When I first glanced at the mass email sent out late last week about the gathering at Parkhurst to protest the administration's impotence when it comes to listening to the students, I was excited, thinking that more people felt the way I do. Then I read on to see what they were demanding, and I immediately returned to my state of disillusionment. In the words of a friend who also disagreed with the protest, "Is it just me, or does a meaningful protest require a meaningful issue?"
Among the demands were "a statement by James Wright, our administration, and the trustees, that declares Dartmouth an actively anti-racist, antisexist, anti-homophobic institution;" "the aggressive hiring and retention of minority professors," "a new centrally located Women's Resource Center;" and "incentives, monetary or otherwise, for coed houses to secede from the CFSC," which went on to say that "in conjunction with the Student Life Initiative, we require integrated gender relations through the creation of more coed houses."
The frustration people have with the administration is its failure to listen to students' demands and actively promote everything it promises, but these protesters are turning right around and hypocritically advocating a system based on rhetoric and not substance. A statement by the president that the college is anti-everything is just that: a statement. It doesn't do anything and has no potential to do anything because one statement cannot dictate how we think.
The aggressive hiring of minority professors falls into the same trap -- it parallels many people's complaints about admissions in general: that the campus cares about diversity only for aesthetics so it can brag about how diverse it is. When you start hiring (or admitting) based only on superficial characteristics, you sacrifice what truly matters in college, academics. The most pitifully appalling aspect of this campus that I've noticed lately and which alumni have repeatedly told me makes the college look laughable from an outside perspective is how politics ultimately matter more than academics. I had high-minded ideals of all the intellectual gifts I would gain in college and how I would become a better person, but what has drowned that out is how much more cynical I've become regarding what the ideals of a liberal arts education really mean.
Sure, I gain knowledge in class, but the overwhelming focus on this campus is political. It's almost as if the educational experience does not matter as long as everything is as perfectly "diverse" as it could be. Diversity, however, matters only along the lines of race, gender, and sexual affiliation, meaning these traits are emphasized while the substance lying beneath them becomes inconsequential. This college will not get better by clamoring for a more diverse faculty unless some fundamental priorities are realigned with what the purposes of a liberal arts institution really should be, the academics.
A new WRC would serve the same purely aesthetic purpose, showing very superficially how central some meaningless concept of diversity is on this campus. It does not add anything of substance since the
College already has a WRC and a great number of people devoted to it. You can put it in the middle of the Green as a beacon of diversity and feminism but how would it add to the overall academic experience?
The most hypocritical demand is by far the last one I listed -- increasing the incentives for coed houses to secede from the CFSC. This is purely a matter of politics, with no attempt at even a cover-up: these protesters feel that the simple act of removing a house from the umbrella organization will suddenly create a more tolerant atmosphere, one in which coed houses become the norm. They essentially advocate paying people off in the interests of this same meaningless idea of diversity. The worst thing about this proposal is its insincerity: you can remove your organization from the CFSC or become coed but that simple act does not change attitudes and beliefs. Indeed, it reflects a desire among the protesters for the social engineering that the majority of this campus vehemently protests against all the time. Such engineering serves only to increase hostility and resentment and to take away time, energy, and resources from where these things should be going.
The protesters demand the fulfillment of everything the administration promised, but the promises themselves are flawed; there's something much more fundamental underlying all of the discussion on diversity. Fulfilling promises of diversity would mean simply improving the aesthetic appearance of the campus in the eyes of those who seem to have the objective answer for what diversity really means. Before the College wastes millions of dollars more than it already has trying to fulfill all the promises that don't mean anything in the first place, it would be nice to see a renewed commitment to academics. Why are we in college if we're just here to bicker over how some superficial idea of diversity should be implemented and, when it is, how diverse is diverse enough?
The priorities are inherently faulty. The concept of diversity at work at this school is only valuable on the surface. What matters more in the educational experience is what somebody knows and has experienced and in turn what they can contribute to the community of their own volition, not because they're forced to by virtue of looking different from others. And while physical diversity is valuable to an extent because it does determine a person's experiences, it is not the end all and be all of the academic experience. Before anyone goes out to hire minorities for the sake of minorities, Dartmouth could use a thorough reevaluation of the priorities motivating them to do so, because right now, all concern for academic integrity has been lost in a flood of rhetoric.
