I have a folder in my inbox that I have never once opened voluntarily. It is labeled, automatically, “Palaeopitus,” and it fills at a pace that suggests an organization with things to say. Over the last year, those things have included: a survey about an e-scooter policy with free Cold Stone as compensation for completion; a survey about Dick’s House with free Lou’s; a survey about Commencement concerns for international students with a five-dollar gift card as a participation incentive; a lunch with an author; two reminders about a leadership conference; and a dinner discussion about gender-based violence and sexual health which was, notably, free. The emails are well-formatted. They arrive with the cadence of institutional confidence. And yet, reading through them, I find myself with a question I cannot shake: What, exactly, is Palaeopitus doing?
This is not a rhetorical question, or not entirely. Palaeopitus has a mandate, and it is a serious one. The society’s stated goals include developing responsible student leadership through the curation and dissemination of institutional knowledge, increasing the effectiveness of College activities by ensuring the student experience is included in planning, fostering community between students, staff and faculty and promoting the College’s welfare and protecting its good name. These are not the goals of a programming committee. They are the goals of an organization that is supposed to be in the room when things are decided.
They are also, more or less, the goals the society was founded in 1899. Edward K. Hall, Class of 1892, proposed Palaeopitus after finding himself, as a member of the Alumni Athletic Committee, out of touch with undergraduate opinion on questions about athletic alliances with other colleges. The problem he was trying to solve was concrete: The administration and the students were not talking to each other in any organized way, and decisions were suffering for it. Hall proposed a permanent society that would unite the leading men of the senior class to influence student thought and activity in the right direction, placing the interests of the College above those of any particular group. Then-College president William Tucker, who had inherited a campus marked by friction between students and administrators, welcomed it. The original Palaeopitus was not a social organization that happened to have a mandate, but rather a structural solution to a structural problem.
What I have received in my inbox does not suggest an organization that is solving structural problems. It suggests an organization that is very good at sending emails about rooms where there will be food. There is a difference between disseminating institutional knowledge and distributing an American Civil Liberties Union PDF alongside a statement of solidarity — however well-intentioned that statement is, Palaeopitus has confused the gesture for the change. There is a difference between bridging the knowledge gap between students and administrators and asking students what they think about e-scooters in exchange for ice cream. The surveys, in particular, bother me, not because data collection is inherently bad, but because they seem to function as a substitute for the more difficult work of actually representing students in conversations that matter. You do not need a gift card to have a conversation. You need access to both the students and the administration, which Palaeopitus has. The problem is that they seem to lack the willingness to use it seriously.
I should be clear about what access means here. Palaeopitus holds a formal advisory role to the College’s administration. Its members have standing invitations to meet with senior administrators, which is a privilege your average Dartmouth student simply does not enjoy. If a Palaeopitus member wants to raise a concern about Dick’s House directly with the people responsible for it, there is no intermediary required, no petition to file, no door to knock on first. That access is not incidental to Palaeopitus’s mandate. That is the whole point of it.
The most generous reading of what Palaeopitus does is that the dinners and discussions are not ends in themselves but groundwork — that relationships built over author lunches translate, eventually, into harder conversations with administrators. I find this plausible in theory. What I cannot find is evidence of it in practice. If the dinners are leading somewhere, the record of where they have led is not visible. An organization that is doing the difficult work should be able to show it, and the fact that the only thing landing in my inbox is programming suggests either that the harder work is not happening or that Palaeopitus sees no reason to make it accessible to the students it is supposed to represent. Neither is reassuring.
The society’s own history is instructive. Within a few years of its founding, Palaeopitus’s secrecy had become, in the words of Ernest Martin Hopkins, then secretary to President Tucker and himself a member, “a deadweight.” Hopkins wrote to Hall in 1902 that the society had never been able to influence college opinion effectively except in one case involving the athletic constitution, and that the secrecy had deprived worthy causes of their natural champions. His proposed remedy was not to double down on ritual but to open up: to throw away the encumbrances which had hampered it, readjust to the needs before the College and take up serious questions with the prestige it had earned. Palaeopitus listened. It published its constitution in The Dartmouth, held a public meeting in the old chapel and from that point forward operated as an acknowledged institution rather than a secret one. The lesson Hopkins drew in 1902 was that an organization which cannot be seen cannot lead. It is a lesson worth revisiting.
The deeper irony is that Palaeopitus draws its membership from exactly the students who are best positioned to do the thing it claims to do. These are student government presidents, editors of The Dartmouth, organization heads and people who have sat across the table from administrators and know how to use that position. The society’s power has always been latent in that network. That said, a network that spends its year hosting dinners and collecting survey responses is not a network being used. It is a network being maintained, which is a much more comfortable thing.
There is no shortage of things that Palaeopitus could be doing right now. The Black Family Visual Arts Center carries the name of a man with extensively documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein and numerous allegations of sexual abuse against him, including that of a minor. The Dartmouth Student Government has called for a renaming. The Dartmouth’s Editorial Board has called for a renaming. Students who learn and create and spend their days in that building have been left to absorb the administration’s silence. This is exactly the kind of issue Palaeopitus was built for, where all we hear from the administration is deafening silence.
Then there is the situation in Dartmouth Athletics, where a pattern of coach misconduct, documented across multiple years of anonymous feedback, formal written complaints and now public testimony, has produced no meaningful administrative response. Student-athletes have raised concerns through every formal channel available to them and been met with inaction. What they need is not another survey. They need someone with institutional standing to walk into the Athletic Director’s office and demand an accounting. Palaeopitus could be that someone. The question is whether it wants to be.
I want to be precise about what I am criticizing, because it would be easy to misread this as a complaint about Palaeopitus hosting events or sending emails. It is not. The author lunch sounds lovely. The dinner discussions center around topics that deserve serious attention. The leadership conference, I am sure, was valuable. What I am questioning is whether any of this constitutes the kind of stewardship that justifies Palaeopitus’s position in this institution’s life — whether any of it, taken together, adds up to an organization that is doing what it says it exists to do. Based on what has landed in my inbox, I am not convinced it does.
Commencement is approaching, and with it the annual ritual of the cane. The Class of 2026 will pass theirs to the Class of 2027, and for a moment Palaeopitus will feel like it means something — the weight of tradition, the symbolism of continuity, the reassurance that Dartmouth’s oldest institutions endure. Hall and the 14 seniors of 1900 did not gather at the Hanover Inn to plan an author lunch. They gathered because something wasn’t working, and they believed they could fix it. What I want is for the cane to mean something in the intervening months too. Not in the form of another survey. In the form of a record number of conversations held, concerns surfaced, decisions influenced. In the form of evidence that the students who hold this position used it like they meant to.
The next time Palaeopitus sends me an email with a food incentive, I will open it. I am easy that way. But I would rather receive one email that says: here is what we brought to the administration, here is what we asked, here is what changed. That email, I would read twice.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
