The Dartmouth Review recently conducted an exhaustive, scientific study concerning what Dartmouth students know and don't know. The questionnaire, which gave absolutely no indication of having anything to do with the Dartmouth Review except for its being almost identical to the one they thought of last year, posed a wide variety of questions encompassing quite diverse fields of study.
Upon close analysis of the answers entered by unsuspecting young scholars desirous of two gallons of popcorn, the well trained statisticians at the Dartmouth Review came to the rather startling conclusion that we tend to remember recent events better than events that occurred several centuries ago. This has disturbing implications, since this means that the average Dartmouth student lacks culture -- a body of knowledge requiring at least one hundred years of aging before it can aspire to contribute to culture.
This unhappy state of affairs has prompted concerned individuals at the Review to take matters into their own well educated hands and call upon a certain Mr. Virgil to assist them in this challenging endeavor of helping Dartmouth students gain culture from the meager 35 courses available to them. And assistance in choosing courses is definitely advisable, with women's studies courses and gay and lesbian studies courses lurking behind every turn of the seemingly innocuous pages of the Organization, Rules and Courses book.
Virgil has apparently done an excellent job with what he was hired to do, managing to avoid any course pertaining to anything that might in any way deal with anything that happened within the last century. Almost. For lurking among Epics of Greece and Rome, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, I spied History 2: The United States since 1877 and History 4: The History of Europe since 1715. Presumably, Virgil was deceived by the dates 1877 and 1715 which appear in the title of these courses and which comfortably pass the aforementioned age test -- which, as the quick reader will remember was one hundred years, thus permitting the classification of anything dealing with events up to, but not including, the year 1896, as capable of contributing to the student's culture.
However, closer inspection of the title reveals that these courses deal not with events before 1877 and 1715 as any reasonable person might expect, but with events since 1877 and 1715, thus exposing us to the very real danger of possessing an understanding of events that occurred on or after 1896. But this small, though potentially disastrous, oversight is quite understandable considering the fact that well educated, cultured gentlemen (and one presumes Virgil to be of such superior credentials) tend not to be very facile with the numbers, especially when they are deceased. But then again, it may well be that Mr. Virgil was exhausted after a good, hard day's work of dodging the various African-American Studies courses, engineering courses and other courses of their inferior ilk that roam between the covers of the ORC.
We, the students of Dartmouth, owe the individuals at the Review responsible for this great service -- Messrs. James S. Panero '98 and Arthur J. Monaco '98 (who, between the two, write 99 percent of the Review's thought provoking "articles") -- our sincerest gratitude. For, were it not for their benevolent concern for their peers (if we might be so presumptuous as to allude to ourselves as such), how could we, the proletariat, ever hope to raise our uneducated heads at cocktail parties where great minds contest over such earth-shaking issues of eternal relevance as Helen of Troy's left knee? For, were it not for their Herculean exertions, would not some of us have gone on to lead worthless lives as productive members of society?
Dear Dartmouth Review, Bearer of the Torch of Cocktail Party Education, accept our heartfelt thanks.
