And I hate to tell you, guys, but they are, at least on paper, a lot smarter and more skilled than we were - with exceptions, of course.īut then again, we had it tougher, didn’t we? We had distribution requirements. Of course, half of them are women many of them are of color they come from dozens of countries and nearly every state in the union, whereas we came mostly from New York and surrounding states. The faculty is bigger and far more ethnically diverse, as is the student body. There are many more buildings today - and more courses, some in academic disciplines that did not even exist then. When we were here, of course, that was an apple orchard - a place where the Sigs would occasionally go to dispose of a no longer functioning car. Before that, the student center was Beinecke, which is adjacent to Sadove and does a lot of the work of a student center but is now more of a gateway to The Dark Side, the South Campus that used to be Kirkland College for women.
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Bruce Sanford wrote approvingly of it at the time in The Spectator as “the living room of the campus,” although it was quickly dubbed “Stonehenge” because of those archways on either side that had no apparent use.īristol is no longer the student center that’s now the Sadove Center, which used to be the ELS house. It was while we were here that the Bristol Campus Center was built. Physically, the core of the campus, centered on this Chapel, remains the same. Professor Maurice Isserman, who wrote the College history, On the Hill, observed that the College Brockway returned to in 1967 would have been quite familiar to him and his mates from the Class of (get this, guys) 1917 - certainly more so than is the Hamilton College of today to us. The class annalist who spoke from this podium the year we graduated was Louis Brockway, a New York advertising executive and, like me, a Hamilton. In retrospect, maybe it was a little of both.
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To me, the finger snap exuded something rather admirable-an understated, quiet self-confidence that defined Hamilton men of those years both here and in the larger world. This was no rah-rah school, like Colgate down the road. But I was quite taken by finger snapping as an alternative to clapping, or foot stomping, or the treble whooping that is the custom on campuses today.
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To some, it was a reflection of “Hamilton Cool,” an effortless detachment, real or feigned, epitomized by someone who could roll to Skidmore two nights a week, miss classes and still pull a respectable grade point average.
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What you hear next is this, so to get the full effect and launch us back into that time, indulge me by joining in. Instead of me up here, picture Dean Winton Tolles, shirttail partially hanging out under his shapeless suit jacket, cigarette ashes on his lapel, making an announcement that meets the approval of the student body in front of him. Now imagine it’s a Tuesday morning at 10 a.m., the regular, required, weekly all-campus meeting. So here we are, members of the Class of 1967 (with a few others, of course) sitting in this chapel, which is essentially unchanged from what it was when we were here in the 1960s. The right setting, authentic props, a bit of meditation and, bingo, he was there. In the book, Morley chooses an apartment in The Dakota, that landmark building on New York’s Central Park West, which was essentially unchanged for more than a century.
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It involves time-travel, and the mechanism Finney’s protagonist, Si Morley, used to transport himself back in time was not some complicated gizmo or an old DeLorean but by placing himself in a setting identical to what it was during the time period to which he wished to return, which in this case was New York City in 1882. You may know of a book called Time and Again by Jack Finney.