Another term, another campus crisis — the last four quarters at Dartmouth, dating back to last spring, have been plagued by events that most of us agree do not befit this community. We’ve limped from Dimensions to the “Bloods and Crips” party to the Bored at Baker incident. Each term has followed the general pattern of initial calm, eruption of outrage, return to ambivalence and finally resignation to frustration. The same issues rear their ugly heads. The same arguments are recycled. The same sides are taken.
Why have our conversations become so circular? Because they lack empirical grounding — in virtually every case, we do not have data to drive our conjectures about why Dartmouth struggles with sexual assault and binge drinking. Is the Greek system responsible for these problems? To some extent, of course. Is there a wider cultural phenomenon at work as well? Almost certainly. Yet without hard statistics — not the “research” and projections listed on Dartmouth Change — we are no closer to pinpointing the root of the problem. Furthermore, the College’s public relations machine contributes to this lack of clarity rather than furnishing the community with tools for informed discussion.
These points become obvious when we consider the state of campus dialogue on sexual assault. We can rail against the Greek system as much as we want, but the near total lack of Dartmouth-specific data on the frequency of sexual assault is a central impediment to crafting a solution. Yes, “group-think” within certain organizations or as a product of cultural standards might normalize what is otherwise viewed as reprehensible behavior. But it could also be the case that a small, predatory and possibly deranged minority perpetuates these crimes. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and the policy implications are enormous. Yet at the moment, most of our community does not know if the answer to this question is even discernible or which version of the story is closer to the truth.
The narrative on binge drinking is similar, but perhaps worse. This past fall saw the implementation of a new Greek Leadership Council policy restricting freshman access to Greek spaces for the first six weeks of the term. The ban was an opportunity for a fascinating natural experiment — to see if the campus-wide incidence of drinking-related violations would change in step with prohibiting freshmen from fraternities and sororities. And yet when the GLC and the College’s Health Improvement Program presented their findings in late January, they were almost laughably devoid of detail. While the number of College-documented alcohol-related incidents declined, the data did not reveal where or when these incidents took place (Greek house, freshman dorm or otherwise, before or after the ban was lifted).
Perhaps the College was simply not careful enough in its data collection. I don’t have the answer, and I have to speculate. Safety and Security reports on Good Sam calls are quite explicit in their documentation of the time and place that a student gets picked up, and I find it impossible to believe that there isn’t a master spreadsheet containing all of this information. So there doesn’t seem to be a reason for not publishing a more discerning version of the data, apart from administrators consciously choosing to keep it under wraps.
In the real world, most business and policy decisions are heavily numbers-driven. They are informed by analyses that identify trends and make projections. This is a basic guide for making rational choices. While Dartmouth is neither a corporation nor a government entity, this doesn’t mean that its approach to key issues should be different.
Referencing data to support or refute conclusions is a basic feature of any intelligent dialogue. So before this column is vilified for reducing the real trauma of survivors to a bunch of rows in a spreadsheet, I will call on the administration to release anonymous aggregate data broken down by incident type, location and outcome. To fix our problems, we must first prove who is at fault. Otherwise, we’ll just keep running in circles.
