Our recent two-second sound bite of fame, courtesy of "The Simpsons," was the talk of the town, oh, until about 8:31 Sunday night. While it was nothing especially dramatic or overwhelming, it still means something when one of the most popular and one of the best TV shows around mentions our isolated little school.
And, as it usually does, "The Simpsons" got me thinking; first of all, about what Maude Flanders did to deserve to be knocked off, and secondly, why we are maligned with a reputation provoking the ever-intelligent show to use Dartmouth to exemplify heavy drinking, an association the writers felt to be so perfectly-placed that it didn't even matter that the television-watching masses would be unable to appreciate it.
I think the answer is obvious: Dartmouth's student body is substantially more Greek than any other Ivy. The correlation is not based on drinking per se as much as it is based on the fact that the drinking takes place in a more public, social environment than it does elsewhere. It becomes easy to label Dartmouth with such a reputation when the drinking is relatively visible by virtue of the frats and, accordingly, the frats represent a convenient, tangible entity to blame for the reputation.
When we look at the schools with which we're being compared, the reputation is significantly magnified. The only other Ivies coming close in frat preponderance, Penn and Cornell, have their own problems -- namely people getting mugged and shot and people killing themselves, respectively -- that provide reputations that supercede any alcohol-related news they could ever muster. So does this mean people there don't drink?
It's also rare to hear anything alarming about drinking at elite schools with small or nonexistent Greek systems precisely because they lack fraternities. At these schools, alcohol consumption moves to dorm parties and stays relatively removed from the public eye. However, does the fact that there's no public entity to blame mean that people there don't drink? I'm willing to bet that they do drink, but who am I to say? It's not done in public there, so maybe that means it doesn't happen.
Unlike those places with less obvious drinking, there's not much in Hanover, besides the frats, out of which a negative stigma can develop. There are only so many jaywalking tickets the Hanover police can give, only so many people having sex on the Green or streaking the reserves.
I guess, without having anything like the frats to blame, it's hard to say exactly how much drinking goes on inside locked doors elsewhere, thus lending more credence to our stereotype. However, an acquaintance of mine at Princeton told me his favorite -- nay, only pastime on Friday and Saturday nights is going to the basements of eating clubs and stumbling back to his room afterwards. In addition, my friends at schools without a social system of drinking also have little trouble acquiring alcohol.
What's scary about the relative conspicuousness of drinking at Dartmouth versus its being swept under the rug and happily ignored (or outdone by worse stereotypes) at other elite schools is the approach taken to 'remedy' it. The approach is based entirely on reputation. When drinking here is perceived to be so predominant that it's even echoed by everyone's favorite yellow cartoons, it encourages the administration to try and eliminate the forms of social drinking that are responsible for this stigma. So when you get rid of frats and center a social system on residential clusters, what becomes of the reputation? Perhaps people will continue to seek out and magnify any signs of drinking they find to keep what we have alive, or perhaps the hole we've dug is already so deep there's no escaping.
Or perhaps, with the end of frats comes the end of Dartmouth being labeled the "drinking Ivy." So what will arise to fill the void of criticism? We all know it has to be something because a school just can't exist without something for people to point out and condemn. Maybe we should all start having sex on the Green and avoiding as many crosswalks as we can to gather tickets for jaywalking. And here's an activity for all your clubs searching desperately for ideas: why not streak the Reserve Corridor to start and end every meeting? As an employee, you can expect me to keep a record of everyone living up to our new reputation, the "streaking Ivy." (Wait, Yale, Brown, and Princeton may already own that title collectively. Stick with sex on the Green.)
But either way, drinking will continue. It happens at places that aren't Dartmouth, amazingly enough, no matter what anyone may tell you. Fixing the situation by sweeping it under the rug may be good enough for an administration that cares more about reputation than student happiness, but I'm not sure how healthy it is to completely ignore drinking and let it go unseen instead of at least acknowledging that it happens and thus being prepared to educate and help people. But regardless, The Simpsons will remain my number 1 source of information.
