In his Presidential Lecture last summer, College President Jim Yong Kim demonstrated one of his own "habits of mind" when he said that at Dartmouth, "We are in the business of building better human beings that can take on the world's troubles and make them better." While in the past I've been primarily critical of the second half of that statement ("Tilting at the World's Troubles," Jan. 27), in my last column for The Dartmouth I'd like to return to this remark and take up the first. The "habit of the mind" that Kim is employing when he talks about "the business of building better human beings" (as if the College were a research and development firm for a line of highly sophisticated, world-saving robots) is that of objectifying people and treating them as the means to accomplish something, rather than as ends in themselves. I believe that this perspective is thoroughly anti-humanistic and, therefore, fundamentally antagonistic to the spirit of the liberal arts. It is also at Dartmouth at any rate extremely common.
I think there is a simple explanation for why this is so: It's hard to get into Dartmouth. In order to gain admittance here, one must be willing to leverage every possible resource, press every advantage and maximize every form of utility. In this way, practically everyone who gets into Dartmouth must possess at least some degree of ruthlessness, some capacity to coolly calculate what is in our rational self-interest. And over time, the drive for achievement and the necessity of influencing people in order to achieve our goals can teach us to view people primarily in terms of their usefulness to us or their competitiveness with us. We tend to live in a harsh environment of mutual appraisal.
The competition for social status, which at Dartmouth is nearly always conferred through exclusivity, can also hinder us from forming meaningful interpersonal relationships based on mutual trust and respect. Those who distribute social status including the admissions officers who have just recently finished vetting a new crop of freshmen, the brothers and sisters who will be reviewing potential new members in the fall, and the employers and grad schools who have already had their pick of the senior class wield an enormous amount of power. To some extent, they are given the authority to determine what we will do, where we will work and how we will spend our time. Their job is to appraise and criticize the persons presented to them as objects as a collection of applications, transcripts and cover letters in order to select some as worthy while rejecting others as insufficiently useful.
We are evaluated for what we will bring to Dartmouth, what we will bring to a Greek house, what we will bring to our new job. This constant evaluation is a dehumanizing process to undergo. When we are treated and evaluated as objects, we cannot help but judge our own worth by the same markers of success that are visible to others. However, these markers fail to reflect the whole truth because they ignore or truncate the intrinsic value that comes from our innate human dignity. But we, the appraised, are equally guilty of depersonalizing our appraisers, of being interested in them only for their usefulness to us and being willing to manipulate them in whatever way will help us the most.
It certainly is the case that as long as Dartmouth continues to be a selective institution, the appraisal of persons as means rather than as ends will be a necessary reality. However, we should recognize as individuals and as an institution that this necessity is, in fact, a necessary evil. Much of this evil could be mitigated, however, if we in our interactions with one another were continually cognizant of the personhood and dignity of the other, whether that other is a peer, subordinate or superior. We must recover a respect for individuals that transcends their functions and associations, and continually remind ourselves that each person is equally and inestimably valuable.
