New Student Orientation for the Class of 2028 is over. So far, I have felt that my transition into the College’s environment has been consistently prioritized. Orientation was full of valuable resources, from meeting Dartmouth faculty to learning how to print on campus. While I appreciate all this effort, the mandatory session “WE Are Dartmouth” had a uniquely negative effect on my experience: led by Rev. Dr. Jamie Washington, president and founder of the Washington Consulting Group and Social Justice Training Institute, the session made me increasingly uneasy with each slide. The presentation asked participants to stand up to identify with markers of ethnicity, financial status, religion and more, pressuring me to publicly embody assigned qualities — most of which I cyclically question myself. While I don’t even fully know who I am, I was nonetheless forced to show my evolving identity to the whole 2028 cohort.
The panel intended to highlight the diversity of the Dartmouth community. To emphasize that point, Washington read statements about identity, beginning with, “I speak a language other than English as my mother tongue.” As we sat in Leverone Field House as a freshman class — the whole 1,183-student cohort — Washington asked anyone who related to the statements to stand up. At first, I, like many others, thought that this was the moment to take pride in my background. As we stood up and sat down, the statements turned into assertions about gender, social status, nationality and even religion. By the end, the exercise became painful.
Among the audience, you could count how few people stood up for statements about the LGBTQ+ community, low-income families or religions like Islam and Sikhism. As a minority, it required courage to make myself visible. And for those who also were bold enough to stand up, it became especially burdensome to see, at most, three other similar faces in the whole cohort. Witnessing such a public representation of our isolation on campus left many of us disheartened.
After the session, I spoke with other members of the Class of 2028 about our discomfort. As an international student, I already find it difficult to cope with cultural differences, be it in people, languages or food. So why are we choosing to make differences more noticeable instead of uniting our Dartmouth family? If this is a strategy to showcase in person the omnipresent diversity statistics on the Dartmouth Admissions website, it failed miserably. The reason is clear: no single identity can represent a person holistically.
Despite the shortcomings of “WE Are Dartmouth,” our student body is incredibly diverse: 17% are first-generation students, 16% are international and 12.6% are Hispanic. Additionally, 50.8% of the Class of 2028 receives need-based scholarships, while 45.6% are domestic students of color. These statistics, however, do not represent distinct, isolated groups but rather overlapping identities. Some students are a part of multiple minority populations. By this understanding, this NSO exercise was destined to fail.
If we want to talk about inclusivity, maybe we should start by recognizing the subjectivity and fluidity of identities. It’s crucial to appreciate that while social, financial and ethnic characteristics are integral parts of who we are, they do not wholly define us. Is my Turkish nationality enough to define who I am? I don’t think so. Neither is my language, gender or income level. These factors impact who I’ve been, yet Dartmouth is where I will find who I want to become. Who I become — and who my friends are in college — has more to do with the experiences we’ll share than our differences.
To me, Dartmouth achieves its goal of being my second home — 6,000 miles away from home — when I run into people from my Aegis team at Foco. It happens when I nod at co-writers of The Dartmouth on campus. It’s in the moments with my trippees, which remind me of cozy times spent with a welcoming community. Dartmouth already has countless naturally emerging communities, where bonds are formed not through who we are thought to be, but through who we aspire to become. That’s how Dartmouth welcomes me as I am.
I hereby invite Dartmouth to embrace our shared experience as students and to become a medium for unity itself.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
