Over 12,000 of America's brightest high school seniors and budding alcoholics turned in applications to Dartmouth this fall. The question is: why?
I don't mean, of course, why they would want to come here -- we have seductive pamphlets that egregiously omit phrases like "lethal weather," "boot-n-slide" and "no on-campus zoo." Fair enough.
Rather, I look to anticipate the question the '08s, '07s and especially the '06s will be asking next fall: why do we have to put up with even more freshmen?
Yeah, that's right. I said it. Freshmen. Come on, now. Do you really believe anyone is about to give up on brevity and say "first-year students?" I sincerely doubt it. It's not a matter of political correctness. It's arbitrary, really. We might as well just call them Los Duderinos and Las Duderinas.
Anyway, the point is this: everyone is going to be pissed off at the arrival of new freshpeople next fall. Of course this won't be universal.
"Dude, have you seen the new '09 Duderinas!? They're hot and unsuspecting!"
"Yeah dude, they are unwise to the ways of the world. I shall open their eyes to the untamed starlight that tickles the pines and heats the life-blood of creation. I shall carry them to awe-inspiring heights, and ..."
"I know dude, they're gonna be totally easy!"
But the opinions of the eloquent lecherous aside, most of campus will probably mark next year's freshfolk by their annoyingly diminutive size and ebullient occupation of space they don't deserve -- the lines in Food Court, for example, or in between veteran students and beer. "Out of Food Court!" we will say, "And out of Beer Court as well!"
This is probably more than a little unfair. I didn't really even notice to what extent we naturally short-changed freshstudents last year. After all, the fall that the '07s arrived I felt just as imposed upon by them as everyone else. Did you see the lines at Food Court? Christ! And they got, like, every single frat on probation!
But since I missed the arrival of all the '08s this year, I was much more surprised to find the Fall term verdict against them so fully pronounced by so many of the people I knew.
It's easy to see that not all the pejorative things that people say about the '08s can actually be true. I have heard that they have infested all the frats and make it no fun to go out, but I've also heard that they're really boring and don't do anything but study.
Unless they do classical studies on the dance floors at Chi Gam (This party is out of control! Get S&S!), I don't know how to reconcile the two.
Why do we get this sort of class intolerance? The young American existentialist answer is that people are driven by fear and laziness. Does it even have to be true? To answer my own rhetorical question, no, it doesn't. It makes too much sense. Racism, feudalism, sabaism -- all of these things are rooted in our fear and laziness.
Our first year, we work (or play or drink) hard as hell to integrate ourselves into what we see as the Dartmouth culture.
Unfortunately, this culture is fatally ephemeral -- a quarter of our population is replaced every year, and the D-Plan makes it so that even within a year, our population alters radically from term to term.
In winter, the prudent students take off and leave only the resilient ice-golems, while in spring the campus is made up of mostly girls in tank tops, frat brothers with puppies and the eternal denizens of Collis porch.
But seeing the constant mutation of a culture we had to dome like hell to enter is difficult. It means we have to keep working to be cool. It means that maybe we're not cool anymore. This thought scares us, and the thought that we may have to socially adapt sounds like an awful lot of work. Enter fear and laziness, motivators extraordinaire.
Accepting this change in our social scene is hard and uncertain. So we idolize the old days (of one to three years ago) and say that everything rocked before someone came in and ruined it all.
It's lucky that we have bumper crops of little green freshpersons -- immature and irresponsible Duderinos and Duderinas -- to dump the blame on. We're still cool, but these ignant freshpeople don't understand the way things work. It's not like there aren't some '08s who really do make the campus worse to live on; the '08s -- just like every class -- have as much good and bad in them as any group of 1,000 or so Ivy League freshlearners. They just also happen to have an unnatural attachment to their cell phones.
Nonetheless, since we are unlikely to exorcise fear and laziness from our collective psyche, we might as well accept that the arrival of fresh-hombres-y-mujeras next year is going to chafe. So let's go ahead and start inventing some traditions for them to corrupt.
God, I bet they won't even call themselves Duderinos.
Bastards.
