To the Editor:
In no way, shape or form, did we advise or consent to the recommendation of the ban on outdoor alcohol at Greek houses, as Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman implied in Monday's front-page article in The Dartmouth.
As student members on the Greek Life Steering Committee, we did not see a final draft before it was printed, nor was our signature requested on any document to signal our approval of the final draft.
In the wake of the recently announced regulations, which many of us strongly oppose, some of us requested that GLSC Chair Cassie Barnhardt remove our names from the document, as we suspected they had been placed there without our permission. She informed us that the report had already been completed and submitted to Dean of the College James Larimore. It was out of her hands.
This committee was, in our opinion, a token group serving as a puppet of the administration. We do not throw these terms around lightly and would not do so unless we had personally witnessed behavior that intimated and deserved that description.
Throughout the process, Ms. Barnhardt told us that she faced what she called "external pressures" which necessitated certain language use in the final document and the inclusion of certain policies. When a majority of the student members of the group disagreed with the presence of those policies in the document, Ms. Barnhardt alluded to these "external pressures" and said the
paragraphs would not be removed or amended.
Toward the last month of the process, many of the student members on the GLSC were disillusioned about the process, and some stopped attending meetings, including several of us. While this may imply a lack of participation in the end stages, it certainly does not imply an agreement with the final product.
When we joined the GLSC, we thought that this committee could make a rare positive difference in student life at Dartmouth and repair the rift between students and the administration. Instead, our participation on the committee confirmed many of the allegations we had heard so many times from friends about the Powers That Be at Dartmouth.
If Ms. Barnhardt will not acknowledge that students on her committee do not agree with the final product which she wrote herself, then we must announce it ourselves. We refuse to have our names -- printed without our permission -- on a document that we have not seen containing policies with which we could not disagree more.
Dartmouth could do with more simple honesty between its Board of Trustees, its administrators and its students. Then maybe people like us wouldn't have to waste an hour of our day writing letters like these.
This one we can sign in good conscience.
