At any moment — perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next month — the Board of Trustees will decide whether or not to give the nod of approval to President Hanlon’s leadership team. If the Board endorses them, the steering committee’s proposals — whatever they might be — will sweep campus in hopes of defeating the three-headed beast of binge drinking, exclusivity and sexual assault.
If all of this sounds nebulous to you, you’re not alone. In early November, the Palaeopitus Senior Society wrote a thoughtful letter to President Hanlon and the steering committee calling for greater transparency in their deliberations. In a savvy move, Palaeopitus carbon copied the rest of campus on their letter, inviting students to sign an open Google document. The result was stunning — 317 students representing diverse corners of campus signed their names in support, including Greek presidents, varsity team captains and editors-in-chief of campus publications.
Three weeks after the Palaeoptius letter had circulated across campus, the committee announced the completion of its re-engagement process, a three month period during which it sought feedback from the community on its ideas. The committee didn’t mention a word about the hundreds of students who were unclear on what, exactly, those ideas were. And, curiously, the announcement was made at the very end of fall term after finals period had already begun. Students didn’t even have time to raise an eyebrow before dispersing across the globe for the holidays.
According to the Office of the President website, the committee’s timeline included a plan to “publicly announce the top ideas developed during the engagement period” during the re-engagement process. But the closest the committee came to presenting a public list of concrete proposals was the three documents posted on the committee’s website under the headline “What We Have Learned.” Released throughout October and November, each discussed one of the three targets of the Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative — binge drinking, exclusivity and sexual assault. Astonishingly, the documents failed to cite many sources, with the exception of a vague mention of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the College’s own 2014 “Living at Dartmouth” survey. Such an omission is especially glaring in light of the pieces’ repeated claims about what “experts suggest.” Who these experts are is anyone’s guess — perhaps the three expert listed on the committee’s “Voices” page, or the undisclosed members of the Dartmouth anthropology department who study “what drives students to the end point of blacking out.” As if to parody itself, the link at the bottom of the committee’s homepage that purports to guide readers to its “expert sources” leads to an empty page that says “no results found.”
None of this is to say that the committee has failed to do its research or is merely blowing smoke. To the contrary, the committee published a webpage containing an informative grab bag of links to the survey data, fact sheets and academic literature that likely informed many of its claims. The “What We Have Learned” documents really do put several concrete proposals on the table. To curb binge drinking, for example, the committee suggests requiring students to pay for drinks and increasing adult presence at parties. To curb sexual assault, the committee suggests publishing a consent manual and requiring students to undergo a four-year education program.
But do the reforms in these documents constitute all or only some of the committee’s proposals? If these are all of the proposals, then the committee spent seven months coming up with fewer than a dozen ideas. If there are more, why were they omitted? The answers to these questions are nowhere to be found.
The steering committee is doing important work, and a glimpse at their “Committee Activities” page confirms that they have been busy. Unfortunately, the bulk of this activity has been carried out behind closed doors. How they incorporated student opinions into their recommendations, which experts they consulted and even which sources back their claims are all shrouded in mystery. Now that the committee’s “re-engagement period” is over, it seems the only thing left for the student body is to wait for the recommendations to arrive.
