The Gender-Inclusive Council condemns Dartmouth’s installation of cameras in and around Greek communities and undergraduate student societies’ facilities. We demand a swift removal and a halt in further implementation.
Since summer 2026, Dartmouth has surreptitiously installed cameras in and around various College-owned sororities and gender-inclusive Greek houses. Currently, there are cameras in Alpha Xi Delta and Kappa Kappa Gamma sororities. Camera mounts and wiring were installed in Chi Delta sorority and Epsilon Kappa Theta — a GIC-member organization. The College claims the cameras will only overlook exit and entry points; thus far, however, cameras and camera mounts have been installed in living rooms, basements and interior hallways near bathrooms.
This project entrenches and reifies gendered and sexualized inequities in student sovereignty, ownership and community formation at Dartmouth. Women and LGBTQIA+ students at Dartmouth will be disproportionately surveilled. All seven Inter-Sorority Council houses are College-owned. Two of the five Gender-Inclusive Council houses are College-owned. Only two of the 14 Inter-Fraternity Council houses are College-owned. Furthermore, the College-owned gender-inclusive houses, Epsilon Kappa Theta and Amarna Undergraduate Society, are the only houses in the Council that did not exclusively center men at inception: EKT went gender-inclusive in 2024; Amarna was gender-inclusive at its founding in 1993. The privately-owned houses in the Gender-Inclusive Council — Alpha Theta, Phi Tau and The Tabard — all originated as fraternities that chose to admit women shortly after Dartmouth stopped excluding women from matriculating in the College in 1972.
The sheer misogyny, homophobia and transphobia rooted in this project is so obvious that it’s farcical. This tells the women of Dartmouth that, if they desire membership within the primary engine of student-led social life at a college prized for its rurality, they must either accept being recorded in the privacy of their home or being in a house owned by men. Meanwhile, the men of Dartmouth, save for those in Alpha Chi Alpha and Chi Heorot, are told that their privacy is almost wholly guaranteed. This project will surveil and police women’s and LGBTQIA+ people’s bodies more intrusively than those of the IFC’s men, by virtue of the imbrication of Greek life and gender in Dartmouth history. These cameras directly oversee women and LGBTQIA+ folks’ bodies and intimate relationships. Our right to bodily privacy and autonomy is decimated.
These cameras, and those watching the footage, will have the ability to see and may already have observed women and LGBTQIA+ people in various states of undress. The College has failed to acquire a freely given, informed or enthusiastic consent from those who will be surveilled. According to Dartmouth’s policy on sexual and gender-based misconduct, the College is in flagrant violation of its own regulation on voyeuristic sexual exploitation.
According to Department of Safety and Security director Keiselim Montás’s message to Greek presidents and chapter advisors on Oct. 8, this is but the next phase of the Connected and Secure Campus project. Apparently, the College “consulted with general student leadership, but … realize[d] that many of those students are no longer part of our campus community due to graduation.” The GIC, of which I am the president, was not aware of this project prior to the Greek President’s Roundtable on Oct. 6. The veracity of Montás’s message aside, the camera installation project remains an egregious privacy violation nonetheless. Telling general student leadership is not enough. For a project as abrupt and invasive as this, true consent is obtained only if there is an active effort to directly gather approval and feedback from all students, especially those affiliated with Greek life and undergraduate student societies. But no notice was provided to any house residents, members or executives of GIC organizations, nor to our chapter and council advisors. If this initiative was being implemented purely in the interest of student safety and wellbeing as stated, then the College would have simply been forthcoming.
Dartmouth is concealing the truth from the student body writ large by means of its viscous matrix of policies and hierarchies of information sharing. The email to Greek leaders contained a PDF with additional information not disclosed to the general student body. It revealed that the cameras have a “fixed scope of view”; the Department of Safety and Security will readily have access to footage for 10 days after recording, and then the footage will be archived for 90 days thereafter. More information about precisely when and how Dartmouth will use this data is included in the access control policy and access to user-related electronic information policy. These policies — as many Dartmouth policies are — are bloated with references to other policies that are crucial to understand the implementation and enforcement of the initial policy. This is overwhelming to a reader. While some complexity is inevitable, this disorienting policy matrix conveniently dissuades our notoriously exhausted student body from developing a comprehensive picture of their rights.
Montas’s email to Greek and society leaders also stated that the cameras are meant to “enhance security,” especially “following the shooting at Brown and violence on other campuses across the country.” Yet, cameras are intrinsically a reactive measure. Cameras do not prevent harm from occurring, as they do not address or alleviate the sociocultural roots of harmful behaviors. Instead, they merely record any harm that happens in their field of view. Harm and violence will not dissipate. Violent behaviors will simply migrate outside of the cameras’ purview. The cameras are not here to keep us safe — they are here to surveil us.
Dartmouth has duped and violated us. This decision obliterates the little remaining trust we had in the College. We challenge the College to rectify it. Remove the cameras, and collaborate with us to envision and invest in alternative anti-carceral modes of accountability and harm reduction.
It befits us that Dartmouth chose to reify gender segregation immediately after celebrating our semicentennial graduating class of women. Our alma mater rings stunningly true: The Lone Pine has set a watch, lest the old misogynistic tradition fail.
Mischa Telesford ’27
President, Gender-Inclusive Council
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
