One thing I know is that there is plenty of at Dartmouth is beer. None of the Student Assembly president or vice presidential candidates I've come across call for more beer at fraternities or for alcoholic beverages to be served at Full Fare. I'm sure that if there would be a need for such things, at least four candidates would have multiple copies of MORE BEER! posters on most bulletin boards.
But if there's one thing Dartmouth has too much of, it's beer. Its ubiquity is drowning the soul out of this campus. Which leads one to ask why? Why does every party have to start with having a drink? Wouldn't Coke, or Arizona Iced Tea or Yoohoo beat out "frat-Beer" in a taste test? I think it might.
But everyone knows beer isn't drunk because it tickles your taste buds. It's drunk because of the way it makes you feel. Alcohol breaks down your inhibitions and lessens your self control. It changes your state of mind. And is there anything wrong with that? Nothing if you ask most people, but I take exception to that.
With the generous supply of alcohol many people pour down their throat before each party, they're not themselves. Their thoughts are clouded, their thinking is dull, their inhibitions are gone and they're mostly grounded in la-la-land, not in this world. And just as people drink beer for it's effects, not for the experience of drinking itself, it's these sought after effects of beer that make the practice so harmful.
Because beer dulls your mind, it is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Consequently, parties and events that begin by having their patrons get drunk take on the same nature. The problem is not that parties then become non-intellectual, I doubt that they were designed to be that in the first place. The problem is that by flooding events with alcohol, we can practically assure that they will be entirely devoid of intellectual content.
When you meet that special someone at [insert frat letters here] there's more than one reason that the content of his or her mind is a non-issue. One of them is that neither of you are capable of much thought by night's end.
When you take a break from dancing and spot an old friend, naturally the only thing you'll have the capacity to talk about is the hot girl in the middle of the dance floor -- who's mind is a non-issue. The meaningful conversations you do have are most likely conducted in slurred speech ... and let's face it, they probably aren't that meaningful. Somehow, even a high number of "date-rapes" in such an atmosphere doesn't seem surprising to me -- drunk men and drunk women make for an irresponsible combination.
Unfortunately, at Dartmouth today, the wisdom of drinking is rarely questioned. The biggest gripe the student body has about drunk students is the high fine Dick's house charges for holding them overnight. People who've never gotten drunk are wonders of our student body, not the norm.
There is nothing wrong with partying, having fun and not keeping intellectualism at the top of your list of priorities. But when drinking is synonymous with social life, it's not only antithetical to intellectualism -- it relegates it merely to classrooms and libraries and thereby makes having fun and being intellectual mutually exclusive activities.
