Having fallen asleep on my keyboard during a recent all-nighter, I found myself in a dream one that placed my best friends and me at our 20th class reunion. It got me thinking: What might a future Dartmouth look like if students decided to come together now to build the school we want to return to in 20 years? If you'll bear with me, I'll try to sketch the outlines of one student's dream of how this place could look two decades hence.
At my dream Dartmouth, 2011 will have been the last year that a sexual assault occurred in Hanover, following reforms that were the enduring legacy of Sylvia Spears. That same year, faculty and students finally stood together to declare that social marginalization of all kinds had run its course on campus. 2011 will also mark the last year the Indian caricature was seen on campus.
Early admission and tuition will have been deemed unnecessary by the Trustees after Dartmouth accelerated out of the recession. All staff will receive comprehensive health insurance and the opportunity to audit several courses. Every senior will be included in the same senior society, one that works to provide freshmen with the best advising system in the country. Greek life will remain a strong presence on campus, and sororities will have long since caught up with fraternities in number. The events that draw the most students together on weekends will not be dance parties but service projects around the Upper Valley.
College President Jim Yong Kim's revamped Great Issues course will have been such a success that in 2014, President Obama recommended that certain members of his economic team audit it online to learn from students' class presentations. Dartmouth will have become the most sustainable college ranked by U.S. News and World Report (now the only measure the organization ranks) in 2016.
Dartmouth Stands with Haiti will have led to a reciprocal partnership with Universit Quisqueya in 2015 and sparked other partnerships focused on student research collaborations with universities across the developing world. Most students publish groundbreaking research (or create world-changing art through the new Angela Rosenthal Artists for Global Justice Center) with their Haitian, Nicaraguan, Tanzanian and Kosovar colleagues. These students will have banded together as activists to win increased contributions to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that provided universal access to treatment for these and other diseases by 2016. Dartmouth's motto has accordingly been updated to include Voces Conclamantes ("Voices Crying Out Together").
Summer Enrichment At Dartmouth will have grown into a year-round program and have been replicated at dozens of colleges around the nation. A group of SEAD alumni will have graduated from Dartmouth and been elected to Congress, where they passed equitable public education reform in 2017 that actually leaves no child behind. Data from the Dartmouth Atlas and innovation at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science will have driven forward true health reform in 2018 that provided every person in this country with access to a world-class national health system and finally bent the cost curve.
A Dartmouth '11 will have been elected the second female President of the United States in 2025 and immediately passed the DREAM Acts, granting all immigrant students permanent residency and paving an expedited path to citizenship for all working families. The American military will not have fired a shot overseas since 2013, but Dartmouth will still promote peace through the education of veterans including Afghanis and Iraqis from their own countries' security forces through the James Wright Veteran Scholars for International Understanding Program.
Big Green football led by James and then Nicolas Kim will have won the BCS in 2020 and 2027, with Harvard losing 1769 on each occasion. Four thousand Dartmouth students rushed the field at both games.
That's just one crazy senior's almost-fully-educated guess at what the small College I love might look like 20 years after we all walk across the Green on that warm Sunday in June. My most ardent dream in my final term here, however, is for each member of this community to wake up to our ability to seize our own visions for this place and together shape the College we want to see tomorrow, today. In the words of visionary Archbishop Dom Camara: "When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream; when we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality."
