Last week, The Dartmouth Editorial Board criticized College President Jim Yong Kim's use of the general meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to discuss binge drinking and sexual assault ("Teachable Moment?" Oct. 29). While we maintain that counselors and deans should lead in working with these issues, we must admit that the approach is not incompatible with the faculty in their role as researchers and mentors.
Dartmouth boasts a robust faculty of academics who are engaged in two incredibly time-consuming tasks: conducting in-depth research and imparting knowledge to their undergraduate pupils. The presence of more effective deans and counselors means that faculty should not divert substantial time away from these activities. But because faculty are already engaged in the issues both in their substantial relationships with individual students and their interest in applying their academic talent there is, without question, useful work to be done. That faculty themselves were pleased to have been brought into the discussion is a testament to their inevitable proximity to the problem ("Faculty praise Kim's topic choice for talk," Oct. 29).
It is this desire of the faculty to be brought into the discussion that we find heartening. Throughout the majority of the past decade, the faculty has been less supportive of Greek life previously discouraging students and administrators from bringing issues such as these to their attention. But it is only as Kim has recognized when the entire community is involved that real change can be implemented, and thus this means greater student involvement as well.
That the life of a Dartmouth student is often divided between two spheres academic and social is no secret. The gender relations that exist in the classroom are often lauded; the same relationships inevitably tend to diminish when students move to the basement. Although students often remark on this fissure between our behavior during the week and the weekend, we are also often content to accept this reality without criticism, which allows for the unhealthiest parts of our culture to continue by their own inertia.
Improvement will only come when we face, head-on, this previously segregated Dartmouth way of life; and it is to this end that faculty and other interested parties outside the student body can best direct their energies. Change can only come when students are forced to acknowledge where the current problems with our culture lie, but years of discussion and forums have so far failed to spur us into action, as we explore in The Mirror today. By involving faculty intellectually and intimately with the problems, our personal and professional worlds could collide, forcing us to recognize the true consequences of many of our currently accepted behaviors.
Still, regardless of whatever research, results or recommendations the faculty produce, it is students who must determine what actions to take. Otherwise, students will continue compartmentalizing their lives, ignoring the fact that there is a problem that does, in fact, need attention.
