In the past week, undergrads have enlisted themselves as foot soldiers in the Battle for Dartmouth.
No longer relegated to just the ballot box, mass mailings, the media spotlight and the blogosphere, the ongoing governance skirmish between alumni has landed right in the laps of current undergraduates.
BlitzMail inboxes have been flooded with petitions drafted by students both in favor and in opposition to the Association of Alumni's lawsuit against the College. Both camps are jockeying for the backing of the student masses, vying to represent the vox populi of the current undergraduates. The core idea of these canvassing efforts is that the clout of the student voice will sway the alumni electorate in the upcoming AoA elections. The outcome of these races will seal the fate of the controversial litigation.
Yet instead of bringing clarity and consensus to the festering alumni slugfest, soliciting student opinion has only muddled the issue even further. When it comes to the governance dispute, undergraduates are passionate and uninterested, knowledgeable and uninformed -- all at the same time. Simply put, intense student factions are warring for the hearts and minds of the apathetic middle majority.
Reading the rhetoric of the pro-lawsuit faction would not give this nuanced impression. The pro-lawsuit side more-or-less monopolizes the media that enables them to circulate misleading talking points. Through the opinionated pages of The Dartmouth Review, along with an array of blogs (Powerline Blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, DartBlog), the pro-lawsuit point of view has been broadcasted far and wide.
Given this monopolization of media mouthpieces, fables emanating from the pro-lawsuit camp go unchallenged and are passed as truth. In many ways, the medium is more important than the message. Do not be hoodwinked.
On April 24, "Dartmouth for Democracy" e-mailed out to the entire campus in a plea for student signatures for its pro-lawsuit petition. The appeal stressed that the "undergraduate community [has] clearly and passionately spoken out" in favor of the lawsuit and parity on the Board of Trustees.
And just two days earlier, on April 22, one pro-lawsuit and pro-parity student blogger at DartBlog concurred with this politically expedient assessment: "Just being on campus and talking with students gives the clear impression that campus is overwhelmingly in support of parity at Dartmouth." Yet on April 5, before this hullabaloo over petitions and alumni politics, another pro-lawsuit student scribe at DartBlog blogged: "There is no 'current undergraduate perspective' on the Association of Alumni election -- at least, no informed one. There is a grand total of four current undergraduates who have closely followed the whole governance story -- and two of them write for this blog."
Unless an epiphany dawned upon the whole student body in the two weeks between April 5 and April 22, the mostly uninformed undergraduates did not become wonks on the "whole governance story." These contradictory statements from the pro-lawsuit wing stand as just one anecdote of the duplicitous fabrications that have been spewed to the alumni electorate. The first thumb rule of mythmaking: be consistent.
And beyond its blatantly racist overtones, the "BlarFlex" cartoon printed in The Dartmouth last Thursday was chockfull of similar misrepresentations regarding the anti-lawsuit students. It posited that Parkhurst was "outsourcing propaganda" to students and that Dartmouth Undying (the alumni bloc opposed to the lawsuit) has undergrad henchmen towing their line.
In reality, the anti-lawsuit movement on campus was organic and "bottom-up" -- devoid of the hand of Parkhurst or alumni. Its petition explicitly noted that it "was created, prepared and signed solely by students. Dartmouth Undying did not solicit this message."
From the eyes of The Dartmouth Review, Phrygians and the broader pro-lawsuit coalition, it is unfathomable that undergraduates -- on their own volition -- have been working under the anti-lawsuit banner. Why is it that anti-lawsuit students are blasted as lackeys of the administration, blinded by their own "false consciousnesses?" And yet at the same time, the pro-lawsuit faction, instead of being billed as submissive minions of the anti-administration ideologues, hail themselves as independent thinkers who have achieved Zen. This double standard reeks of condescension.
In the weeks ahead, look beyond these sweeping generalizations that distort the actual undergraduate stance (or lack thereof) on the lawsuit. The message should matter more than the medium.
