I met an administrator from Reed College on a rock climb in Nevada this past spring break. It turned out he was the director of Reed's Outing Club. When he discovered that I was part of a group of thirty undergrads managing our own trip without direct administrative oversight, he was flabbergasted. "That just doesn't happen," he said.
He was right, and that's why our Outing Club is so special. Without rattling off all the things the various sub-clubs accomplish, I can say that the DOC is flourishing, and everything is student-run. This student leadership is a singular tradition in American higher education -- one of which we are very proud and one in which we are humble to take part.
This past Friday, the administration undermined that student leadership. They did so by forcing out Andy Harvard, the director of the Outdoor Programs Office. Under Andy, the DOC experienced a small renaissance, due in no small part to his careful direction. The student leadership of the DOC has a partnership of sorts with Andy and his colleagues in OPO: we bring the ambition and the grand schemes, and they keep us grounded in the work of funding, risk management and other crucial aspects of outdoor trips. Andy was a masterful senior partner, comfortable "being in the position of power, without being in a position of control," as Chris Polashenski '07 put it.
Andy's dismissal, then, is a mystery to DOC students. Despite attempts to contact College administrators when rumors of his impending termination came up, we are still in the dark. The administration's silence is a clear and troubling signal: the student leadership has been cut out of the decision-making process.
I've been looking for the right word for this administrative secrecy. Disrespectful, alarming -- it is both these things; going even further, it is completely alien. To dismiss someone as valuable as Andy Harvard without a word to the numerous affected students is simply not how things are done in the DOC. If you're not a hiker/climber/boater and this last point seems academic, I ask you this: what would Freshman Trips be like if they were not exclusively student-run? With its intrusion, the administration has set a precedent of top-down control, and I fear the worst.
Who pushed Andy out? I think, tentatively, it was the Office of Student Life. That I am so uncertain only shows how unexpected this administrative intrusion has been. No DOC student knows which obscure tier of the college bureaucracy to confront; presumably, then, the anonymous administrators don't know very much about us either. And yet they have done real damage to the prolific partnership between the DOC and the OPO. I'd like to believe they have students' interests at heart, but the inscrutability of the thing reeks of office politics.
I promised earlier not to prattle on about the DOC's work -- I'm reneging. I can speak for the club I know: in the last two terms, the Mountaineering Club has traveled thousands of miles, climbed tens of thousands of vertical feet, taken out close to a hundred undergrads on beginner climbing trips and taught seven PE classes on rock and ice. All of this was student-organized, by just one sub-club of the DOC.
Look farther, and you'll see a new sugarhouse and greenhouse at the Farm (designed and built by students), a new cabin that rivals the Moosilauke Lodge in size and elegance (ditto) and the incredible ski program, which brought Dartmouth its first NCAA championship in decades.
All this is a testament to the students devoted to the DOC -- but absolutely none of it would have been possible without the wonderful partnership we have with Andy Harvard's OPO.
Now he's been pushed aside, and I'd like the administrators responsible to look at that list of DOC accomplishments and answer this: last year, what happened under your watch?
