To the Editor:
I was taken aback by Yana Rozental '07's comments in The Dartmouth about our college's rankings (Aug. 23). Rozental said: "As a relatively small college amongst bigger universities, we cannot adequately live up to our Ivy League name. We could be right alongside Harvard but not if we don't make some serious changes to our structure."
Why on Earth would we desire to be "alongside" Harvard? Dartmouth College may be a small institution, but there are many who love it. If Rozental and others do not know who it is I am paraphrasing here, then perhaps they have ended up at the wrong place for their college education.
Many students, myself included, were attracted to Dartmouth because it IS a college, not a huge impersonal university. At a large university, like Harvard, faculty are often far more interested in their prestigious research and in the graduate and doctoral students who can help them complete that research. Undergraduate students are given over to teaching assistants and otherwise ignored. I wanted to attend college at a place where I would feel valued as a student, where faculty members would be willing to talk with me, where my needs and those of my fellow undergraduates were taken seriously by the administration. So I came to Dartmouth. There are eight institutions in the Ivy League. Of those, seven are large universities. If anything, the Ivy League could use more small colleges. There is nothing wrong with schools such as Swarthmore, Smith, and their ilk -- and that includes Dartmouth.
If Rozental cannot appreciate that fact, perhaps they should consider sending out a few transfer applications to some unfeeling, huge research centers. There is a place for those universities, just as there is a place for smaller liberal arts colleges. If you came to Dartmouth looking for the former, you did so foolishly and without much knowledge of the place.
