Trustee Susan Dentzer's vision of student social life seems to be best embodied in her statement, "We want the students to have choices; we just want them to be very structured choices." This sentiment is little more than a thinly disguised way of informing the student body that it will choose from among one option. One option is no choice, and will allow for no debate.
The current lack of respect for student input to the process is appalling, and it is no wonder that as a result much of this generation of Dartmouth students has learned to distrust administration intentions. Many suspect that the Trustees already have a master plan in mind, and that the entire input process is mere lip service. What does it say about the openness of this debate when a commenting professor feels it necessary to speak only on an anonymous basis?
When the current administrators were students in the 1960s, there were protests against what students of the time saw as university meddling in their lives. The students argued that they were adults and that they ought to be treated as such. And as Peter Lake of Stetson Law School recently pointed out, the courts at the time backed up these student claims.
Ironically, now that those students have come into their own as the administrators, they are eager to enforce a kind of "we know best" policy, bent on a return to the very controls that they protested as students.
Granted, the times have changed. The drinking age is now 21, and there is increasing legal liability by all parties involved in college life. But the principles at stake remain the same. At its heart, the current "discussion" is about who is going to decide the new paradigm of student life at Dartmouth: The students or the administrators.
The truth is that it is going to have to be a combination of the two. President Wright said that we are living and working in a place akin to what Thomas Jefferson described as an "academic village." It is sad that in such a place, true debate has been stifled by a steamroller process intent on defining parameters of "choice."