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Sanborn House
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. 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. |
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.
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.