The release of the Social and Residential Life Task Force Report revealed serious problems in the implementation process of the Trustees' initiatives. Approximately four months before the Steering Committee plans to announce recommendations about the College's social and residential life system to the full Board of Trustees, student ideas on those changes are still substantially absent.
Part of this problem is due to the Task Force Report itself. Our difficulty with the report is not with the material present but with the proposals and input conspicuously absent. If the goal of the Task Force was to provide a comprehensive reflection of student opinion, why did the Task Force choose not to publish the "more than 350 responses" submitted primarily by students through the College's Internet web page? Instead it chose to publish a statistical table, which - aside from the information that 182 of 257 (over two-thirds) of student respondents expressed "strongly negative" opinions toward the Initiative - was meaningless relative to what could have been included.
Although the Task Force holds responsibility for some of these deficiencies, the report also indicates a more troubling problem. While the Task Force should have worked harder to obtain and publish detailed accounts of student feedback, apathetic Dartmouth students need to exhibit true interest in the Initiative and the recently released report. For these reasons, the opinions in the Task Force's report are not representative of the College's individual students or the community as a whole. Some groups and interests own numerous pages in the report's proposal appendix, while others receive practically no ink. Of the approximately 354 pages in the report's appendix of submitted proposals, 92 (one-fourth) of them are a proposal written by graduate students and another 42 (one-eighth) of them are proposals from administrators. The Coed Fraternity Sorority Council's proposal - representative of over half of the student body - occupy only 24 pages, and only 12 (less than four percent) of the appendix's pages represent individual student opinion. Lastly, the report's appendix is missing proposals from all Class Councils except that of the Class of 2002.
In addition, many of the existing proposals in the report would probably anger or excite students - if students were more aware of the report's contents. For example, some possibly controversial proposals include the elimination of the residential aspect of single-sex organizations, an enhanced College judicial system to punish those who "engage in salutary neglect of ... ignorant prejudice behavior," freshmen housing and expanding housing requirements, housing by academic major, decentralized dining, a required "Community at Dartmouth" course, and the use of professional bartenders at large events. Without student interest, it is impossible for the Trustees to implement changes that reflect student sentiment.
Unfortunately, the failings of the past two terms must be repaired in the coming months by the Initiative Steering Committee and the student body. The committee should do more work to insure students' opinions are given due consideration. Students also need to make a concerted effort to make their convictions known and investigate social alternatives already presented in the report and elsewhere.
