Dartmouth College, which is among the rowdiest of the Ivy League colleges, is trying again to change its campus culture.

Good luck with that!

During Prohibition, John Sloan Dickey returned to Dartmouth College after a weekend football game against Cornell and found a box of whiskey under his cot in an off-campus apartment. His roommate, a fellow Dartmouth undergraduate, had the idea of becoming a bootlegger.

Dartmouth in those days was a “sanctuary for juvenile delinquency,” Dickey, who went on to become Dartmouth’s president, would recall years later in an oral history. The college had cultivated a reputation for being unconcerned about liquor and its abuse, he said, which became a serious handicap when he tried to recruit faculty and students during his quarter-century as president, from 1945 to 1970.

Little has changed. The current president of Dartmouth, Philip Hanlon, says the college remains bedeviled not just by its students’ drinking but also by sexual assaults and growing disregard for social norms.

Together, Hanlon said in a speech Wednesday night, these student behaviors are threatening to do serious damage to the college’s reputation. He blamed the 14 percent decline in Dartmouth’s applications this year — at a time its Ivy League peers continue to attract growing numbers of students — on the reputation for rowdiness and sexual assault.

“We can no longer allow this college to be held back by the few who wrongly hide harmful behaviors behind the illusion of youthful exuberance,” he said in prepared remarks. “Routinized excessive drinking, sexual misconduct, and blatant disregard of social norms have no place at Dartmouth. Enough is enough.”

Whether Hanlon, who took office last summer, can do anything or not remains to be seen. He is forming a committee of students, faculty members, administrators and alumni who will spend the summer “researching and crowdsourcing the best solutions.”

Officials in the past seven Dartmouth administrations wrestled with Dartmouth’s reputation. For at least six decades, Dartmouth officials have been trying to shut down or rein in fraternities in some form or another, according to oral histories and archival material.

A lot of the problems have been blamed on Greek life, which dominates the campus. First-year students can’t join Greek organizations, but after that, most students do: about 63 percent of upperclass male and female students are in a fraternity or sorority.