Since May, the Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative’s presidential steering committee has collected more than 1,000 recommendations from faculty, staff and students. We commend the initiative’s transparency throughout these efforts. The members of the committee have reached out to students for comments through campus summits, online submissions and over email. This kind of active student outreach is integral to the success of any initiative regarding student life. The College’s new sexual assault policy exemplifies what transparency and acknowledging student feedback can accomplish.
But the committee must be more creative in the ways they gather student opinion. The campus conversations under the Moving Dartmouth Forward banner have been attended by mostly faculty and staff; just seven students attended a recent session on global experiences. This past Tuesday English professor Barbara Will, the steering committee’s chair, held open office hours in Sanborn Library for two hours. Just three students, Will said, showed up.
One area where the initiative could be more creative is in advertising. Poorly advertised events in quiet buildings will not catch the eye of the average student. These events should instead be heavily and effectively advertised in popular locations such as Collis and Baker-Berry Library. The committee could send student representatives to clubs as a form of peer advertising. Moving Dartmouth Forward events should have their own blitz mail advertisements, instead of being subsumed under the oft-ignored VOX Daily. The events themselves should be in busy areas instead of tucked off to the corner of Sanborn. Moving Dartmouth Forward could also do more to incentivize students to join these conversations by offering free food from popular local restaurants.
Another part of Moving Dartmouth Forward’s outreach issues involves the organization’s occasional lack of transparency. Four named students sit on the committee, in addition to five faculty and two alumni. The College did not announce how it chose the committee’s members. Obfuscating the selection process is counterintuitive to the crowdsourcing and otherwise transparent methods of the initiative. Perhaps students could not apply for the committee because of the measure’s condensed timeline. However, it is disturbing that in the face of greater calls for transparency, four students were lifted out of several thousand to play such a large role in this influential initiative. The committee should publicly justify their choice to forego applications and outline their criteria for choosing its members.
We hope this is just one step to enact even greater transparency in the future. On its website, the committee lists July through August as the “feasibility” phase, in which the “top ideas generated during the engagement period will be evaluated and assessed through feasibility studies and expert consultation.” The committee must continue to be transparent throughout this phase instead of remaining silent until September’s “re-engagement” phase. The committee should also announce what constitutes “expert consultation,” and make the names of those consultants public.
Moving Dartmouth Forward’s efforts will change student life, and the committee will be ill-informed unless students take action and get involved. The steering committee will only hear the comments that we as students communicate to them. Online forums are useful tools to float ideas and check the campus’s temperature, but they cannot substitute real conversation with the committee. While Improve Dartmouth galvanizes student opinion on various issues, it does not in of itself lead to effective and nuanced student opinion on extensive campus issues. No matter how much Moving Dartmouth Forward tries, its efforts will be fruitless if we as a student body refuse to actually attend the initiative’s events. All of us must work to reap the benefits of this campus initiative. In doing so, we may actually accomplish its titular goal and move our campus forward.
