It is an oft-repeated cliche at Dartmouth that we students often fail to take advantage of the opportunities that surround us. Generally, I feel that such concerns are overstated. Many students do make an effort to take advantage of funding opportunities, attend lectures outside of class and participate in events like concerts and film premieres. However, I recently came to realize that there is one way in which we neglect the community around us. Students here tend to overlook the most obvious sources of ingenuity and entertainment each other. On Saturday night, I found myself seated in the Bentley Theater in the Hopkins Center. I was there to witness "WiRED," a theatrical experience 24 hours in the making. WiRED technically began the night before, when several groups of talented students gathered copious amounts of red bull and coffee in order to make it through a night of script writing and a day of frenzied rehearsal. The resulting plays were moving and comical in their own right, and stunningly so when one considered the circumstances of their production. As the final play ended, I felt myself swelling with pride at the glorious thespianism of our Dartmouth peers. Then, I came to a shameful realization as a sophomore at this college, I could count on one hand the number of student performances that I had attended out of my own volition.
I was astonished that I could be so culturally parochial given all of the singing, music, theater, dance, slam poetry and other performance art that pervades this campus. Yet it appears that we have become conditioned to automatically delete emails that bring tidings of such events. How many among us have truly made the effort to venture out to One Wheelock in the dead of winter to hear some spoken word? I suspect that unless we are supporting the pursuits of close friends, few of us will go out of our way to experience the artistic endeavors of our peers. It is true that Greek houses will sometimes advertise student group performances on party nights, but this setting is only conducive to a narrow range of artistic expression. Much of the performance on campus takes place outside of Dartmouth's most frequented social spaces.
This phenomenon is not limited to the arts. For a college where so many students have a history of athletic accomplishment, remarkably few sports games achieve high rates of attendance. Of course, there are some highly anticipated events like the Princeton hockey game that bring out large portions of campus. However, we are drawn to things like the hockey game more out of a desire to witness spectacle than out of a genuine appreciation for the talents of our fellow students. The Homecoming football game operates in much the same way Dartmouth students rarely turn out for football on any other occasion. Our attitude towards athletics is much the same as our attitude towards other student performances we simply do not show up for most sporting events.
All of this is not to say that we are dismissive of one another's abilities, but merely that we have failed to internalize a strong desire to share in the artistic and athletic accomplishments of the people around us. This is all the more unfortunate because college is a unique setting in which the diverse talents of many are easily accessible. During WiRED, I got to see new sides of people who I had formerly known only in the context of academic or social settings, and I also bore witness to the talents of strangers who I never would have known otherwise.
We should all make a greater effort to share in the accomplishments of other Dartmouth students. Even a casual stop at the Hop or One Wheelock could turn out to be an eminently rewarding experience. Our location in Hanover means that we cannot take advantage of the cultural opportunities that a large city would have to offer, but much of that dynamism can be found right here at home.
