My little sister recently sent me an angry Facebook message with a link to a Wall Street Journal opinion column. The column posits that the "feminist narrative about men being responsible for the oppression of women" is wrong, because, in fact, what women do all day is oppress each other ("Lipstick Jungle," Sept. 26). One anecdote about Tufts, where my sister is currently a freshman, did nothing to prove the point: One time at Tufts, a female editor-in-chief published a controversial joke about rape (or, a comic strip?) in the Tufts Daily.
I find my sister's defense of her school far more compelling than any human interest piece concerning college women printed by the Wall Street Journal. She was concerned that the article did not fairly represent her experience at Tufts.
The column reminds me of several occasions throughout my Dartmouth career when I have been exceedingly frustrated by outsiders' portrayal of goups that I belong to, either in the media or by word of mouth. Whatever real, urgent problems these organizations may have, it is my prerogative as a member to recognize, analyze and work to fix my organizations' problems.
At Convocation my freshman fall, for example, then-Student Body President Tim Andreadis '07 announced that as women, my 500 or so fellow female '10 classmates and I would not be able to enjoy college because of the prevalence of sexual assault at Dartmouth. It annoyed me to hear someone else interpret four years of my life before I even had the chance to live them.
Another perfect example of this comes from a letter called "Democracy at Dartmouth" sent out to alumni by the Association of Alumni in the summer of 2007. The letter was meant to garner support for the Association's lawsuit against the College; it not so subtly compared former President of the Board of Trustees Ed Haldeman to Hitler. Attached to the letter was a student's column from The Dartmouth ("Large Classes, Misplaced Priorities," April 16, 2007) accusing the College of faking its progress towards a better student-to-faculty ratio. Alumni who read this letter (without reading anything else) could very well believe that Dartmouth is a horrible place.
Of course, my reaction in both of these cases is a natural, human defense mechanism against unexpected and often shrewd criticism. On the other hand, I become angriest when an outsider's assessment is paternalistic. As current students at Dartmouth, Tufts or wherever, we are the ones working day in and day out to accomplish our goals, make friends and help others. While alumni who learn from their bad experiences in college can perhaps provide valuable support for improvements to their alma mater, they must not impose their narratives on current students who are in the midst of living their own lives.
As a member of a Greek house at Dartmouth, I often think about the criticism coming from both insiders and outsiders. Whenever the campus dialogue focuses on gender relations and inequality of social spaces at Dartmouth, I find myself questioning whether a Greek system made up of single-sex fraternities and sororities can ever fully resolve problems between genders. On the other hand, as a member of a sorority, I want to work to alleviate the problems within the current system. Perhaps I am part of a system that is inherently flawed, but hearing from anyone outside the system that the organization of which I am a part can only perpetuate a harmful, negative trend that is unproductive -- it just makes me angry.
Andreadis was right that sexual assault is a problem at Dartmouth. The AoA was right that a Dartmouth education can be improved upon. And the Wall Street Journal op-ed was right that college women tend to be hard on each other. Indeed, for my sister and me, it's not as if we don't see the problems in our respective institutions; instead, we are angry that we are treated as helpless victims (in Andreadis' example) or symptoms of a social ill (in the AoA's and the Wall Street Journal's examples), even though we have chosen to swim, not sink, in our environments.
Outside criticism denies us our entitlement to work on improving our lives by ourselves. If we have a problem, we should be empowered to denounce it publicly in our own voices and fight for a solution ourselves, so we are never reduced to victims, to casualties of a greater social trend. I am proud that my younger sister knows this, and I hope that we all fight for our right to represent ourselves, our imperfections and our quests to resolve our problems to the outside world.
