To the Editor:
We find it interesting that the responses to our letter regarding academic responsibility at Dartmouth completely sidestep the issue at hand, apparently finding petty personal attacks a more appropriate route to take. ["Minority Students Work Hard at Dartmouth" and "Ignorant Views Disregard the Real Problems," August 16, 1996, The Dartmouth.] Faced with such poignant misinterpretation of our original statement, we find it necessary to clarify our point. Before we do so, however, we urge our detractors to reread our letter carefully and without the bias so evident in their responses.
True, neither of us attended the meeting in question; then again, we never claimed to offer insight on that meeting. As our first sentence should have made perfectly clear, we were "writing in response to an article," not a meeting. And our point is still valid. We in no way attacked the African American Society, criticized the fact that they held such a meeting, or reproved the individuals who attended it. Very simply, we wished to call into question the fact that the article written in summary of the meeting practically dismissed individual academic responsibility as playing a role in a student's (and not just a "minority" student's) success at Dartmouth.
Nor did we mean to "harp on [academic responsibility] as if it were the only issue" of importance. Yes, we chose not to comment on Dartmouth's allegedly racist, "pre-grading" faculty members or on the particular obstacles faced by some of the members of our college community. In fact, we made no reference to the meeting at all. Why? Because we are clearly in no position to do so. But we are in a position to stress, to the entire Dartmouth community, the importance of individual academic responsibility, especially when faced with an article in which we feel it is undermined.
Unfortunately, we are apparently unable to open a discussion on an issue as sensitive as academic responsibility without subjecting ourselves to severe personal attack. From our point of view, such intolerance is not conducive to the open intellectual exploration and exchange that the college attempts to foster. But then again, we are two, "for lack of a better word, ignorant" people whose analytical skills are "distantly related to garden equipment."
