Parietals at Dartmouth Will Not Be Enforced

Dartmouth College will no longer punish students for having women in their rooms after parietal hours.

Dartmouth's Committee on Standing and Conduct, in dismissing last week the cases of two students whom campus policemen found violating parietals, stated that it would also dismiss all future violations of parietal regulations which involved only the presence of a girl in a room after hours.

The Committee--consisting of four students, four professors, and one dean--is Dartmouth's highest judiciary body on social and academic regulations. It had previously punished minor parietal violations by issuing "letters of reprimand."

"We will continue to punish students for violations of good order, such as noisy parties and indecent conduct," Thadius Seymour, the dean on the Committee, said yesterday. "Each parietal violation will still be reported and treated as an individual case," he said.

The Committee's statement called for the formation of a faculty committee to revise the parietal regulations, which, it said, "are regarded with universal scorn and are almost universally disregarded."

"The same weekend the two students were caught, there were probably 500 girls illegally ensconced in Dartmouth rooms," Rogers Elliott, one of the professors on the Committee, said. "We know this because there were 1200 girls in Hanover for the weekend and only 700 had registered in rooms in the town," he added