Barding Around

Still truant from my Boston Globe review duty, I am now spending 3 days “barding around” the former haunts of Robert Frost. Today in Amherst, Massachusetts and in the poet’s final resting place of Bennington, Vermont.

One sad note on the changing times in American colleges is the fate of the former fraternity houses at Amherst College, which were found to be too intolerably male to continue in existence and have been purged from campus life and converted into extraordinary college dorms. Sad to think of Frost visiting these houses for dinner and after-dinner conversation in another era. Our American culture is wildly intolerant of all-male institutions, regarding them merely as bastions of privilege that must be integrated. Amherst College graduated its first woman in 1976. The fraternities proved intolerable to a coed institution, I guess, and were shut down in 1982.