Freddie is a senior whom I am delighted to see almost twice a week. He never fails to don his Dartmouth shirt proudly, and he always keeps his pong paddle close by. He volunteered in Africa during his off-term, constantly tries to impress of the opposite sex and strongly dislikes the '15s. For better or worse, Freddie is the stereotypical Dartmouth student except for the fact that Freddie doesn't actually exist.
I am, of course, referring to the titular character of Andrea Jaresova's "Freddie and the Bigger People," a bi-weekly comic strip for The D that serves as a visual pastiche of Dartmouth life.
In last week's strip, Freddie unloaded his emotional burdens onto an anthropomorphic banana. Freddie asks, "Do you ever wonder how everyone just seems to keep on going? It's like in gym class, and it seems like you're the first to stop. And what if I stop? What if I was wrong the whole time? What if I wasted time on stupid things?" The banana retorts, "Well, don't ask me those questions. I'm just a banana." Freddie sighs, and later emerges dressed smartly in business wear and holding onto a flier from the career fair with a downcast expression. Freddie ultimately decides to compromise his personal doubts to once again take his starting position in a race among his peers, out of fear that by stopping short of the undefined finish line, he risks succumbing to feelings of personal failure.
Freddie's metaphor closely mirrors the situation of many Dartmouth students stuck in the unrelenting running mill of collegiate life, carried away by the cultural and social inertia of the "Dartmouth Experience."
We have all faced another variation of Freddie's race at least once before, leaping over the obstacles of high school, scoring atmospherically high on standardized tests, garnering accolades and awards and sprinting ahead of our peers in academics and extracurricular activities.
Yet when we arrived at the racecourse called Dartmouth College, we discovered that the tracks were less defined, with branching lanes and ambiguous finish lines. Faced with a number of uncertainties, many of us at least opted to take the social path commonly trodden by those who came before us. The Dartmouth Experience describes a set of "must-do" collective, social activities that include participation in DOC Trips, the Greek system and sophomore Summer.
While I have no qualms with the individual elements of the Dartmouth Experience, our collective insistence on its normalcy threatens to belittle the experience of those who decide to deviate from what is considered to be a normative social life, especially relative to the centrality of the College's Greek culture. I have met plenty of unaffiliated students who feel as if they must endure Dartmouth's social marathon in fears of missing out, and feel obligated to justify their unaffiliated status. Other students have confided that while they have no intention of pledging, they feel obligated to rush for the experience.
Of course, there are those on the other side of the coin. While probably in the minority, there are students who, like Freddie, wonder if their adherence to the Dartmouth Experience is misplaced, but feel reluctant to de-pledge or temporarily inactivate their membership in fear of being one of "the first to stop in the race."
Yet the worst are those who insist that their choice somehow makes them better and belittle those who have chosen otherwise from among both the affiliated and the unaffiliated.
Our collective insistence on normalizing the Dartmouth Experience is causing many of us to strain. We need not think better or worse of ourselves for the paths that we have opted to take. Instead, we need to re-establish the importance of personal preference, respect individual choices and acknowledge to others and to ourselves that the various tracks and lanes are different, but ultimately valid, iterations of the Dartmouth Experience.
