In the past 50 years, Dartmouth has enjoyed an undiminished reputation as one of the Ivy League's most conservative members. But despite the impression Dartmouth makes on the outside world, most of its students consider it to be a liberal school tainted by an old and persistent conservative reputation that is unsubstantiated by campus life at present. In reality, conservatism at Dartmouth is more complicated than either perspective acknowledges. The truth is that many of us come to Dartmouth with liberal views and leave with those views intact. And because our outward views remain persistently liberal, we rarely realize that the fundamental values underlying those convictions become increasingly conservative during our time here.
According to Facebook, roughly 50 percent of the Class of 2010 identified itself as liberal while less than 15 percent identified itself as conservative. But despite its prevalence, liberalism at Dartmouth is seldom more than an inherited front; a set of proper stances on prominent issues passed down from parents to children. Pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-public healthcare, pro-public education.
Often, we stand by these liberal perspectives willfully and mulishly, creating an outward aura of political fervor. But beneath our ostensible zeal we rarely have a sense of the overarching ideology that links one issue to another. For us, liberalism is indistinguishable from its outward political manifestations. It exists only in practice. In reality, however, liberalism, like all ideologies, operates on a more fundamental level first. At the center of its concrete practices there is a core of values that exists in the abstract and provides us with the means to address new issues for which liberal and conservative stances have not yet been established; instead of providing us with stances on prominent issues, it provides us with the means to establish those stances for ourselves. It is this core of values that forms the backbone of ideology, and the answers that it produces are secondary.
The reason most undergraduates consider Dartmouth to be a liberal institution is because they only see what is on the surface: that the majority of students voted Democrat during the presidential elections; that most of the speakers brought to campus are liberal; that 45 professors donated to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in 2006 while only one donated to Bush's ("The Conservative Party School," April 13). But conservatism at Dartmouth does not operate on a superficial level. It is hidden deep beneath the surface of what goes on at this school, embedded within this institution's core values.
As undergraduates, we come to college ready to learn and ready to be taught. We come desperate to find a set of core values that we can adhere to for the rest of our lives. And in our haste to begin our search, we come to college prepared to ease our passage into an alien place by willingly adapting to and accepting what is new and different. At Dartmouth that entails an uncritical acceptance of tradition.
From day one, when we, as freshmen, still nurture unformed values in the tentative refuge of our impressionable minds, we gather as a group in an impressive auditorium and sing the alma mater. We rise in unison and sing in unison, and when we reach the second stanza we belt out in unison, "Dear old Dartmouth, set a watch/ Lest the old traditions fail!" From that point on our faith in tradition begins to grow.
When we enter the Dartmouth community we immediately feel proud to be a part of something so old and so large, something bigger than ourselves and older than the nation we live in. We begin to believe in the overwhelming importance of tradition. Subconsciously, we think to ourselves: God forbid the old traditions should fail; God forbid my class, preceded by hundreds of others, should be the first to betray those values. The majority of us then go on to join fraternities and sororities that are amongst the oldest in the country, and we voluntarily do things during pledge term for the sole reason that they have been done that way in years past. Slowly, tradition becomes a source of comfort for us, and we become invested in preserving it. Slowly, we become entrenched in our established views and unwilling to challenge them. Slowly, in our blind acceptance of tradition and in our resistance to change we have become fundamentally conservative. And despite the fact that we might still believe in abortion, in a public welfare system, and in the environment, we have become liberal shells with conservative embryos growing within us.
In the end, Dartmouth succeeds in undermining our superficial liberal views by supplanting them with fundamental conservative values. And inasmuch as we become invested in tradition and uncritical of the status quo, there will come a time when the rest of the world catches up to our established liberal norm, and we will be the conservative leaders of the future, ever ready to prevent further progress.
