Another term, another unflattering portrait of Dartmouth splayed across national headlines. But for anyone keeping score, not a single item in the leaked documents describing the hazing practices of Beta Alpha Omega fraternity was even the slightest bit shocking. The community’s response was also unsurprising: a lot of finger-pointing, excuse-making, satirizing and drumbeating. Indeed, this is hardly the first time that Dartmouth has been down this road.
Dartmouth has a short institutional memory. Owing much to the truncated semesters and scheduling patterns associated with the D-Plan, the mix of students on campus changes every term. The issues and controversies of one term often fail to resonate during the next, and momentum propelling the intention to implement change on campus peters out during the interim. As a community, we grapple with the same problems, in the most predictable ways, again and again.
Yet, a general sentiment persists that Dartmouth is a much better place today than it used to be. If hazing, sexual assault and bigotry were once a feature of the Dartmouth experience, that experience is one now firmly relegated to the past. Issues that arise presently are incidental, misconstrued or exaggerated; we’ve already made the necessary changes, and those who promote further reforms are blowing smoke.
This is a story that the Dartmouth community has believed for some time. We believe we were a lot worse off four years ago than we are now. Things needed to change four years ago, but not anymore. But pick through that institutional memory — query some alums or scan the archives of The Dartmouth — and you will find that four years ago, Dartmouth believed the same about four years before then. Four years from now, campus will no doubt hold that presently (as in, right now) Dartmouth was riddled with problems that will no longer be applicable.
So when does anything actually change? There are policy tweaks here and there, primarily driven by outside scrutiny. Meanwhile, evolving attitudes reflect the broader progressivism developing in society, imported to campus with each matriculating class. But once on campus, these sentiments are constrained by the archaic, traditional bedrock of Dartmouth’s culture. Big changes — those that even come close to addressing the persistent, ongoing abuse within our community — are noticeably absent from the Dartmouth record, even as these abuses are chronicled extensively.
A cursory review of The Dartmouth’s online archives, reveals a disturbing pattern of abuse perpetrated on our campus, often within the Greek system. Over the past decade, allegations of such behavior have been levied against, chronologically, Theta Delta Chi and Delta Delta Delta; Kappa Kappa Gamma; Theta Delta Chi (again); Zeta Psi; Psi Upsilon, Chi Gamma Epsilon and Kappa Delta Epsilon; Sigma Alpha Epsilon; Alpha Delta; Alpha Phi Alpha; Alpha Delta and Delta Delta Delta (both, again) and now, Beta Alpha Omega — and that’s after just a cursory enumeration. Not one student in the last 10 years has made it through his or her Dartmouth career without a Greek scandal rearing its ugly head.
Other incidents surely do not make it to print. I can personally attest to experiencing or witnessing abusive behavior at nearly every fraternity on campus. The tally of such incidents explodes when I factor in the accounts of my peers. The faculty, divorced from the ephemeral nature of the undergraduate experience, has been consistently resolute in its perspective — more than 100 took to The Dartmouth in 2001, decrying a system based on “exclusion, self-indulgence and an arrogant sense of entitlement,” and then again a decade later, implicating the Greek system in creating an environment of “moral thuggery.”
Of course, the Greek system is not solely responsible for campus hostility. Multiple incidents of bias have recently occurred elsewhere on campus, and a steady stream of authors in this very paper have described their personal experiences enduring prejudice and abuse. There is a clear narrative here, but there is also, still, no sign of pending, significant change. But that is exactly the kind of change that Dartmouth needs — extensive, structural, institutional change — to finally break out of the predictable cycle of abuse, denial, outrage, bickering, handwringing, interim break… wash, rinse and repeat.
