After undergoing another round of late-night hazing that involved wooden paddles this fall, Dartmouth College sophomore Ulysses Hill texted his mother.

“I’m done,” Hill messaged. “Come get me.”

Hill, 20, was fortunate that his mother resided 15 minutes away. Olivia Sanchez moved from California to the Upper Valley after her son entered Dartmouth last year.

Sanchez picked up her son outside Channing Cox Hall, where he lived with three other pledges in an on-campus apartment that Dartmouth provided the fraternity that he was looking to join.

Hill left with just his laptop, cellphone and wallet in a backpack. He’d come back in the daylight to pick up the rest of his belongings.

He wasn’t leaving Dartmouth — just Greek life. The biomedical engineering major moved into his mother’s apartment in White River Junction. His older sister, Amanda, lives there too.

The two-bedroom apartment is a bit cramped, but Sanchez and her children have dealt with worse.

Sanchez, a single mom, raised her two children in a hardscrabble neighborhood of Pasadena, Calif. When Hill was in elementary school and his mother got sick and fell behind on rent, the family moved into a homeless shelter.

Another time when Sanchez was out of work, Hill and his sister would walk to a nearby community center that gave away day-old bread. “Our lives were kind of ridiculous,” Hill told me. “For me, it was just about getting food.”

For his mother, the priority was lifting her children out of poverty through education. And she’s succeeded. Her daughter graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. Her son had his pick of prestigious schools, including Dartmouth, Cornell and Johns Hopkins.

Ulysses Hill was highly sought-after for good reason by colleges seeking to diversify their student body.

At Cathedral High School in Los Angeles, Hill was salutatorian of his graduating class. Cathedral is a private college prep Catholic school with 700 boys who come primarily from low-income families in and around LA.

On Friday, I talked with Robert James, who teaches in Cathedral’s social studies department. “Ulysses is extraordinarily bright, way off the scale,” said James, who has taught at Cathedral for 30 years. “He was always very engaged in class and asking endless questions, which drove some teachers crazy, but I loved it.”

Hill was an all-league selection in water polo as a goaltender. When we talked at a coffee shop this week, he joked that there was a reason his coaches used him as the last line of defense. “I can swim better than the average person,” he said, “but compared to other (water polo athletes), I’m abysmally slow.”

Hill continues to play water polo — and goaltender — at Dartmouth, where it’s a club sport.

Coming out of high school, Hill received a coveted scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Scholarship Program, launched in 2017, helps “outstanding minority students who come from low-income backgrounds realize their maximum potential,” according to the nonprofit’s website.

The Gates program picks up Hill’s college expenses that Dartmouth’s substantial financial aid package doesn’t cover.

While Hill plans to pursue a career in engineering, he wants to continue honing his photography and writing skills that have already earned him numerous awards.

Last year, he won a national writing competition sponsored by YoungArts, a Miami-based nonprofit that recognizes the work of talented, emerging artists. In one of his nonfiction essays, he wrote about what it’s like being a “Black boy in America.”

He described helping his mother make Uber Eats deliveries at night, which she did to supplement her pay as a private caregiver for the terminally ill. While his mother waited in the car with the engine running, Hill dashed up to customers’ doors with their food orders. Between stops, he did homework.

They delivered mostly in an “upper-middle-class area right outside of L.A.,” Hill wrote. “My mom prefers going there because the tips are better and I don’t mind because the area is more interesting. People crowd the streets… The neighborhood vibrates with the energy of youth.”

At 17, he was already 6-feet tall and weighed 220 pounds. In his essay, Hill wrote about walking up a driveway on a hot summer night when the house’s front door suddenly opened. A white woman was looking down at her phone.

“She looked up,” Hill wrote. “I met her eyes, and in them flashed something primal. It took me a second to recognize. It was fear. My heart sank in my chest.”

“Uber Eats order?” he said, lifting the bag of food he was carrying.

“Yes,” she said, timidly.

When he was about six feet away, Hill gently set down the bag. “Enjoy your meal,” he said.

Back in the car, his mother asked, “What was that about?”

“She seemed to be scared of me.”

Sight unseen

Hill chose Dartmouth without seeing the campus. But he only needed to look at the college’s online fact book to know that most of its students were different from him.

Roughly half of Dartmouth’s 4,400 undergraduates are so-called full pay, meaning they don’t receive financial aid from the college to cover the $90,000 annual costs.

Only 6% of undergraduates are Black.

The spring of Hill’s senior year of Cathedral High, Dartmouth and other colleges that had accepted him offered trips to their campuses. A Dartmouth alumni club in LA was picking up the tab for his visit to Hanover.

Shortly before he was scheduled to make the trips, however, his mother suffered a stroke, and he had to cancel his college visits. The Dartmouth alumni club offered its help. There wasn’t anything that could be done at the time, but it left a favorable impression on Hill.

“Dartmouth was the only school to reach out when my mother had her stroke,” he said.

Before arriving in the Upper Valley in the summer of ’23, about the closest Hill had come to Dartmouth was when the Gordon Parks Foundation flew him to New York for an awards ceremony. Parks, the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine, was a “world-class, barrier-breaking” artist, The Washington Post wrote following his death in 2006 at age 93. The foundation that bears his name provides cash awards to promising young writers and photographers.

Hill used the money to buy a new camera (he’s now a photographer for The Dartmouth) and to help pay for his mother and him to make the 3,000-mile move from Pasadena to Hanover. With his mother still recovering from her stroke, he didn’t feel comfortable leaving her behind.

“At 18, I had to become an adult and responsible for my family,” Hill said.

He set up a GoFundMe account. He later found out that many of the donations that he received came from Dartmouth alums. “That’s how we afforded the move,” he said.

When Hill and his mother arrived at Boston Logan International Airport, two alums, a married couple from southern New Hampshire, were waiting for them.

Before the fall term began, Hill’s mother moved into the White River Junction apartment, but didn’t have a car. On the first day that Dartmouth students were allowed into their dorms, Hill and his mother took Advance Transit to Hanover. From the bus stop to the dorm, Hill toted many of his belongings in a pull cart.

The first year in White River Junction, “we walked everywhere,” said Sanchez, who saved up enough money to buy a small, used Chevy electric car.

Now that she has a car, Sanchez is delivering for Uber Eats in the Upper Valley. She also recently found a part-time job stocking shelves at a Route 12A retailer in West Lebanon. Her daughter is also working for a retailer.

Dartmouth’s alumni network continues help Hill. Last week when we met, Hill was wearing an L.L. Bean winter jacket that the couple from southern New Hampshire had given him. “I appreciate what the Dartmouth alumni community has done for us,” he said.

Campus culture

Roughly 60% of eligible Dartmouth students are involved in Greek organizations, the fourth highest participation rate among U.S. schools, according to the website CollegeVine.

Hill was among six pledges at Theta Beta Beta, Dartmouth’s chapter of Omega Psi Phi, which belongs to a group of historically Black fraternities and sororities known as the Divine Nine.

Why did he want to join?

Like most others who join the Greek system, Hill hoped to “make connections” that would help him later on his chosen career path. He also wanted to become part of a community that might watch out for his mother, if something happened to him. Omega Psi Phi, founded at Howard University in 1911, is known for taking care of its own.

Dartmouth’s Omega Psi Phi chapter was re-established last year. Hill didn’t dream that a fraternity just coming back to campus after being dormant for 30 years would engage in sadistic behavior.

Within days after her son moved out of the fraternity’s apartment, Sanchez brought him to the emergency room at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. At the hospital, they called Dartmouth Safety and Security to report what had happened to him. The call was patched through to Hanover police, which sent an officer to interview Hill at the hospital.

“The victim had visible injuries that reportedly occurred after being struck multiple times with a wooden paddle during pledge events,” stated a Hanover police news release issued last week.

“Additionally, the victim also reported that he was forced to eat an onion which made him vomit and then was pressed to eat the regurgitated onion,” police said.

Talking to the cops took courage. Hill was breaking the code of silence that Dartmouth’s Greek system prides itself on. (Hill and his mother also agreed to allow the Valley News to use their names, which weren’t mentioned in the police news release.)

When I told James, Hill’s high school teacher, about what had happened at the Dartmouth fraternity, he wasn’t surprised to hear how his former student responded. “He wouldn’t have put up with that,” James said. “He’s not going to put up with anyone disrespecting him.”

Dartmouth announced last week that it had suspended Omega Psi Phi earlier this fall “upon learning of these serious allegations.”

On Friday, Jana Barnello, a Dartmouth spokeswoman, said she couldn’t “share more information about Omega Psi Phi at this time.” The college, however, sometimes “allocates apartments within available on-campus student housing to recognized Greek organizations that do not have a house,” Barnello added.

A Hanover police investigation now in its third month has led to arrest warrants being issued for three men connected with Omega Psi Phi. One was a Dartmouth senior on the football team and the other two, both in their late 30s, are “graduate” members of the national Omega Psi Phi organization, police said. Student hazing is a misdemeanor, which carries a potential fine but no jail time.

Dartmouth pretends that it doesn’t condone hazing rituals, going to great lengths on its website to distance itself from past and present abuses of its own students.

But paddling (a polite word for beatings) and other potentially harmful practices have been part of the college’s DNA long before “Animal House” offered an inside view of fraternity life nearly 50 years ago.

Hill and other pledges were told that to become a fraternity brother, they needed to “go through what we went through,” he said. It was presented to them as “part of becoming a man.”

After getting the late-night call from her son, Sanchez tried talking with the fraternity’s leaders, she said. She wasn’t looking to “ruin the lives of young men who just got caught up in something,” she told me.

The talks weren’t productive, she said.

After telling Dartmouth officials his story in multiple meetings, Hill isn’t optimistic that the culture will change. “The administration is  willfully blind,” he said. “They didn’t want to  know.”

Although Hill’s Gates scholarship could easily be transferred to another college, he’s intent on staying at Dartmouth. It’s partly for practical reasons — if he moves, his mother would have to as well.

Sanchez told me that she hopes her son will eventually move back onto campus. “I want him to have the college experience, but only when he’s ready,” Sanchez said.

Hill isn’t sure when that will be.

“I enjoy a lot of things about Dartmouth,” he said. “I just want to see change.”

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.