Snapshot "Dartmouth students are racist." "He's a faggot." "Dartmouth is up in booneyville, New Hampshire -- totally out of touch with the rest of the world." "Chink!" Death threat with a star of David on a door to someone's home.
We are in Hanover, New Hampshire, which indeed could qualify as booneyville. We are a predominantly white campus. We have had racist and ignorant epithets on students' doors. All of this is happening at a time where the world is growing more interdependent across national borders, across cultures, and mobility in a physical sense is easier than at any other point in our history. All of this is happening at a time when young people are attending more and more diverse colleges. And still we wonder about the cause of our frightening trend toward fewer applicants and less selectivity, this year reaching its lowest point in recent history.
Two years ago, Yale University had the foresight to know that these issues are of a contemporary nature, demanded by the current student who is stimulated by the prospect of understanding her surrounding world a bit better. Yale created a department called Race, Ethnicity and Migration to allow students to pursue academically the problems we face as a diverse nation and culture. The University of California at Berkeley has had an Ethnic Studies Department for over eight years, encouraging and facilitating the study of such subjects as assimilation and social identity construction of a whole range of groups. At both schools, students can major in these intellectual topics. We at Dartmouth can't even minor in Asian-American studies since we only created two courses in the program a little over a year ago.
Not unlike most Dartmouth students, I like to look at Harvard as our little research-university-rival-to-the-South, the antithesis of all that we love about Dartmouth and totally out of touch with the needs of the undergraduate. But I must commend them for their recent creation of a task force to investigate ways to diversify the faculty and the curriculum with more ethnicity/identity-related courses. Princeton, historically and stereotypically the "whitest" Ivy, has begun a similar initiative and is putting together a conference next year on race relations and ethnic studies.
What do you know about the "Latino-American experience" in Southern California in recent decades? Do you know anything about the African-American struggle in Harlem in the early part of the twentieth century? Chances are you don't know all that much about either one. Perhaps you have taken an AAAS class or a LALACS course that glossed over these topics in a much broader context. Perhaps you're familiar with the Harlem Renaissance from a literature course in which you enrolled.
I'd like to study both. In depth. And at the same time. My guess is that studying them side by side would enhance my understanding of each individually. I reckon that considering the social phenomenon of identity construction would improve my ability to comprehend a diversity of perspectives while informing my own perspective. Why is it that we have courses at Dartmouth which deal with "Black Images in Popular American Culture" and another which deals with "The Fabrication of Images: Mass Media in Latin America" but none which explore the issues which are explicitly in common or in opposition. We have a course entitled "The Social Construction of Identity: Panethnic Groups in the U.S.," but it's only in the ORC for a one-term scheduling. There are nearly 20 classes in the ORC which address ethnicity and identity in an explicitly comparative context, and only three of them are currently scheduled for more than one term.
We cross our fingers in hopes of getting through 10 weeks without a hate crime of racism or a protest against an ignorant, narrow-minded article in some student publication. In light of this, you'd think the College would be interested in making a concerted effort to address the issues in the manner it is charged to investigate any problem: academically. I think we need a way in which we can study these complex issues comprehensively. I think we need a way to ensure that students coming to Dartmouth, and more importantly, leaving Dartmouth, are prepared to deal with the complex culture in which we live.
Having a "World Culture" requirement so naively based on geographic factors such as "Non-Western" is ludicrous and ineffective. Redraw that requirement to entail courses of ethnicity, identity and immigration. Create courses that fit the category -- especially interdisciplinary ones, where the discipline of sociology can be enhanced and truly needs to be for more complete understanding, by a historical context provided by an intellectual historian. Create a program so students can pursue these problems for more than 10 weeks. More students will end up taking courses pertaining to ethnicity and identity. More students will be more aware of the problems we face as a diverse and less integrated society. And more students will be ready to leave Dartmouth to succeed in their lives ahead, not to mention being able to live alongside, and learn from, their peers while they're here.
