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Sanborn House

This
is Sanborn House, home of the English department at Dartmouth
College. It contains faculty offices, seminar rooms, and, most
important to English majors, a library with Oxford editions of
all the major and minor English and American authors, quiet alcoves
for reading, a large fireplace for cheerful log fires on cold
winter afternoons -- in the 1960s, there were lots of cold winter
afternoons in Hanover, N.H. -- and tea for faculty and students
every afternoon at 4:00. WCD spent some of the happiest afternoons
and evenings of his young life here, reading his way progressively
through this library, from Chaucer to Samuel Johnson.
Sanborn
tea has been a Dartmouth tradition for nearly a century. It began
in honor of Edwin David Sanborn, the Dartmouth English professor for whom
Sanborn House is named. Professor Sanborn was remembered by generations
of Dartmouth undergraduates for the Thursday afternoon teas he
held for students in his family home near the College Green.
When Sanborn House was built, a grateful alumnus left an endowment
for the perennial custom of afternoon tea to be served in Sanborn
Library at 4:00. Dartmouth students remember these teas with
special fondness. Faculty would drift in from
their offices, English majors who had been studying in the Library
would put down their books, others would come in from elsewhere
on campus, and there would be an hour or so of conversation about
all sorts of topics in an informal atmosphere.
At
Rutgers, it
happens that a smaller-scale version of Sanborn teas spontaneously
emerged some years ago at Toad Hall, where several generations
of Rutgers undergraduates have spent Thursday afternoons arguing
about literature, politics, philosophy, music, movies, and the
rest of the universe. Old Rutgers students drop by and meet undergraduates
now attending the university. Other students bring members of
their family. Others bring younger friends who are still in high
school and are considering coming to Rutgers. It is the pleasant
survival of an older Rutgers in the midst of an otherwise lamentable
period of institutional decline.
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