Dartmouth is a community with a collective emotional atmosphere that can be healthy or unhealthy. Dartmouth's emotional landscape is obviously complex and has many factors, but I want to talk about just one of them here our apparent aversion to risk. Sure we do things that would look like risks to a Dartmouth outsider, like jumping in a freezing cold pond in the middle of winter and getting trashed on weekends. But these aren't really risks, they are part of typical contemporary college culture and it requires almost nothing to conform to them. While there may be many other reasons for our avoidance of risk, I think it is observably true for a significant amount of people in this overachieving community that they don't take risks because doing so carries the possibility of failure. In some situations, risk taking can be both healthy and important for the personal growth of Dartmouth students.
There is as I have learned from my and other's experiences a part of our community that doesn't want to take risks because failure would force them to admit to their weaknesses, their insecurities and their vulnerabilities. I think this is partially the cause of our hook-up culture. It is so much easier to spend a night, if it even lasts a whole night, with somebody you don't know well than to actually commit yourself to a long-term relationship. A serious relationship involves emotional intimacy and would require you to tear down the faade Dartmouth enjoins upon all of us.
Some people's fear of failure might also account for the widespread use of the Non-Recording Option, which permits Dartmouth students to guard and protect themselves from having to accept a poor grade in a class. The NRO might be a harmless enough thing when it comes to academics, but when it is applied to life I think it can be disastrous. I don't know what the rationale behind those "NRO Life" T-shirts was, but I think it expresses, even if inadvertently, an overly cautious view of life and unhealthy view of risk-taking.
For some people on this campus, though certainly not all, fear of admitting to failure and weakness leads to projecting an illusion of self-sufficiency, of having everything under control, of being perfectly satisfied with themselves and their situation. This acting as if you are perfect doesn't allow you to be honest and real with other people. It therefore locks you into your own small world and shuts everyone else out.
Some people feel like they are alienated from any real human contact, and some Dartmouth students for all the social contact they have on the weekend are actually very lonely, I think. This is one of the reasons for the articles that pop up in The D every once in a while about the discontent that lies beneath the surface of campus culture ("One foot out the closed door," May 25, 2007). There are many people at Dartmouth who are starved for genuine, as opposed to superficial, human contact. They won't ever have it, however, if Dartmouth students don't learn to be truly honest about who they are.It's OK to admit that we're not perfect. It's OK to admit that we don't have everything under control. It's OK to admit that we fail sometimes. It doesn't make us especially weak people it just makes us people.
Everyone fails sometime, but that shouldn't stop Dartmouth students from trying something if success is not guaranteed. Because everyone here made it into an Ivy League school, we are used to success and we don't want to attempt something that might spoil our good record. But I think everyone wants his or her time at Dartmouth to mean more than a few Friday nights spent wasted in a frat basement and a fancy sheet of paper received at the end of four years. If people do want a great and fulfilling Dartmouth experience, it will require taking risks. The first step to taking risks is to make peace with our fallibility, and to truly open ourselves up to other people.