Alsheikh: I Am Mad at the DPU From Inside This Igloo

First Charlie Kirk, now Laura Ingraham: the Dartmouth Political Union is certainly on a roll when it comes to inviting controversial speakers to campus. By now the parameters of the debate I am about to enter should be familiar to all: When is it appropriate to give a platform to individuals whose views many consider hateful? Are those who protest such events — such as me, writing this piece from inside an igloo on the Green covered in banners and flags — simply too close-minded, too radical to appreciate the dialogue the DPU is promoting? 

I, like many others, am tired of this debate and its endless back-and-forth; I have been listening to such debates about “dialogue” since I first got involved in politics at Dartmouth, whether from the administration, professors or organizations like the DPU. Yet, I want to approach this debate about “dialogue” from a different angle. Why do such events happen in the first place, and what effect do they have on campus discourse? 

To be blunt, I don’t believe the DPU brings speakers like Ingraham to campus out of a “dedication to the respectful exchange of ideas.” I believe instead that it is for the status of the organization. After all, the first qualifier that the DPU uses to describe itself on Instagram, before “nonpartisan,” “student-led” or “dedicated to promoting open discourse,” is “preeminent.” In order to maintain this self-proclaimed preeminence, the DPU needs a steady stream of high profile speakers to lend them an air of respectability. Any enrichment that such speakers might have on campus debates is incidental, secondary to the primary purpose of maintaining this status.

To be even blunter, I doubt there is even much incidental benefit. The people the DPU tends to bring are disproportionately talking heads and career politicians, people whose job it is to flame partisan tensions and obstruct level-headed debate. A look at some of the guests they invited to their last three events — Ingraham, Ana Navarro, Scott Jennings, Charlie Kirk — credits this view. Too many of their guests are individuals with views that, while controversial here, are not new or even interesting in the grand scheme of things. Ingraham, Kirk and so many other individuals that the DPU has invited are not novel thinkers, nor revolutionaries: they are pundits who parrot back to us the status quo of American two-party politics.

The status quo — that is what so many of the arguments about “dialogue” boil down to. For many, the rhetoric of “dialogue” is a way to save face, to maintain status, to preserve prestige. Whether we’re talking about an organization like the DPU or the institution of Dartmouth as a whole, the effect is the same: views which are already prominent are repeated ad nauseum, as if they were brand new. The effect is a discourse which has little bandwidth for opposing views, for real dissent, simply because so much of it is going to speakers and ideas which are already the norm. Real dissent here means politics outside of party lines, politics that meaningfully challenges the distribution of wealth and power in this country. In this sense, all of this talk about “dialogue” is deeply hypocritical, insofar as it is a one-dimensional discourse that constrains, rather than expands, the limits of our thought.

This is not a problem limited just to Dartmouth, but is instead a widespread and pervasive cultural issue that has been around for decades. I agree with Herbert Marcuse that advanced industrial society has limited the ways in which we are able to think; we have become instruments in a technological rationality that only knows itself by its own catechisms, and “dialogue” is one of them. It is an empty word that does nothing but affirm itself, repeated endlessly by those in power who have nothing to say, those who are obsessed with status and image rather than the real urgencies of politics. 

Yet, these urgencies won't go away, and increasingly it is those who completely do away with the rhetoric of dialogue that are finding success in American politics. Trump is the best example of this. For many facing the affordability crisis, his firebrand demagoguery is a welcome relief from the cognitive dissonance that is the natural result of so much dialogue with so little action. As dissatisfaction with higher education mounts and Trump begins to actively threaten these institutional elites, one cannot help but feel a sense of karma.

I am conscious that these are harsh words, and that they are coming from a place of frustration and anger. In truth, I don’t hate the DPU, nor their leadership. Eli Moyse ’27, their debate director, is my co-editor and a thought-provoking voice on campus. Rather, what I am disgusted with is this status quo of brainless, soulless dialogue that demands I metaphorically lay down my arms in the face of a country spiralling into plutocratic authoritarianism. 

I have no illusions that my sitting in an igloo for a few hours will do much to change this; it is a small, largely symbolic protest against this sort of pathetic, politically-castrated rhetoric that has come to define so much of my Dartmouth experience. At the very least, it is a voice of dissent on a campus which desperately needs it. 

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