Whether they realize it or not, all Dartmouth students have great interest vested in College policy -- $190,000 worth of interest. Why then, are so many students so antagonistic toward the Dartmouth administration? Improving communication between students and the administration would go a long way toward ending the adversarial and unproductive attitude that often exists between the two groups.
Antagonism begins with ignorance, and most students have at best a very basic understanding of the very structure of Dartmouth's administration. How many students can name the six divisions of this institution with leaders who report directly to the College president? How many students know that there are 11 positions in Dartmouth's central administration that include the word "president" in their job titles? When "deans," "directors" and "managers" are included in the count, the number is probably well over a 100, though an exact count is difficult to come by because, to my knowledge, there exists no document with an explicit list. Though most students are probably aware that there are many, many individuals working in Dartmouth's administration, there are probably few if any who can enumerate their titles or functions with much accuracy or specificity. With a casual page-through of the faculty handbook, one does not get the sense of anything so much as a sprawling "educorporate" bureaucracy. Student antagonism toward the administration is completely understandable with this in mind.
Often, students' ignorance and antagonism go together, as in declarations like this recent one by Max Bryer '08: "The appearance of the Assembly as a functional political entity is an elaborately contrived charade developed by the administration to convince the student body that its genuine concerns and gripes are being attended to diligently and conscientiously" ("The Futility of the SA Fight," Jan. 24). To claim that the Assembly is a conspiratorial mechanism of deception is alarmist at best.
But I have a dream. I dream of a Dartmouth where this antagonism is gone, where student walks hand in hand with administrator to the tune of some grandiloquent refrain from the 1960s, where administrators dine at Collis Cafe and students lounge in the yard in front of Parkhurst Administration building. I challenge the Dartmouth administration to communicate more effectively with students. It is rumored that College President James Wright holds office hours, but I have no idea when they are, and I know no student who would seriously consider speaking to the president of the College in any kind of closed office setting, let alone one located in the intimidating Parkhurst. Wright also regularly holds lunches with students, but they are with small and select groups. Palaeopitus holds meet-the-administrator events occasionally, but they are few and far between and rarely allow students to engage in critical discussion with administrators on College policy. We need a program that regularly brings administrators and students into close, informal contact in a public forum setting for serious discussion of issues relevant to both. Hold it biweekly in the aptly named Collis Common Ground. Each session, a different administrator would discuss what he or she does for the College and how this work helps Dartmouth achieve its institutional mission. The frequency, the public nature and the seriousness of the discussions at these events would distinguish them from any meet-the-administrator program currently in place.
My proposal is closely related to the ongoing leadership debacle in the Assembly. Amid claims that Assembly leadership has achieved nothing substantial, President Tim Andreadis '07 ironically presided over discussions of the mascot and of who should send out "Uh-Oh" BlitzMail messages at the last Assembly meeting. For an organization purportedly dedicated to advocating for student interests to the administration, there is no issue more pressing and "substantive" than opening channels of communication.
Communication is the first step to understanding. If administrators and students communicated more on relevant College policy issues, the level of student antagonism toward the administration would decrease substantially. Any entity that successfully enacts a program like the one I proposed above, be it Palaeopitus, the Assembly or the administration itself, will garner a great deal of student goodwill. Better still, it will have accomplished something of "substance."
