The summer is dead. Long live the summer! At some point we'll have to face facts and acknowledge the restful passing of a great term. But, as frat guys like me will tell you, there are things to look forward to in the fall. Young, supple things that need a warm and gentle reception to the Dartmouth social scene.
When those sexy '12s get here, they will -- after so many self-promoting campus tours and pictures of diverse students smiling and being the best friends forever despite their racial differences -- expect a school full of amicable, inviting people. And while this is ostensibly true, there are certain signs that we're not so utopian after all. Certain social clues remind this young anthropologist that we're all just plain old faulty people. Self-serving, destructive people.
And so I end the summer with another futile attempt to indicate a social problem at Dartmouth, only to be boiled down by hearsay into some fiasco over a gender joke I made a few paragraphs earlier. What we have here, in theory, is a community of scholars and -- if the Student Life Initiative did anything -- friends. Now this is all peachy thought, and it would be great if this were really true. However, as we exist as a group of humans, there will be natural divides.
And so I turn sour, which is why I spared this article from the impressionable young '12s. I think the notion -- that despite our similarities, we're all still self-serving individuals -- hit me when I was trying to leave Classics 4. You see, it was a quiz day, and somewhere between Tyndaeus' daughters and Jason's golden fleece, dozens of frustrated scholars were frantically searching Wikipedia for the answer. You must imagine this class as a paradigm of anthropological study: hundreds of students, each with a laptop and blazing fingers, struggling to use the internet to answer a question about Ancient Greece (try to ignore the humorous anachronism). And I had to get out of the row. Well, Dartmouth student or not, getting out of that row of seats was like another birth. Actually, it was worse -- I was a Cesarean.
I could not believe how difficult it was; it felt like something Seinfeld would complain about to his friends, and they would just shrug and say "it's just those pesky New Yorkers." Is that what we are? Can't you just pull in your legs a little bit when I try to get through? I was even endearing and self-deprecating about it. But no, you couldn't pull in your legs. You got mad at me. Despite our sense of community, will we grow up as those jerks who are obstacles in our pursuit of a pain-in-the-ass-less life?
Exhibit 2: The Green Key/IFC midnight pizza event under the Rockefeller overhang. And everyone was thinking, "Oh man, our Student Activities fund at work -- I love our sense of community!" Of course, it was only a matter of seconds before certain Dartmouth peers began to take whole pizzas, depriving the feeblest from their due rations. You'd think that a mature group of people wouldn't need a guard to lord over their own food. But no, like soma addicts in "Brave New World," selfish students rioted for a slice.
This sense of self-preservation complements a common drinking mindset: "I will get drunk, I will steal food, and I will not care if I hurt someone's feelings or break their possessions." No, go ahead, punch in the window or break the bathroom door. Someone else will deal with it.
Ivy League students are daily found stealing valuables: jackets and iPods, laptops and hearts. And most people just don't care. This may be the heart of the dating scene's inescapable black hole, the key to the gender dynamic problem and the reason that many students feel jaded by the end of the summer: we're a bunch of jerks.
I have no evidence to contradict the lack of consideration for property, academics and most importantly, people. What's special about our Dartmouth bubble if we're just like the "real world" that some students fear? Dartmouth problems, in fact, aren't specific to us. This is how the world grows up. It's ugly.
