In the fall, towards the end of the term, a sign appeared on the wall in Collis, in the back room with all the comfortable couches. The sign said the following: "Quit studying. Start Talking. This room was designed as a SOCIAL SPACE. There are plenty of other places to study, and by doing your work here, it makes other people feel uncomfortable being loud. So be loud, or go to the Top of the Hop or the Reserve Corridor. A public service announcement."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Wretched winter weather not withstanding, we are a student body blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful campus to work and play on. The way in which the 3,000 or so of us who are "on" at any one time use the facilities available to us allows some interesting observations about how we as Dartmouth students lead our lives.
Though the facilities that compose the institution we know as Dartmouth College are not without their limits, one thing that Dartmouth's physical plant does not lack is places to study. In the library alone there are numerous rooms and halls with varying atmospheres, sufficiently beloved and detested in turn by each that they need not be listed here.
For those not satisfied with Baker, there are several other libraries where undergraduates are welcome. In addition, nearly every dorm has a "study lounge," in itself a contradiction in terms. Many students also, assumedly, study in their rooms. But the list does not end there. It seems that almost any place on campus is fair game for the eager studier, to the point that many places that surely were intended as social space are destined to eternally serve as de facto studying space. Collis is one such place. The "couch room" at Collis has to be the worst imaginable place to study, what with the constant traffic and absurdly comfortable couches. Most of the people who are "reading" in there tend to be dead asleep anyhow. Now there's a study lounge.
Besides Collis, Dartmouth is full of spaces that conceivably were originally intended as places for students to congregate and socialize but were seized by terrorist studiers, if you will. Witness the Top of the Hop, Hinman Forum in Rockefeller, Brace Commons at East Wheelock, many additional "social" lounges in various dorms, the room outside Collis Cafe. I have even seen my classmates studying in Food Court, on occasion. Students are everywhere, noses in books, but very rarely does one glimpse students "socializing" in public.
The New York Times blames this phenomenon on the program we all love to hate, BlitzMail. In an article on Monday, November 11 of last year, Times writer Trip Gabriel writes of the national trend toward "wired campuses": "Dormitory lounges are being carved up for clusters of computers, student unions are declining as gathering places, and computer-wired dorm rooms are becoming, in some cases, high-tech caves."
At first glance this sentence seems ridiculous to a Dartmouth student. Did people used to gather in their student centers?
There is no question that we study a lot. That Dartmouth students schedule time to study is surely a ludicrous understatement. We are students; our job is to learn.
However, it would be equally ridiculous to assume that we do not "hang out." By "hang out" I mean that each and every one of us spends at least some time each day involved in unplanned inactivity. Hanging out is "downtime," time to do nothing in particular, to interact with friends, to catch up on gossip, or whatever.
If we are hanging out, we are not doing it in the way that the designers of Collis may have envisioned or that the loss of which the New York Times writers lament. Perhaps, though, Dartmouth students simply do not care for that kind of hanging out. We hang out at Thayer or the Hop over lunch, we hang out on the Green when it is nice, we hang out at our CFS houses, we hang out in our rooms -- but rarely in official, public "social spaces."
All this is not necessarily a problem. Each student individually and each student body as a whole makes decisions about how they want to spend their time and thus how they spend their lives.
However, "social space" -- and the lack thereof -- has become one of those Dartmouth buzzwords, like "community," that seems to surface time and time again. Every term, one group or another is clamoring for more space in which to socialize, and sometimes it seems that the concept of "social space" has lost its meaning and significance in the clamor. Perhaps we should use the space we have before we worry about asking for more.
