Administrators Are Trying
When I graduated last June, I wondered which editorial in the Dartmouth would be the first to cause me grief and anger as an alum. The past few weeks have provided many such articles, but the recent editorial by Elizabeth McConnaughey '99, titled "Greeks Prevent Sexual Assault," managed to upset me enough to respond. While she does make some strong points about this problematic issue, I believe that her conclusion that the administration is to blame -- and that we need to praise the Greeks, and them alone, for all their efforts -- is quite misguided and uninformed. I write this with an intense personal interest. I currently work as a college administrator at a school in the West, so I can see both sides of the coin. And, as a student at Dartmouth, I spent countless hours working on this very issue of sexual assault adjudication. You could even say that at some points in the Fall of 1996, it consumed me. If you were on campus that term, you might remember some campus discussion about the Annual COS Report. I was frustrated and angry about the results of sexual assault cases I had heard about, and couldn't believe that this College I had trusted with my life for four years could be so negligent in its decision making. I wasn't the only one, and we organized together to fight.