On Sunday evenings, when Sophia Jiang ’28 wants a break from a long day of studying, she heads to Sarner Underground to meet other students who are part of Undergraduate Tea Enthusiasts at Dartmouth. For a few hours, the group of seven to 10 regulars sip tea, mull over current events, and talk about their lives.
The teas and tea sets are Chinese, and the students observe venerable Chinese methods of steeping and straining the tea leaves. Although not strictly ceremonial, the evening evokes Chinese culture and history and, for some, familial ties in China and the Chinese diaspora, explains Jiang, whose parents hail originally from China and who is one of the founders of the club, which is open to all students.
“It’s very good for our mental health to do that, and we actually have a lot of intellectual conversations during it. Because people from different backgrounds and majors will come, and we just love to talk about what we’re learning,” Jiang says.
Tea Enthusiasts, which first met last winter, is one of 200 student-led organizations on campus that fall under the Council on Student Organizations rubric. COSO, an 18-member undergraduate student board, approves and funds each organization, and also foots the bill for some campus events, with a maximum cost of $5,000 per event.
The 200 organizations, whose funding is drawn from student activity fees, represent a broad swath of interests, among them the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, Can’t Sell Culture Comedy Collective, Conservative Students of Dartmouth, Undergraduate Moot Court Team, Fusion Dance Ensemble, Men of Color Alliance, Students for Letters of Love at Dartmouth, the Dartmouth Political Union, and Women in Media.
For a number of years, the number of clubs on campus stayed steady at between 130 and 140, says Anna Hall, the co-interim associate dean for student life and chair of COSO. But the last few years has seen a “significant increase in the number of student organizations that COSO oversees,” she says.
Students seem to be “forming communities around a specific issue, or topic, or group of people,” Hall says.
The history of COSO dates to 1911, when it became the college’s first non-athletic council. The first booklet to mention COSO specifically was printed in 1914. Some student organizations have long histories on campus, such as the satirical magazine Jack-O-Lantern (1908) or the Nathan Smith Society (1976), which looks at medicine and health care issues.
More recent clubs have sprung up because students are interested in activities or subjects that have not previously been represented on campus and that may be more attuned to current student concerns.
Learning what COSO does, which typically happens at first-year orientation, is an important part of finding the communities and interests that help both new and returning students adjust to the college experience.
The COSO board, which meets once a week in Collis, comprises six sophomores, six juniors and six seniors. First-year students apply in the spring to join the board in the following academic year, and six applicants are then selected by the current board members. Each board member serves a three-year term.
One of the tenets of serving on the COSO board is that “we don’t let our personal views or beliefs be relevant to our decisions. The point is to allocate our student activities fee that every student pays. So, with that in mind, we recognize that we’re trying to add to the student experience,” says COSO board member Jesuferanmi Ayanlade ’27, who is also co-president of the COSO-sponsored Dartmouth African Students Association.
When a student applies for COSO recognition, the board asks some fundamental questions, such as how the organization would “add value to the campus,” Hall says. Is there support for the club? Is it feasible? Does it have a learning or leadership component? Are there any safety or liability concerns? And does a similar organization already exist?
As part of the approval process, the organization must meet rigorous standards of responsibility and accountability, including writing a constitution and explaining how it plans to function on campus.
For Chloe Banino ’26, the idea to form an organization around medical law and ethics emerged from a series of discussions with a fellow Dartmouth student. Banino, who is pre-law, noticed that she and her friend, who is pre-med, tended to talk about issues at the “confluence of both the pre-law and pre-med worlds. There was a lot of really interesting overlap.”
Out of that came the Medical Law and Ethics Society, a group of around 12 undergraduates that meets weekly in the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth. The society, which discusses a new topic weekly, has looked at issues at the confluence of medicine and law—euthanasia, end-of-life care, and the recent federal government shutdown—that aren’t necessarily addressed in undergraduate classes.
“We wanted to have a space to be able to do that and explore that on campus,” Banino says.
In spring term last year, Paul Eason ’27, who has been playing Dungeons & Dragons since 5th grade and started a D&D club in high school, decided to start a campus group devoted solely to the game. Eason is on the council of the Creative Gaming Club, which had a D&D subgroup. But he decided to branch out with a club that was only for D&D aficionados. He believes, he says, that this is the first dedicated D&D club on campus.
When it came time to make a pitch to the COSO board, Eason argued that the D&D was “a social club that benefits people with imaginative thinking and boosts cooperation. We are where you meet the other people who are also interested in D&D.” The application was approved.
In his time on the COSO board, Cooper Hyldahl ’26, who is also membership chair for the Dartmouth Political Union, has noticed the breadth of interests represented by applications coming up for evaluation.
“I would never think to establish some of the clubs that have been started up while I’ve been on the board. I feel like every meeting, someone comes in with a fantastic idea. Seeing all of the aspects of campus life that I otherwise would not be exposed to has been really interesting,” Hyldahl says.
The campus organizations and clubs are key to both student interactions and the campus atmosphere, says Ayanlade. “So when we are funding, we think a lot about how does this event or this club contribute to that?”
Having the support of COSO has been critical to the success of Tea Enthusiasts, says Conner Sullivan ’28, one of its founders. The club received around $100 from COSO, which went to buying teaware and tea tables.
It would be difficult to “get people together to engage in this cultural practice, so from an access point of view, it’s a lot easier if there is a club that is dedicated to this craft,” Sullivan says.
And even if a proposal is initially rejected, says Hyldahl, students can talk to both board members and Hall about how to rework it so that it passes on the next go-round.
To that end, the COSO board has added office hours, “since we know that we’re representing the students, and we try our best to do that,” says Ayanlade.
When board members’ terms end, they submit written evaluations of what serving meant to them, Hall says.
For many of them, working with COSO turns out to have been one of the most valuable experiences of their time at Dartmouth. Among the cited reasons are: making new friends, understanding different perspectives and the importance of initiatives for and by students, and learning the art of negotiation and how to diplomatically deliver news someone does not always want to hear.
The end result is that “these kinds of clubs come from us just letting every group express themselves in a safe manner for the benefit of the rest of the student body,” says Ayanlade.
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See the list of organizations recognized by COSO.
