Last week as I left the Alumni Gymnasium, muscles swollen and head buzzing from a post-workout endorphin high (ladies, feel free to blitz me), I threw on my jacket and sweats and headed out into the Hanover snow. When I got to my dorm, I turned around, stuck out my butt and began the "open-sesame" dance we all must perform whenever we want to get into a secured building. No beep. I felt in my back pocket for my wallet. Nothing. I checked my jacket pocket, side pockets and gym bag. No luck.
Every guy is familiar with the dread that accompanies a misplaced wallet. I'm not sure there is a worse feeling in the world. Hunger, thirst, drowning -- these pale in comparison to a lost wallet. I was pretty sure I'd left it in one of the cubbies at the gym, but my cell phone read 10:50; the gym would be closing shortly. I probably could have sprinted back, but I decided to wait to retrieve it.
The next day I woke up to a blitz titled "WALLET FOUND!" from the gym staff, as if they had known about the nightmares. I headed over there later that afternoon, grabbed my wallet off the gym desk and headed to dinner. When I pulled out my wallet later that night, I realized a $20 bill, my only $20 bill, was missing. Good ol' Andy J. had been jacked. And yet, whoever had taken my cash money had been kind enough to leave me with five dollars. An altruistic thief.
My wallet fiasco got me thinking about integrity at Dartmouth. On the whole, I've found Dartmouth to be an honorable and trusting community. Professors have faith that exams can be taken unproctored, and students, for the most part, respect the honor code. It is by no means the flagrant incidents, the major forms of cheating -- sneaking notes into tests or purposeful plagiarism -- that plague our campus.
Instead, it's the small, nuanced forms of dishonor that we as a community seem to have difficulty with. It's the minute discretions that can't be policed: concerting on a Blackboard quiz, passing a major GPA off as a cumulative GPA, drinking half of a full cup when you know it hit the half, going jacket shopping at a Heorot dance party, taking the $20 but leaving the $5. The problem, of course, is that these little things add up. When I realized I was $20 poorer, it wasn't the money I was worried about, but my faith in fellow Dartmouth students. These little instances create an environment of distrust that pulls at the seams of our community. And these small acts of dishonor create a vicious cycle -- as more acts occur, people are more likely to lose faith in the system and become perpetrators themselves.
I'm not writing this column to get my money back (although I do write down all the serial numbers of my $20 bills and Hanover Police will hunt you down, thief). It's my fault for forgetting my wallet. Whoever took the money probably thought he was doing me a favor and therefore deserved a $20 finder's fee -- besides, a light wallet is better than no wallet at all. But I think it's important that we, as individuals, take time to consider how we must conduct ourselves if we are to live together in the Dartmouth community. Are we going sacrifice community in the name of individual advancement, or are we willing to make responsible decisions even when there aren't tangible consequences?
It's always easier to take shortcuts in a community, whether we're slipping into a "drunkenly-borrowed" black Northface or pocketing someone else's cash. These are certainly cheap solutions to being cold or short on money. But, before you walk out of that frat basement door, consider the larger impact a dishonorable action will have on the greater Dartmouth community. The altruistic feeling you get by acting with integrity, I'm convinced, will warm you as you return home, jacketless and penniless.
