President Freedman's announcement of his resignation at this school year's end has blessed us students with a rare opportunity -- an opportunity to influence the College's future. As The Dartmouth's editorial pages in the past few weeks indicate, however, many of us have been too quickly spouting our beliefs about the presidential selection.
Opinions that are not contemplated thoroughly are always problematic, but they may have troublesome implications particularly now, for we have arrived at a critical juncture in the school's history. As our choice of the next president will significantly affect subsequent choices for the other top administrative positions that have recently become vacant, we must put exceptional care into our recommendation.
To act properly on this momentous occasion, it is essential that we understand the way in which our liberal arts education must evolve to best respond to the next millennium's demands. For only with a clear vision of our purpose can we hope to select the right president.
And this purpose can only be to become a fountainhead of democracy; that is, to socialize America's bright students into democratic drones, without whom our nascent political system will never gain permanence in the course of humans' political history.
What is then necessary is a drastic departure from Freedman's pedagogical philosophy -- the fostering of an environment where we undertake soul-searching introspection. We must desist tackling profound ethical questions to discover what it means to be human. Most importantly, we must transform Dartmouth not into a place for "creative loners," but into an institution designed only for the furthering of its students' political and business careers.
I say this because Freedman's "liberal learning" only encourages the feeble-minded masses to face the consequences of moral self-reflection they cannot handle. It creates unnecessary vacuums in their lives in lieu of the "noble lies" they seek or the beliefs in the mythical presence of the absolute. When a weak man grapples with his moral identity, an overwhelming sense of alienation is bound to crush him, causing devastating social consequences.
Take a look at how such individuals are poignantly portrayed in the great literary works. Perhaps the most frightening character of this nature is one of Dostoevsky's -- Kirillov in "Demons." Living in the post-enlightenment age of reason, when the doctrines of God were being undermined in every corner of Europe, Kirillov, after years of self-reflection, concludes the only way to reestablish meaning in the world is to commit suicide -- an act that demonstrates the human will's triumph over fictional premises of Christianity such as the preciousness of life. Camus' Meursault in "The Stranger," Turgenev's Bazarov in "Fathers and Sons," and Soseki's Sensei in "Kokoro" are other examples of our beastly potential that is realized when our moral foundations collapse.
The most disturbingly common characteristic of these alienated individuals is not lunacy. Rather, it is their impeccable reasoning that brings them to face irreconcilable existential crises. This is because reason, when it is trained, strengthens the legitimacy of science, which in turn degrades man's intrinsic worth by undermining metaphysics. Yet, implicit in Freedman's notion of undergraduate education is the uncompromisable virtue of reason as the beacon for our self-reflection. In other words, what he champions is nihilism, the dangerous state we reach when we ascertain our subjective moral universe's tenuous ground.
A country teeming with alienated humans teetering on the brink of nihilism may not be a pretty sight, for their belief in nothingness erodes democracy. We must not forget that the success of democracy is predicated on challenging conditions -- wealth, sophisticated bureaucracies, educated masses, etc. -- all of which can easily be lost. Many African nations with well-established chiefdoms once possessed those requirements, but are struggling to democratize today, because brutal imperial powers decimated their cultural heritage.
Liberal learning, if continued, is a recipe for disaster. It undermines people's blind love for democracy, another precondition for a healthy democracy that alienated individuals will fail to uphold. Political philosopher Leo Strauss once argued that humans, in their eternal search for glory, are bound to carry out a great rebellion against the very peace democracy has brought about. Alienated men and women will be the undertakers of such rebellion.
To sustain humanity's prosperity into the next century, Dartmouth must thus cease to support intellectualism. It should redirect its energy into the production of the nation's brightest investment bankers, consultants and computer programmers -- those who enslave themselves to their appetitive material desires. As long as we are obsessed with erotic pursuits of financial glory, a decent future may still be ahead of us.
Let us then install a president with a firm grasp of his or her role as an overthrower of Freedman's legacy, so we may together chant, "So long, President Freedman!"
