The men and women who are going to take Dartmouth into the next decade are very different from you and me (and not, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said, because they have more money).
This simple but important fact has become clear to me after observing recent trends, witnessing prospective week and reading a few recent articles in the press about the changing college admissions game. As the decade and the century come to a close, talking about the "Dartmouth of the '90s" just isn't accurate anymore, in technical terms or in real terms. Classes from now on will graduate in another decade, another century, even another milennium, and there seems to be a big difference between them and previous classes.
True, change is not new to Dartmouth. The College has changed a lot in the last three decades, from the all-white-rich-conservative-New-England-male-etc. place it once was, to the diverse, coed, but still relaxed and Ivy-Leaguish place it is today. Some things are gone, like the Indian and the tradition of rushing the field, but deep down it is the same place, since accomodating minorities, women, and white trash (as someone put it in a letter to The Dartmouth) has so far not required drastic changes.
On the surface these were big changes, but they really didn't do all that much to change "the Dartmouth spirit." That's because even after these changes, the College still attracted the same kinds of personalities (even if they now belonged to people from different backgrounds). People at Dartmouth today might look different from their predecessors, but inside, for the most part, they still have "the granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains."
The way Dartmouth is changing now, however, threatens to do much more to change that spirit.
According to the New York Times and the Dartmouth Review, high school students are stressing out like never before trying to get into schools of Dartmouth's caliber. It seems you now need image consultants and a team of special advisors to get into college, and applying is starting to resemble running for office. Naturally, this intense competition is becoming to change the pool of successful applicants.
And now that prospective week has come and gone here in Hanover, we have all had a chance to observe the next crop of pea-green 'shmen. Sadly, the evidence so far seems to indicate that they are living up to their nickname: "zeroes."
Did anyone manage to read that article in The Dartmouth and not laugh (or wince in pain)? Sure, jokes about translating Catullus and playing the cello were funny a few years ago, but this is reality. These people are actually coming here in a few months.
One guy brought his books, holed himself up in the stacks and marveled at how great they were, then immediately decided that this was THE place for him; need I say more? And another guy's main disappointment was not being able to verify the rumors he'd heard that underage drinking just might go on here. (On a college campus? Never!)
And Dartmouth's commitment to these budding young scholars seems to be serious; to accomodate them, the College is creating "intellectual superclusters," building a completely new library, and (if you believe the Review) planning to open graduate schools too.
Well, this could be the end of a new, brief era in Dartmouth's history. This used to be a place where guys came and spent four years with other guys exactly like themselves. Those days are long gone, but after that it became a nice, harmonious place where diverse people came together and formed a cohesive, friendly community; at least that's how I remember it my freshman and sophomore years.
Now, it seems to be turning into a place where diverse and anti-social people come and stay in their own divisive groups, never interacting with others -- the kind of place that, say, a Unabomber might go to school.
