Last week, in the wake of a report that the College was considering expanding its undergraduate student body, Rohan Taneja ’28 wrote a well-crafted response in defense of the familiar spirit of the small college we know and love. In it, he argued that, beyond posing logistical challenges, expanding Dartmouth’s student body would degrade the sense of tight-knit community that makes the school special, and that this community-level impact is something the College overlooks when it treats expansion as a matter of balancing a spreadsheet.
I agree with Taneja that the College has taken a deeply flawed approach to evaluating expansion. The last time the College considered expansion in 2018, it released a report outlining in numbers the logistical additions that would be needed to support a larger student body and advising against such an expansion only because there were “no significant economies of scale to be gained.” What was entirely missing from the report was any evaluation of how the expansion would affect student life.
Still, simply because the College has focused purely on numbers does not mean that the overlooked community-level effects of expansion would be entirely harmful. Taneja criticizes the College for starting “from the premise that more students is the goal” and working “backward from there.” Yet his argument likewise seems to work backward from the assumption that Dartmouth’s small size is an inherently good thing. The truth is probably a little more complicated.
Dartmouth’s small size comes with a tradeoff, one that we have all likely come to accept. We benefit from exactly the kind of tight-knit community that Taneja described, in which acquaintances run into each other throughout their day, and the community doesn’t feel “anonymous.” This is what makes Dartmouth unique and drives its meaning and identity. On the other hand, the small community can make it harder for someone to find exactly their “people” and fit in. This tradeoff isn’t ideal, but it’s okay as long as it remains a matter of personality and “fit.” If someone feels like they would struggle to thrive in a small community because of their personality or interests, then they would ideally choose a larger school, at the cost of that tight-knit feeling. No school can satisfy both conditions, so Dartmouth exists to fill its own niche while some of its peers fill other ones.
The problem arises when whether a student fits into Dartmouth’s tight-knit community is no longer just a matter of personality, but rather one of intrinsic identity. Dartmouth was already the least racially diverse member of the Ivy League by some margin before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in university admissions in June 2023. Add to that the fact that the school as a whole is already small, and that coarse racial categories don’t reflect the many smaller cultural and ethnic groups that fall within them, and it becomes clear that many identity groups are likely woefully underrepresented on Dartmouth’s campus. A glance at Dartmouth’s list of cultural affinity groups reveals a fairly impressive slate of student associations, but the list pales in comparison to the offerings that Cornell University — a much larger school — has, with all sorts of groups representing different cultures, nationalities, ethnicities, and even a handful of groups committed to representing particular aspects of certain cultures, such as music and dance. Even Brown University, a school not nearly as large as Cornell, has many more cultural student groups than Dartmouth.
Dartmouth’s problem in this regard is due to proportions, no doubt, but it’s also due to size. When the school as a whole is smaller, the raw number of students representing minority identity groups is smaller, and thus these minority communities are far less robust. From the perspective of a majority or well-represented minority identity group, Dartmouth’s small size might make it seem “easy to experience.” But for others, the struggle to find people who share their experiences, and in turn the struggle to build a space for those people, could cause Dartmouth to feel alienating at times. From my own perspective, while it certainly hasn’t ruined my Dartmouth experience by any means, I’ve found it very difficult to find other Iranian-American students on campus, and I feel like a certain outlet for shared experience has been missing for a while. This isn’t a problem with personality or fit. It’s a problem with Dartmouth not building a campus that is simultaneously tight-knit and inclusive.
Expanding Dartmouth’s class size, if done carefully, gives us an opportunity to strengthen these minority communities while keeping relatively intact that tight-knit feel. Ideally, this would be done by actively making an effort to admit proportionally more minority students in this expanded cohort, but this will likely be more difficult in the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. Still, even if the additional students that Dartmouth admits maintain the demographic proportions of its recent classes, just the increase in raw numbers of students from all identity groups would help.
The effect of such an expansion would hopefully extend beyond just making more students feel like they belong here socially. When identity groups become large enough that they can stop being fragmented and start being organized, they will be better able to leverage their voice in all sorts of spaces to both inform policy and to simply build more awareness among administrators, faculty and students.
In the aftermath of mass killings by the Iranian government, Brown’s Iranian Students Association held a community gathering attended by deans and administrators. This kind of direct interaction with the administration is much harder for more-fragmented minority groups at Dartmouth. And in a time when the College administration is supposedly trying to be careful about where and how it gets involved in politics, it’s crucial that we hear the voices of students whose lives are directly affected by otherwise-distant political issues. That will ground these issues in the campus community and, hopefully, motivate a little less restraint and a little more action.
I recognize that any expansion will have to be carried out cautiously and conservatively to preserve the cozy feeling that makes the school unique and avoid other adverse effects. The logistical challenges remain, and it’s pretty darn audacious of the College to consider expansion just as it’s finally starting to address its housing shortage. While an expansion is the right move down the line, I don’t mind waiting until we’ve developed a comprehensive plan to build even more student housing.
Once the time for expansion does arrive, it doesn’t need to be drastic. As Taneja noted, even just a few hundred more students is a tax on that special feeling of intimacy. Keeping the expansion small will help preserve what makes our community unique. Even if the expansion does cost us some intimacy, it will be more than worth it in how it will make our community more accommodating.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
