It's no secret that I've criticized Dartmouth College in the past. But it has always been under the guise of tough love; like a mother reproachfully scolding her child in public or a monkey chewing the gnats out of another monkey's fur -- it's not always pretty, but it's done for the sake of improvement. And I'm going to criticize Dartmouth again here, but this time it'll be different, this time I'm not pulling any punches, this time it's personal.
A lot has been said lately about exclusivity and the debilitating effects it has on Dartmouth College. As a white male American, a true son of privilege, and a student of the Ivy League, I've never really thought much about exclusivity. But, from time to time, I read the newspaper and see various faculty and administrators launching assaults on a certain social organization because they consider it "too exclusive." Is the Greek system too exclusive? I'm probably not the best person to answer that question, so I won't. But the question that we should be asking is, "Is exclusivity necessarily a bad thing?" And the answer the administration comes up with, time and time again, is that yes, exclusivity is inherently evil.
So the other day I go to my Hinman Box looking to pick up my Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and I was greeted with a pleasant little surprise. No, not the 3-D glasses that came with the magazine, but an envelope from the Off Campus Programs Office. Great, I thought, now I'll find out if I got into my FSP.
Before I go any further, let me take you back a bit. Back to when I was in high school, deciding at which college I would invest a ton of money and four of the "best" years of my life. I had rounded up the usual suspects, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. After talking to my guidance counselor and finding out that I was not "high-ability" I immediately narrowed my search to Dartmouth, a quaint college in the middle of nowhere known worldwide for its heavy drinking and cheating scandals. I looked up Dartmouth in those Barron's Top 50 Colleges books and found a Post-It note left by my sister, now at Georgetown, who was looking at colleges two years earlier. The note read, "Don't even think about applying here, Liam, It's a sexist frat-boy school." As if that weren't enough to make me fall in love with Dartmouth, I had a great visit in Hanover and loved the literature the College sent me. One of the recruiting pamphlets talked about the D-Plan and how, although it screws up your vacations and you have to go to summer school, it's a great idea because it allows for so much flexibility and wonderful opportunities to take advantage of Dartmouth's study-abroad programs. That's all I needed to hear; as a kid who's spent his entire life in exciting Suburban New Jersey, I was sold at the idea of being able to study abroad.
Fast forward to me in my overcrowded, outdated dorm room, opening my letter from the Off Campus Program. To make a long story short, I wasn't one of the 15 people accepted out of an applicant pool of over 70 students (before the faculty calls any organization exclusive, maybe they should turn the mirror on themselves). I was, however, encouraged to apply again for my senior fall. However, due to the fact that certain courses I need for my major are only offered in Hanover, not abroad, during my senior fall, I doubt that I'll be able to apply again, which means, barring some miracle, I won't be able to go on one of the heavily-touted FSPs while at Dartmouth.
So here I am, mired in the reality of Dartmouth, which is a pathetic joke when compared to the Dartmouth the Admissions office sold me on over two years ago. The Greek system is being hacked away at by personal-agenda-driven Trustees, the value of my degree is being diminished by cheating scandals drummed up by visiting professors with axes to grind, and the D-Plan is being uncovered as little more than a scam to get more students to pay tuition on an already overcrowded campus.
Maybe I sound like a spoiled brat who is whining because he won't get to drink in his basement any more, he won't get to go abroad, and he won't get to do anything fun or interesting in this God-forsaken little neck of the woods in the middle of nowhere. But deep down I know that I'm not a spoiled brat, and I know that there's a message that I'm trying to get across that I hope you all can understand. I made a choice to come to Dartmouth over many other schools. I chose Dartmouth because I thought it was an excellent school, an excellent environment, and an excellent atmosphere to be educated in. Now that I'm here, I constantly doubt myself and my decision. Dartmouth has become a joke, a parody of itself. Students, administrators, deans, faculty, hell, even visiting faculty are all pointing out that this college isn't what it can and should be.
