It was with a certain note of irony that we went to the Senior Symposium panel on Friday night. It was devoted to the subject of coeducation at Dartmouth. It seemed like an interesting topic under the Symposium's title, "They Said It Couldn't be Done." At the panel, five women told of their time at Dartmouth in the early and middle 1970s. Two men, both former Trustees, also gave their recollections of the period.
Several of the panelists mentioned that while coeducation had become a matter of college policy, they were not sure if it had become a matter of college culture. They noted that probably the audience was better suited to answer that question.
And we, as members have the audience do indeed have a few thoughts on the question. In the 20 plus years, in which Dartmouth has gone from all male to having at least one class in which women are the majority, has coeducation become a part of the culture?
Perhaps it has, but before you answer that question for yourself, consider that the five women on the coeducational panel were the ONLY female speakers throughout the entire Senior Symposium. There were 10 featured speakers -- all of them white, seemingly middle-class, and most certainly, male.
The five women who accepted the invitation of the symposium committee appeared together on the coeducation panel -- a panel which was specifically devoted to a "gendered" issue and which represented a decision made not BY women but FOR women. Each of the panelists was given less than twenty minutes to speak, versus the 60 minutes granted to the featured speakers. Furthermore, while the featured speakers addressed such worldly and public issues such as virtual surgery, US foreign policy, and international engineering, the panel was devoted to a very local, almost private issue -- the focus of the panel did not extend beyond the boundaries of Hanover.
Apparently, the final symposium line-up did not reflect the committee's desired outcome. According to several committee members, the original list of invited speakers was far more representative of both women and people of color. Unfortunately, the good intentions of the committee are invisible and unknown to the community. All we see, as the students, faculty, staff, and administrators of the college is an intellectual gift which perpetuates and prescribes racist and sexist societal norms. What the Class of 1996 has left the college with is the message that the only noteworthy accomplishments have been achieved by white men. This message perpetuates exclusive definitions of "success" and "achievement" as notions only attainable by white men. It is also saddening to note that almost all the speakers glorified either man conquering nature (the artificial heart, the chunnel, etc.), or trying to fix man's attempts to conquer nature (environmental organizing, the bald eagle). This, too, is a troublesome ideal of "success."
While we recognize the sincere attempts of the symposium committee and do not at all intend to belittle their efforts, we felt that a constructive critique was in order -- mainly to bring these things to the attention of the community. Clearly the committee is not comprised of racist and sexist individuals and surely, the speakers which accepted their invitation were men worth hearing.
Considering the recent attempts to be inclusive and aware on this campus, however, the committee may have taken steps to acknowledge the homogeneity of their speakers. A letter to the editor with a disclaimer before the symposium would have informed the community of the efforts of the committee to have a representative body of speakers. Announcements at the beginning of the events would have accomplished this as well. On a more radical note, perhaps a stronger message to the community for the senior class would have been the committee's decision to cancel the symposium for lack of a representative line-up.
