Alumni, students, faculty and administrators should take a second look at John Strayer's Nov. 6 letter, "Fundamental Questions." In it, Strayer questions the ability of the College to maintain itself as the premier liberal arts institution in the nation while simultaneously attempting to become a better research institution. The College seems to have cooled its attempts to rid the campus of single-sex social institutions, which need to be eliminated from campus as soon as possible. Fraternities have no reason for existence at Dartmouth. They are a relic of 19th century gender anxiety and now reinforce or even strengthen those anxieties. That said, Strayer is correct in stating that the questions surrounding the "Greek crisis" on campus have obscured most other aspects about the growth and health of the College. However, the administration has presented a much greater challenge to traditions with President James Wright's recent words.
I'm not sure whether or not the depiction of Daniel Webster defending the College charter is still hanging in Thayer. I'm not even sure if Webster uttered those now famous words: "It is, sir, a small college, and yet there are those who love it." The phrase may be apocryphal but the myth has become a reality at Dartmouth. Students and professors alike have adopted Webster's defense as a mantra for the intellectual life of the College. Indeed, during my first class meeting at the College, Wright -- then a dean -- gave a speech echoing these words. His theme? Teachers and students, learning together.
It appears, however, that the College is taking steps that would inevitably alienate students (undergraduates at least) from professors. The budget cuts Strayer questions are simply one place where we can read changes in College policy. An even more powerful expression of change at Dartmouth can be read in the physical landscape of the College itself and the school's master plan, both of which stress the regimentation and modular nature of a large research institution.
Take the residential college plan proposed by the administration a few years ago. Although it might help ameliorate some of the negative aspects of the D-Plan, it also allows for a more modular campus, one that is able to grow and expand, ostensibly without threatening the ideals of a liberal arts college. Like a manic developer's happy vision of suburban sprawl, a small group of residential colleges supposedly maintains that intimate feeling associated with -- essential to -- a liberal arts college while at the same time it encourages the growth of more residential colleges. However, this circular logic sacrifices one of the most fundamental aspects of life on the Hanover plain. We should not threaten the broader campus-wide community for the smaller social security gained though residential colleges.
Let's look at the "North Green" in back of Baker Library. The master plan intends to locate a slough of new science buildings around this new north campus. The physical separation of academic disciplines at the College, so essential to large research universities, will serve no purpose save that of widening artificial distinctions between science and the arts. Even the plan's proposed post-modern architectural theme for North campus, that of New England mills (sweatshops) seen in Berry Library, fits into this regimentation.
We can just imagine hordes of graduate students slaving away in labs. It seems that the irony of post-modern architecture is quite fitting in this instance. At research institutions the business of learning is industrialized and has few parallels with the social interaction between student and professor created by a liberal arts college.
Arguments from the natural sciences about the necessity of labs, research funds and graduate students do not require Dartmouth to become a research university. There is no reason that Dartmouth could not create an innovative academic model based on the separation that currently exists between the College and the Tuck, Thayer and medical schools. Professors can have their grad students, but the undergraduate classroom should be kept free of them.
Arguments in favor of graduate students simply do not hold in the social sciences and the humanities, disciplines dominated by individualized scholarly activity. Professors in the humanities might enjoy graduate students, but in practice they would distance all but the best of the College's teachers from the undergraduates. Giving up the business of grading might seem like a good idea at first, but this crucial aspect of the student-teacher relationship is where students learn to learn. Similarly, graduate student seminars might be "more stimulating," but Dartmouth students are just as sharp, hard-working and committed to their education as even the most ambitious graduate students. And, they lack that classic graduate student cynicism!
Since graduation I have labored in a large research institution. The University of Texas at Austin has over 52,000 students. I have been a teaching assistant for classes with 200 students, and that is a small class. I have colleagues that teach 400-500 students regularly, with a gang of assistants. Texas is an extreme case, but the difference between 100 and 400 students in a class is much less than the difference between 50 and 100. In either case, though, the relationship between student and professor suffers, not to mention the sense of a campus community. It is, members of the Dartmouth community, a small college; let us work to keep it that way.
