To The Editor:
I read in your January 21st issue, an article on dormitory cable television containing the following paragraph:
"One of the reasons the College plans to offer new channels is to increase the cultural diversity of television programming on campus. As a result, one of the channels under consideration is Black Entertainment Television along with more international and foreign language stations."
This statement seems, in some obscure way, to summarize much of what is going on at Dartmouth these days. One must either be a naive fool or simply not care, if they can not to see both the irony and utter stupidity of the above statement. Despite recent questioning of the intelligence of the administration, I believe that the College administrators fall into the latter category. The purpose of the Student Life Initiative is ostensibly, among other things, to improve residential life on campus. However, the implementation of a decent cable system for the dorms has been put off because of this very same Initiative. It seems to me that a decent television service on campus would greatly improve student life. One need not have graduated from an Ivy League school to draw this conclusion.
This brings me to my second point. Suppose for a moment that the College does miraculously implement a new cable television service on campus. Why do they feel compelled to use it as a means of further strengthening their stranglehold on student life and student choice? The channels that they propose to provide are absurd. Do they honestly think that we need more foreign channels on campus? Under the current system we are able to view three English channels (excluding PBS) out of 12. The others are obscure foreign programming, which I would venture to guess go mostly unwatched. Thus, one can draw the conclusion that the administration does not care about improving student life. Rather, it cares about dictating what students view, think, and have access to.
Sadly, much of this comes under the guise of "cultural diversity." Instead of relying on human nature and natural student interaction to provoke cross-cultural interaction, the administration feels it necessary to force-feed such interactions down student's throats. It is quite clear that this television debate, although absurd in its own respect, is merely representative of the larger issues at hand here. I just hope that people will see these issues for what they really are and understand how irrational and hypocritical some of the administration's actions and decisions are.
