Alsheikh: Dartmouth Must Continue to Lead in What?

When I first read JJ Dega ’26’s recent guest opinion, Dartmouth Must Continue to Lead in Health and Wellness, I initially assumed I had been living under a rock. I had not heard of most of the events and people that he referenced in his article — not our chief health and wellness officer, not the Jed Foundation, not even the Seltzer Project that my senior class president seemed so proud of. At first, I chalked these gaps in my knowledge up to the fact that I don’t go out much and called it a day.

But something had bugged me about the article’s tone, insistent that mental health at Dartmouth was a problem that had been “solved.” On a re-read, this impression was confirmed. “We have already checked all the boxes,” Dega writes. According to him, Dartmouth is now a “model institution” for campus mental health; we’ve changed old stereotypes, Masters is now safe, the library is a paradise of “sun lamps, free therapy, massage chairs [and] therapy dogs.” Through the tireless efforts of administrators and students partnering together, we have become “leaders” in health and wellness. Though Dega acknowledges there are some challenges left to be faced, they are mostly bureaucratic and can be resolved merely by “building on the successes of the past two years.” 

While I felt happy for the hypothetical students attending Dega’s idyllic vision of Dartmouth, I felt a sharp sense of dissonance as I compared the College I was reading about to the one I lived through day to day. In my world, aside from having new “Stall Street Journal” posters to read in the library bathrooms every few weeks, and occasionally passing a dog in Blobby, almost none of these changes had had any appreciable effect on my life or the lives of anybody that I knew. The people around me were still neurotically stressing out over classes, jobs, friends and the world, as they always had. Were all my friends and I the bland exception to the mental health renaissance that we were supposedly living through? 

I don’t think so. The reality is, the problem of wellness at Dartmouth is much larger than the drinks offered at Greek Houses or the amenities in the library: it is much more deeply rooted in the structure of Dartmouth’s basic institutions and their flaws. These institutions include the quarter system, which leaves many students overwhelmed; D-Plan, which often breaks up friend groups; and Greek life, which often encourages unhealthy drinking habits and social hierarchy; and even the administration itself, which has not done enough to protect international students and student activists from the ire of the Trump administration. Without confronting these broader institutional realities — which would take time, effort and controversy — there won’t be any meaningful change to the Dartmouth experience. 

I don’t want to put down the work Dega has done; after all, to borrow Theodore Roosevelt’s quote, “It is not the critic who counts.” I’m sure his work comes from a well-meaning place and has, in all likelihood, helped a lot of people who were having a bad day. My issue with his piece is the way in which he treats initiatives from the administration as if they were the end-all-be-all of student wellness when, in the grand scheme of things, they are really rather superficial. This problem is further exacerbated by the strangely sycophantic way in which he hyperfixates on Dartmouth’s reputation.  

Take, for instance, his repeated celebration of the fact that the chief health and wellness officer has a desk in Parkhurst. While the placement of the officer’s desk is a nice token gesture, can anyone credibly say it will affect students in any way? The only justifications Dega himself gives in the article are too abstract, or are overly focused on how they will affect the administration’s reputation: it will “strengthen our campus community” somehow, “allow Dartmouth to maintain our leadership status” and allow “Campus and Community Life to continue devoting resources toward strengthening programs … that have also helped Dartmouth gain national praise.” 

Such an emphasis on how student wellness intersects with our institutional reputation risks substituting the latter for the former, as recent history has shown us. Indeed, pursuing superficial initiatives that don’t address the real problems on Dartmouth’s campus, and using them as public relations tools to bolster Dartmouth’s image, is perhaps the hallmark of our administration. There are countless examples: promoting initiatives like Dartmouth Dialogues while supporting the mass arrest of peaceful student demonstrators; ratifying feel-good policies like institutional restraint and then not consistently standing up for the College’s mission against federal coercion; most recently, partnering with Anthropic to promote the irresponsible use of AI technology even as their models steal the work of our professors.

In the case of mental health, a focus on these small, student-led initiatives — like the kind Dega glowingly praises in his article — provides administrators with something easy to point to in order to say wellness at Dartmouth is improving, without requiring any systemic confrontation of the real issues facing students. Not only is such an approach a “band-aid for a bullet wound,” but it also risks making the real problem harder to identify and reinforcing institutions that contribute a net negative to campus wellness. The hard truth is that without a more critical position towards the various Dartmouth institutions that define our quality of life, the only thing we will continue to be leaders in is good PR.

Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.