R. Harcourt Dodds ʻ58 Trustee Emeritus

R. Harcourt Dodds ʻ58 Trustee Emeritus An Interview Conducted by Chris Burns Hanover, New Hampshire May 19, 2001 May 20, 2001 DOH-9 Special Collections Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire R. Harcourt Dodds Interview INTERVIEW: R. Harcourt Dodds '58, Trustee Emeritus INTERVIEW BY: Chris Burns PLACE: Baker Library, Room 158 DATE: May 19, 2001 BURNS: Today is May 19, 2001 and Iʼm speaking with Harcourt Dodds, class of 1958 and trustee of the college from 1973 to 1983. Iʼd like to begin by examining your decision to come to Dartmouth College in the first place as a student. You were born and raised in New York City? DODDS: Born and raised in New York City and, more particularly, in Harlem. I went to public schools in Harlem and then passed the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High School, which was one of New York's selective high schools, and I was a good student. Stuyvesant, along with Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, emphasizes the physical sciences and careers related thereto, engineering and so forth. So my bent was engineering and, initially, I applied in my senior year to schools like Cooper Union and N.Y.U. School of Engineering and a few other places that had engineering schools, with the idea that I would go on and pursue a career in engineering. But a number of things intervened. It was made clear to me that (this is the 1953-54 academic year), that there were very, very few, if any, blacks in the profession so that whatever I might do might well have some sort of a path-breaking quality to it. I had a session with a representative from an organization called the National Scholarship and Service Fund for Negro Students, who made the very helpful suggestion that it was probably better to look at a liberal arts institution because, to go to engineering as an undergraduate experience at Cooper Union, for example, might mean that after a semester or two, I would find that I wasn't cut out for it, I didn't like it. And then what would happen? I was stuck in this engineering program and struggling. His suggestion was, "Go to a liberal arts school. Get a broad base and, afterwards, if engineering is what you care to pursue. Fine. You would at least have sampled a wide range of offerings." 3 R. Harcourt Dodds Interview So it happened that he had a nephew attending Dartmouth and he said, "Why don't you apply to Dartmouth? Itʼs a fine school. My nephew goes there. He enjoys it." I should say, just parenthetically, that this was a white man that I was speaking with. So, at this point, I had no concept of what Dartmouth was like with regard to minority students or anything of that nature. In fact, I didn't even know where it was. [Laughter] This is now February or March of senior year, so I had to scramble around and put this application together. I was then slated for an interview. Now that I am thinking liberal arts colleges, I also applied to Columbia and to Yale. Since those were places that were really better known to me, they were the ones that I was really anticipating making some choice between. The Dartmouth interview was first; Columbia did not give an interview. The Dartmouth interview was first and I went to a businessman's office in the Wall Street area. There were three alumni and we had the usual conversation about high school, background, my extracurricular activities, and so on and so forth. At one point, they then said, "Well, what questions do you have?" So I said, "Well, Iʼm interested to know, and I hope you don't mind my asking, what is the racial climate like in a place like Dartmouth?" They then proceeded to tell me about the referendum vote, which was then in the process, perhaps it had been concluded, having to do with fraternities that had restrictive clauses and that there were students that had been there when they were there. These were all white interviewers. There were students that they knew who had been there who seemed to have had positive experiences. And they were very upbeat, very positive. In fact, complimented me for raising the question. They thought it was very forward-looking and very helpful to them that I had, in fact, raised this matter because, the way our conversation was going, I mean it just would not have come out on to the table for discussion unless I had raised it. Well, given their glowing response, I figured that I now had the magic bullet for these interviews. So, with the Yale interview coming up -- I sort of targeted Yale as my primary place -- the Yale interview was just with a single individual. He was an executive director of a boys' club in Manhattan. So the Yale interview went along, again, the same basic questions about background and so on. Again, at the appropriate moment I was invited to ask any questions I had and I raised the same question. Well, this interviewer was flabbergasted that I had not heard of Levi Jackson, who was a Yale football player and he was, in the late '40s, elected captain of the Yale football team. That was, of course, a 4 R. Harcourt Dodds Interview big item of national news. His picture was on the cover of Life magazine; it was really a big deal. I had heard of it, but Iʼm ten years old or something when this happens, so it wasn't like it was something that I was going around thinking about all the time. [Laughter] This interviewer, he just couldn't believe that I wouldn't have known that Yale was this wonderful place, having elected this guy as the football captain back in the late '40s and so on. Not to prolong the story, I later learned from my high school debate partner who interviewed with the same man that he was of the opinion that I was very immature, that my raising the question about race relations showed that I didn't have the self-confidence and the ability to kind of get along in an environment like Yale. So he sent back a recommendation that I not be admitted. [Laughter] So I get this rejection from Yale. So Iʼm now reduced, so to speak, to Dartmouth and Columbia. There were a couple of other schools, CCNY and Howard University. But my parents, at this point, really came into play because, from their standpoint, they were immigrants from the Caribbean, from Barbados-- going to college to them always meant going away to college. So there was never any question but that, at whatever point I went to college, I would go away. So when you took away the New York--the NYU, Columbia, CCNY possibilities, what was left was Dartmouth and Howard University. So, between those two, at least as they viewed it and I viewed it, there really wasn't much of an issue, so I accepted Dartmouth's offer. There was a scholarship that went along with it. So it worked out. BURNS: But you didn't come to Dartmouth before you came in as a freshman? DODDS: No. Itʼs interesting because, in fact, I had even made a note of that, the idea of campus visits was just nothing we ever considered. I mean it would have been possible to go to Columbia to visit classes, similarly to CCNY. Even the schools in New York, I mean, I never, none of us in high school ever made visits. We would get the brochures. Weʼd read them and, whatever they said in the brochure, we believed was the case. [Laughter] We had no car, so to go away would have been a major undertaking. It was just never part of the equation. The idea that you would actually go and examine a place just never entered our thinking at all. BURNS: And so those alumni interviews for the college's perspective, too, really played a... 5 R. Harcourt Dodds Interview DODDS: They played a major role because that was really how you made human contact and you got a chance, literally, to have a face put onto the college and have it humanized. So, they were very, very important. No, it wasn't until the autumn when we came up. My dad and I flew up. The first plane ride for us both. BURNS: Into Lebanon? DODDS: Right into Lebanon. Yeah. But, before that, there was something that had happened that I think future listeners or readers of this transcript might find interesting. I had a great uncle. He was married to my mother's aunt, who worked for the Downtown Athletic Club, which was one of the then very exclusive private clubs in Manhattan. In fact, it is the club that sponsors the Heisman Trophy Award every year in college football. My uncle was a waiter; he would work to clean up. Basically, he was one of the laborers in this club. He and the other people in the club were working-class men, although it was considered at that level, a job of some prestige because you were working in this environment with the very wealthy Wall Street types and so forth. So most of his co-workers were, in fact, white but they were working- class like Irish, Italian immigrants, sort of on their way up. He, himself, was from Guyana, British Guyana, but very, very fair and could have passed for white and probably did in order to get that job.

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