If you haven't noticed already, Dartmouth, like many colleges, is a giant social experiment with exams and occasional free food. Particularly at the institutional level, the College often provides an array of incentives to support that experiment. However, while these incentives may seem beneficial at first, I think they can often cripple the student dedication that our College is built on.
At first glance, the provision of incentives to encourage specific student behavior and mold campus culture through the force of policy may not appear to be a bad thing. The world is full of incentives -- after all, one gets a good education partly because a high-paying job waits on the other side. One works hard in class, partly because of the reward of an 'A.' The U.S. government has been tweaking incentives for centuries, in order to encourage innovation, risk-taking and good citizenship. But what happens when incentives breed mediocrity, and destroy the very values they are supposed to uphold?
The Winter Carnival snow sculpture is a telling example. The College spent over $500 on pizza and gift certificates to encourage student participation in our timeless College tradition. Turnout was unfortunately sporadic; blitzes were sent out to campus, consistently describing how the sculpture was behind schedule. Without devoted students, the tradition would not continue, and the sculpture would not be built. Even I only donated a few minutes of my time to the project -- and that wasn't until after the first sculpture collapsed. In the end, it was a few people who put everything they had into making the sculpture, despite the difficulties brought by unseasonably warm temperatures -- campus at large was not as engaged as it could have been in one of our most special celebrations. I hate to beat the dead horse of student apathy, but I think there's a problem when we can't turn students out in droves to make a Dartmouth tradition flourish. Incentives are a Band-Aid that draw resources from other areas of the College, and do a questionable job of fixing the problem in the first place.
A great deal of research has been performed on the relationship between incentives and motivation. Years ago, Switzerland was determining a location for a nuclear waste storage site. Nuclear waste not only presents a health and safety hazard, but also lowers property values in neighboring communities. When researchers asked residents if they would permit nuclear waste storage inside of their town, 50 percent of those questioned, with their responsibility as Swiss citizens in mind, responded favorably. However, when researchers asked residents if they would permit a nuclear waste dump in exchange for a considerable sum of money (roughly equal to six weeks of an average worker's salary), only 25 percent of those questioned responded favorably. Incentives here distorted value and killed motivation, as people forgot about the considerations of their fellow citizens, and instead acted out of pure self-interest.
Psychologists have known about the effects of incentives for decades. A study on nursery school children was performed in which some children were given "awards" for playing and drawing pictures, whereas others were not. After awards were given, it turned out that the children who had received awards were less likely to draw -- and were more likely to draw low-quality pictures -- than the children who hadn't. The truth is that kids draw for the same reason that spirited college students participate in their communities and traditions: it is fun and rewarding. No incentives necessary.
Students of decades past have managed to create some tremendous snow sculptures, and I'm fairly confident they did so without food bribes. This raises the question: if we stripped away the incentives, how would the student body react? I would point you to the night that the Winter Carnival sculpture collapsed. Dozens of students were found that night on the snow sculpture, carrying buckets of snow and working late into the night, all out of selfless dedication to a proud Dartmouth tradition. That kind of student passion is what defines Dartmouth, and it is about time we began to harness it and expect it from ourselves and from one another.
