Let me establish my credentials: I am a '68 and the father of an '02. I was a fraternity member and I drank (in fact, on one pledge night I even drank enough to get hospitalized at Dick's House). I have read everything on the administration, The Dartmouth, and Dartmouth Review websites. I have also read a lot of BlitzMail traffic forwarded to me by my son. I am amazed, though hardly surprised, by the controversy.
President Wright is very astute to observe in his latest memo to the Dartmouth community that this all boils down to 1) fraternities/sororities as a refuge from coeducation; and 2) organized, heavy drinking.
When my son decided to go to Dartmouth, I was enthused that he would be attending a far better Dartmouth than I had. In my day, road-tripping was the key to sanity, but now, I gushed, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley are right across the hall! Of course, I recall chipping in for a keg on a Tuesday night at the House, but mostly we talked about how horny we were, not so much about the meaning of life. I was also a member of the Cutter Hall Experiment (before it became African-American, Cutter was Dartmouth's first and only program dorm, and unlike the current Wheelock Cluster, totally student run); that was where the meaning of life got discussed.
Life, the real world, is coed and multiracial, and Dartmouth should be too. Dartmouth is not a polity in which constituents have rights. It is an educational institution, and it would be derelict in its duty if it did not have a perspective, a bias, a framework. That framework used to be single-sex when I was at Dartmouth, and then it became academically coed, though not fully so residentially. Now the Trustees have decided to complete the transformation to a coed college by eliminating ("substantially") the last organized refuge of sexual segregation, namely, the fraternities and sororities. Bravo, I say. And if you disagree, be assured that single-sex and single-race colleges still exist, albeit in dwindling numbers. Dartmouth, however, stands on the threshold of decision-making, in which students have been invited to participate (though not control), and that decision-making may well show the nation how a nonsexist and non-racist college can be made to thrive, and not just b
e politically correct. I envy you the opportunity.
If panic and ideological stampede could be restrained, one might notice in President Wright's latest memo that, although coeducation is about to become the norm, exceptions will indeed be allowed. Just as Butterfield is a substance-free dorm, mono-sexual and mono-racial residences will be allowed, as an alternative for minorities (not the present overwhelming majority of almost twenty mono-sexual Greek houses). I would imagine the current African-American, Latino and Native American residence halls would survive, along with Butterfield and perhaps one all-male and one all-female house. And I would hope these would all wither away in a decade or two, in favor of interest-based rather than race- and sex-based housing.
Booze is a less tractable issue, if only because both the administration and the student body appear to evade discussing why students drink so much. The administration is like the parent who either thinks all misbehavior requires psychotherapy or blames all misbehavior on peer pressure. In fact, most kids who "misbehave" come from unhappy families, and most Dartmouth students drink because Dartmouth is a high-pressure, painful environment, and alcohol remains, after millennia, despite competition from dope and sex, the most popular painkiller ever discovered. Students seem to think that "hoisting a few with the bro" is what they came to Dartmouth for. In fact, students drink because they're lonely and stressed, and kegs and open bars make it a lot easier (and less expensive) to drink than, for example, at the rowdy Williamstown bars that replaced fraternities at Williams (and which will mushroom on Allen St. the moment Dartmouth's fraternities disappear). If Wright really wants
to curb binge drinking at Dartmouth, he'll have to be the first college president to really curb loneliness and stress. Lotsaluck!
However, I think the man really does want to do just that, and the Dartmouth community should not be abusing him for that. I think Dartmouth students are not just sexually and racially segregated more than is healthy, but they are also age-segregated in a way that aggravates the stress of a most demanding academic environment. Now inviting one faculty family to live in each dorm, as some colleges do, is no solution, but the faculty must seriously reconsider how little contact they have with their students outside of not just class but also classroom building. Some of my most cherished memories from the older, smaller Dartmouth are the Govy seminars that occasionally met at professors' homes over a home-cooked meal, and the potluck suppers that we invited our favorite profs to at Cutter, and, yes, the serious, coat-and-tie, faculty cocktail parties we invited our favorite profs to at my fraternity. How much of that is still happening at Dartmouth?
These are the questions you ought to be asking, instead of clinging childishly, petulantly to old traditions that failed long ago. Jim Wright is not some new broom sweeping clean; he's been around for 30 years, and he cares about Dartmouth as much or more than you do, who've only been around for three or four months, three or four years at most. Give the guy a break. Give yourselves a chance.
