The big three -- Homecoming, Winter
Carnival and Green Key -- have
an almost cult-like appeal to them. You can either join David Koresh or try to take over his compound. You either love these weekends or you would rather not incur dorm damages from the guy who urinated in your trash can. So, to belabor this metaphor, the administration has taken the position of the FBI in Waco and has assaulted the stronghold of the Greek system in recent years in efforts to create an all-inclusive campus utopia where every student lives in a bubble of praise and flattery.
Yet a curious thing has happened: instead of a revolution in social life, little has changed. The assault has become a war of attrition. How else can one explain the unprecedented number of fraternities placed on probation for various ticky-tack reasons? The numbing rhetoric of the College has been helpful in soothing the critics, as even the campus conservatives have taken up different agendas, and it appears there is a slow shift in the relative weight the Greek system has on campus. If the goal of the administration is to iron out potentially unsafe events for fear that others will feel uncomfortable and excluded, then it has been successful. If the administration wants to revamp Dartmouth's reputation, however, then it is woefully misguided.
Dartmouth has an image problem. We have the reputation of being an excellent school, historically (and in U.S. News & World Report) second-rate to Harvard, Princeton and Yale, but still great. We produce powerful businessmen and few intellectuals; we are known for accepting above-average students from prep schools like Choate, Groton and Exeter, for being a laissez-faire academic school of some repute that put the children of patrician families through a fairly rigorous education and taught them how to socialize.
But it is this reputation we are trying to escape -- that we aren't smart enough, liberal enough, diverse enough. As a result of this thinking, fraternities are not even listed on the campus maps handed out at the Admissions Office. Drinking is not more of a problem here than across the nation either, as a recent study has shown, but it is in the mind of the College. Nor does drinking appear to be a bigger problem than at Princeton or Harvard, schools that turn a blind eye to the perpetuation of old-boy eating and finals clubs, schools that are comfortable with their histories and try to negotiate this past with a new, more inclusive future. The assumption is that we, because of our provinciality and savage location, are somehow out of control and that this situation must be fixed.
Now, I do not hold a grudge against the administration and I am not carrying on a bitter polemic against their attempt to modify ("end" certainly has too strong a ring now, doesn't it?) the Greek system as we know it. But what does get me upset is the evident disregard for traditions that administrators consider unsavory; what irritates me is the lack of insight that many of these changes display. This disregard, as far as I can tell, comes about because Dartmouth's traditions aren't intellectual enough, because they were the ones responsible for that old catch-phrase, "You can always tell a Dartmouth man, but you can't tell him much."
It's been so long since the Student Life Initiative was announced that there are few students who can remember when Carnival was cancelled, when students gave impassioned speech on the Green about the Greek system (I haven't seen an "Unaffiliated but support the Greek system" T-shirt since freshman year, in fact). But I would like other students to get upset when they see that they go to a school ashamed of its past and ill-at-ease with its future because it cannot see where it's coming from. Shouldn't James Wright, a former professor of history, understand the value of the past?
Because it is Winter Carnival, I felt that I needed to write about how our College deals with itself. For it is Carnival that really epitomizes what Dartmouth once was, and what it is today. No longer do we build elaborate traps (read: well-planned sculptures) to show the girls from Smith our general virility in such manly endeavors as packing snow together into large phallic objects. The "we" has changed because we don't need to bus up the girls from Smith due to the ready availability of sex on this campus. (Wait a minute, that's not true, not true at all -- you lied to me, tour guide!) Our phallic symbols aren't so solid , or at least they weren't until we got alumni help to make things right once again. And we don't attempt in our drunken haze to jump over kegs. But since we are obviously at a sobering moment in our history, it might be fruitful to lift our heads up and take a look at ourselves and our school.
