To the Editor:
When I called my dad back home in Chicago the other day, the first thing he told me was that Dartmouth had been in the national media. I then expected him to say something about one of the departments, or some award granted to a distinguished member of the faculty, but instead the news item had to do with the Hanover Police.
It seems that Hanover's policy of stopping drunk students and submitting them to breathalyzer tests has made it across the country, branding our campus as a police state. I personally believe the reports to be exaggerated, as I have seen no one subject to this treatment, but how is the rest of America supposed to know that?
The cliche, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," also works the other way. If something's being fixed, then there must be something wrong. If the local authorities are involved, the conventional wisdom goes, then something is very wrong. And yet, the drinking habits of Dartmouth students are no different from those of students elsewhere.
The administration has worked hard to debunk the beer-swilling image that has come to be associated with Dartmouth, and is just now diminishing. Now we have taken a giant leap backward.
Dartmouth is the only campus where I have experienced such an adversarial climate between the campus police and real police and the students they are supposed to be protecting. It would be naive to think that the College administration is powerless to control this. If it doesn't, all its efforts to polish Dartmouth's image will have been for nothing.
