This article is featured in the 2025 Freshman Special Issue.
Soccer players get worse at Dartmouth, a friend once told me. The allure of drinking, parties and investment banking interviews distracts from their original goal: becoming a great soccer player. For most of the players, the woods unmask their real desires and afford them the material pleasures so missing from the intense high school sacrifices that facilitate athletic recruitment. But some remain committed to their sport — my friend did his best to escape the centrifugal pull of pleasure. Within three years he had graduated.
I am not an athlete, but I did enter Dartmouth hoping for a New Jerusalem of learning, where it would be more than just me discussing Rousseau, Tom Wolfe and Lionel Trilling. I was naive or perhaps just downright idiotic. Thankfully, an upperclassman arrived to disillusion me. “If you came to Dartmouth to learn, you came to the wrong place,” a senior in my comparative literature class told me. The class was almost entirely athletes who seemed to have forgotten to plug in their brains prior to entering the classroom — or perhaps entering life.
That class was exceptional only in how ordinary it was. Dartmouth is not an intellectual place. People may tell you otherwise, but this is a project of self-convincing rather than of honesty. To declare Dartmouth anything less than philistinism run rampant is to lie in a grand fashion. Think of the lay-up list — a website that lists the easiest classes or “lay-ups.” Or median grade complaints. Or check-out rates from the library. Or any conversation with any student. This is not the New Jerusalem of learning I had so desired.
There are schools for such places and those are schools that rejected me and perhaps they rejected you. Hopefully you chose to be here, but if not, it may be worthwhile to examine what it is actually like at a hyper-intellectual university. I recently attended a two week workshop at the University of Chicago, the school that had filled my dreams — where literature was discussed in the classrooms and the dorms and the hallways and the bathrooms and the bars. And to some extent that was true, and it horrified me. I met a man who spoke of Jacques Derrida as if he were a personal friend and used the words fecund and agonism as if they were colloquialisms on par with JK or TTYL. People that did the reading ahead of time and skipped going to the bar to go over their notes. People that went to bookstores to buy Kant for fun and called arguments “insufficiently dialectical.” Students, in short, that I had dreamed of meeting when I entered college.
But I felt out of my mind there and there was something not right with me. College is not really a time for nourishing the soul, or not merely. I had the aching feeling that these students were papering over social angst or sexual desire by talking about books. They would have been Dartmouth students if they could have been.
And the prophet of the University of Chicago, America’s greatest novelist Saul Bellow, attempted to impart the clear-eyed lesson that knowledge will not save you. His great novel “Herzog” was a dramatization of that lesson. Moses Herzog, a professor of intellectual history realizes that all the books of the world cannot get his wife back. She cheated on him and all he could resort to was writing letters — to newspapers and family members and Heidegger and Nietzsche — as if that would repair his life.
As I strolled the campus where Bellow had been a professor for decades, I saw thousands of little Herzogs. A bunch of ill-adjusted nerds, hoping that reading and writing would return them to a lost Eden, where honor and power and love would be theirs for the taking. They studied and studied, as if their souls required it. But ruin was coming for them.
We Dartmouth students harbor no such illusions. We have chosen an anti-intellectual college and are all-the-much happier for it. We have no splinters in our eyes. That is why we live well.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
