At Dartmouth, students are expected to love this place. I find that I fulfill this expectation. I love the emphasis on undergraduate education. I am glad to have a laid-back social system, where most parties are open to the entire campus. I love a lot of things about this place. So why am I not always walking around in unmitigated bliss?
After rejecting a number of possibilities, I think I have found the answer: every dining facility on this campus serves Pepsi instead of Coke. It is so subtle that I did not accurately attribute the source of my unhappiness, but everyday I have to drink a beverage against my will. When that frustration builds, it forces a break in my usual happy state.
What a relief to finally come to this conclusion. There were so many other things that I mistakenly thought were the source of my disquieting feeling.
For example, I now realize that the disturbance in my psyche was not caused by frustration with the social system at the College. My occasional unhappiness was not related to the fact that the social balance of power is skewed.
It had nothing to do with the fact that men plan, host and control the vast majority of parties on this campus while women help pay for them with co-sponsoring dollars.
And to think my frustration might have stemmed from the nature of the debate and the ridiculous logic used by both sides.
Greeks claim some sort of divine right because students continue to join their system. Yet from the fact that students choose to become members of the dominant social culture, it in no way follows that there are not significant problems with that culture.
Yet I see equally flawed reasoning coming from the other side. The extremists seem to expect a mass execution and burial somewhere behind the Choates. This hardly seems a reasonable request for change. And yet, it was really Pepsi that was bothering me all along.
Nor can my uneasy feeling be attributed to my concern over the role of women in this debate. Under the current system, women consistently get the short end of the stick.
Ultimately, whether or not fraternities create a culture which contributes to sexual assault is a question which most directly affects women. Meanwhile, women are crowded into a few sororities, while several fraternities can't even fill their beds. And yet the public debate is characterized by male voices.
Of course you can't really blame the women. In the instances where a woman has spoken up and said something controversial, she has been excommunicated by the entire campus, criticized by both men and women.
All this time I mistakenly thought that these were the factors at the root of my occasional melancholy. I shouldn't be too hard on myself. I could have been right. It's frustrating seeing things go wrong in an institution you love. Change doesn't come quickly at Dartmouth and there are bound to be setbacks, but those setbacks are still hard to swallow.
But now I have identified the genuine source of my angst: Pepsi. That done, I hope to improve my state of mind by addressing the problem. Perhaps I will feel better once I act on my discontent and work to change the beverage situation on the campus. Maybe I can get involved with a Student Assembly task force. That will make me feel better, I'm sure.
