The Trustees have decided to raise the goal of the "Will to Excel" campaign to half a billion dollars. Four hundred twenty five million or 500 million, either way, it is an inconceivably large amount of money. But do we, as students, even take note of the fact that people are willing to invest that kind of money to improve our education?
What would we say to the potential donors? What reasons could we possibly give for donating money to Dartmouth College? What promises can we make that we will even rise to the quality of education that is being offered us?
Could we explain to them why money is well spent on Dartmouth, even in the face of the dire needs of public education in this country? Could we come up with a reason why we should get the money over University of Nairobi for example, where the libraries are empty of new books, the faculty are underpaid and students face police brutality and tear gas as they demand the government take action and give them an education?
Can we tell them it is not better invested in the stock market? Can we ignore the number of people that could be given the basic necessities of life with half a billion dollars?
In my mind there are two ways of dealing with the awesome weight of responsibility that the investment in our education carries with it.
We can deny that there is such responsibility and insist that everything we receive here is our right: That through our struggle in high school and in the application process, we fairly beat out all the other competitors, and we earned the Dartmouth education.
That in paying the College tuition and repaying our government loans we have purged ourselves of all responsibilities and debts we accrued while at Dartmouth. That we deserve a higher education more than the other 99 out of 100 people in the world. That we can hide behind legal reasoning and parrot the words of the land owners in Ngugi wa Thiongo's novel "Matagari": show me the piece of paper that says I owe another man and I will repay the debt.
Denying this responsibility means that there is no imperative that we accept all of the resources granted to us as students. It means we have no responsibility to fill the lecture halls, or open the books, or hear the words of those that have changed the world.
It means we do not, as Andrea Useem '95 proposed in her column ('Deciding Our Futures, Will We Help More Than Ourselves,' Oct. 25) have a duty to "work actively to combat the apathy and numbness that creep... through our minds"; that there is no imperative to invest our imagination to "land us in someone else's shoes"; that we have no responsibility to leave Dartmouth with our own "informed moral imagination."
Or we can fully accept that with the resources available to us, comes a very real and serious responsibility. Accepting the responsibility means first that we must accept the resources.
Though the administration will not turn down a new library, will we, as students, use it to give ourselves more than grades and resumes? The donated faculty positions will not be rejected, but will we spend the hours with them to come up with new approaches to the problems that the world faces?
And finally, accepting the responsibility forces us to take the means given to us and devote them to "helping more than ourselves." It means that we must ask ourselves how the incredible talents that got us accepted to this school, and the incredible resources we've obtained here, will combine to make the difference in the future and truly make the investment worthwhile.
Half a billion dollars. The returns are up to us.
