While students proposing a hate speech code in response to recent incidents of hate crime on campus have made little progress, the student effort to create a mandatory class on tolerance and diversity has prompted new ideas for multicultural training.
Reactions to recent hate crime incidents, students circulated two petitions at the town meeting on Feb. 2 and at the next day's rally against injustice that called for a mandatory tolerance and diversity class as well as a hate speech code.
John Barros '96, president of the Afro-American Society, said he has spoken with Dean of the College Lee Pelton many times about the idea of creating a hate speech code.
Barros said Pelton has made it clear that he is opposed to the idea.
Many administrators are firm believers in free speech and say the "best way to fight hate speech is with more speech," Barros said.
"Most likely, there will be no hate speech code," he said.
Pelton said he received a petition asking for a code of conduct in reference to the racial epithets written on the doors of several students last term.
He said he and other administrators are "looking into that now, I can't predict the outcome."
While it is unlikely the College will develop a hate speech code, "consideration will be given to a code of conduct," Pelton said.
Administrators seem more interested in the addition of multicultural training to a Dartmouth education.
Unai Montes-Irueste '98 said a group of concerned students drew up a petition calling for "minimally, either a course or a one week training session [to] deal with issues of tolerance, emphasizing, but not limiting itself to, an examination of the realities of sexism, multiculturalism and homophobia" as a graduation requirement for all Dartmouth students.
Montes-Irueste said the underlying goals of the training are to "challenge everybody, including the faculty, and expose them to the same things" and to force them to "question their assumptions."
He said the petition deliberately did not contain the names of any campus organizations or affinity groups because it is not aligned with any specific group and also so it could gain more widespread student support.
Montes-Irueste said the group thought it should be mandatory for students to take the class their in the fall of their freshman year.
He said the class would try to give students "methods of communicating" and "a sense for the language to talk about issues."
He added that the class should also make students question themselves and their preconceptions about others while acting as a catalyst towards change.
"You already have so many requirements," Montes-Irueste said, "Maybe they could get shifted around so your freshman year you have to take a class about another [cultural] group, one that you are not a part of."
He admitted that many of his ideas, like creating new classes and manipulating requirements, involve "overhauling the curriculum," a process that could take three to five years.
Pelton said any matters that would require adjustments in the curriculum or impose degree requirements are matters that have to go through the faculty.
Pelton said the way any of these ideas must be presented to the faculty is "through the committee structure, maybe the Committee of Chairs or the Committee on Organization and Policy."
Last term, the Student Assembly passed a resolution calling for a new committee to facilitate and encourage communication between student of diverse backgrounds but Pelton has not yet endorsed the Assembly's idea.
Montes-Irueste said he has not talked to many faculty members yet about his proposals, but he said the faculty "are the most important support to get and the hardest support to get."
While student input is important, what is best for Dartmouth is for the faculty to make many of the decisions concerning a class on tolerance and diversity, Montes-Irueste said.
"It would work best for people who are here for more than four years to decide" something of this caliber, he said.
Pelton said he heard many different ideas last term about alternatives to a mandatory course that might be "an experience or a series of opportunities or occasions for first-year students to come together and learn and discuss important community issues."
One suggestion Pelton described was an optional course that would reside within the physical education requirements and be analogous to the "Introduction to Dartmouth" course currently taught by the Academic Skills Center.
He also said he heard an idea about making the course residentially-based, "modeled on the kind of exercises that area coordinators and undergraduate advisors now participate in."
Another idea Pelton described was revising the Leadership Discovery Program "in such a way as to fulfill the need of learning about different cultures and histories."
Montes-Irueste said other schools in the country have diversity and tolerance training requirements.
He said Brown University has a tolerance training seminar period at the beginning of the year for freshmen.
The University of California schools have a class for all freshmen, Montes-Irueste said.
