At Dartmouth, intellectualism comes cheap: $60 a term to be precise. Now, I'm not averse to the idea of paying $60 for the company of great thinkers and scholars. But I can't help but wonder what really induced administration to levy that tax. Maybe:
1) The college doesn't really want the money, but wants to attract rich students to the intellectual crowd at Dartmouth to ensure diversity. (Just kidding, rich students).
2) The college really wants the money. But then, why ask only East Wheelock residents to cough up all the cash? After all, I never use the weight room or the swimming pool or the squash courts or the microwave oven in the Choates; and yet my money goes towards supporting these facilities.
Is it because the facilities in East Wheelock will be unavailable to non-East Wheelock residents? But then the computers in Sudikoff are unavailable to those of us who are not computer science students. And the computer science students aren't paying extra for that privilege. Some departments are costlier to run, but it doesn't and shouldn't cost extra to major in one of those departments. The college absorbs the cost differences that arise between different activities so as to let students fully explore these different activities without cost differences being a factor of consideration.
The same principle of prorating the costs over the entire Dartmouth community should hold in the case of the East Wheelock program.
3) The college wants to create another obstacle in addition to the other hardships (non-central location and supplementary application form) associated with getting into East Wheelock so as to ensure that only the most motivated students actually get in. But this will be a small obstacle for the rich and a big one for the poor. That is unfair. If creating an obstacle is the aim, fairer obstacles -- such as having East Wheelock residents do ten hours of community service a term -- would be more tenable.
I also have a problem with the fact that the majority of East Wheelock residents will be freshmen. The motive behind this is fairly obvious. The administration sees upperclassmen as already corrupted by the anti-intellectual Dartmouth environment and beyond redemption. They don't want to see innocent, idealistic freshmen corrupted by frat hopping, beer swigging upperclassmen who don't give a damn about the meaning of life. Since the administration couldn't get their all-freshmen dorms, they are settling for second best -- mostly freshmen dorms.
But on the whole, this subsuperdorm is a good idea and will clear the way for the establishment of the superdorm. And architecturally, East Wheelock really comes close to capturing what a superdorm should be. It is one of the few dorms where you open the front door and find yourself in the vast common space. Most of the other dorms have their front doors open into ugly little stairwells and have their vast common spaces tucked away in some godforsaken corner of the building. I didn't know Russell Sage even had a vast common space until a few weeks ago when, desperate for a TV and a VCR, I wandered the length of those endless corridors like a man possessed until I finally stumbled upon the secret door that opened into the common space.
East Wheelock will probably attract an interesting group of people brought together by the common desire to get a better residential, as well as intellectual, experience than what is otherwise offered at Dartmouth. Whether a program, based on a group of people who are thrown together by this common aim and who are brought together by social and intellectual activities sponsored by residence halls, will succeed remains to be seen.
Usually, dorm sponsored events tend to be failures. But that is presumably due to the randomness of the student population residing in any given dorm and the consequent lack of cohesion. East Wheelock events stand a better chance of success as the student population will not be random. For in East Wheelock you will find those among us who retain the curiosity of our youth, who are unafraid to face the intellectual challenges that surround us at every turn, who dare to ponder over the mysteries of life and who can afford $60.
