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(02/03/17 5:20am)
Josh Kauderer ’19’s Jan. 27 guest column — published on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the very day that President Donald Trump signed an unprecedented executive order targeting Muslim refugees and immigrants — trades on the tired argument that criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism and suggests that Jewish people are the religious group that most needs defending in today’s society. Kauderer so confuses and dilutes the meaning of anti-Semitism and what Jewish values ought to stand for that I struggle to decide where to spend my 800 words setting the record straight. However, two salient points stand out to me as most important.
(11/15/16 5:15am)
Donald Trump is the next president of the United States. It seems easy to lose hope, to believe that this election shows the irredeemable hate that lives in this nation’s underbelly. We desperately want to disengage and hope that, in four years, there will be enough of a millennial or minority vote to return us to the path of “progress.” Mostly rural, white Americans decided this election. They felt left out, excluded from the progress of the past eight years. They have grounds to believe that globalization and technology have robbed them of their once-thriving livelihoods. They have been told that life is better now than it was eight years ago by people for whom that is true — but that is not how they feel. They have expressed this anxiety through a rhetoric rife with hate, but hate alone did not win this election. To continue to believe that it did would be to continue missing what the media and liberal America have failed to recognize over the past year and a half.
(05/25/15 11:01pm)
Since before I matriculated, I have been troubled by our profound inability to engage in respectful discourse when it comes to questions of institutional change on campus. In a rough sketch, the problem often plays out like this — a small group of passionate students agitates for change, often in a well thought out and productive manner — though my most recent column “What Is Derby?” demonstrates that I don’t always believe that to be the case. Yet even when the student campaign is focused and respectful, a large portion of students seem to take personal affront to it. Michelle Gil’s ’16 May 21 column, “What Dartmouth Does Teach Me,” seems to typify this part of the problem with our inability to discuss and engage with these calls for change.
(05/12/15 10:58pm)
The Dartmouth editorial board wrote in last Friday’s Verbum Ultimum, “Reacting with Respect,” that we would do much better as a campus to consider the issues raised by protesters, rather than to criticize the means of protest — and in general I agree. But in attempting to take my editor’s advice I’m confronted by a problem: with last Saturday’s protests, the issues raised only make sense in the context of the protests themselves.
(04/13/15 10:20pm)
A recent movement called Open Hillel has risen up on college campuses in response to Hillel International’s “standards of partnership,” which state that “Hillel welcomes, partners with and aids the efforts of organizations, groups and speakers from diverse perspectives in support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Unfortunately, Hillel International’s idea of supporting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state does not extend to forms of support that challenge Israel to live up to that ideal.
(04/01/15 11:00pm)
Spring term usually means an end to the chilly temperatures — but this year it also appears to signal a chilling of relations between administrators and students. With the rollout of some of the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” plan’s less popular policies, it appears administrators face a choice: work with students to effect cultural change or force this change through top-down policy adjustments and scare tactics. We all know that change must come, and many — myself included — believe that College President Phil Hanlon’s vision has potential. In order to be effective, however, this change must come through cooperation rather than administrative edicts.
(02/11/15 11:45pm)
Over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly clear that the College’s attitudes toward alcohol and underage drinking are misinformed. I would like to believe that this institution — more focused on the undergraduate experience than many of its peers — would have taken the lead in putting students first. Alas, the tenor and rhetoric of administrators lead me to believe that those making policy decisions are either primarily concerned with public image or are shockingly unaware of the way that college-aged people interact with each other and alcohol.
(01/30/15 3:50am)
It seems that few are completely happy with College President Phil Hanlon’s speech, but likewise, few appear completely unhappy. Yesterday morning, he presented a comprehensive — though perhaps not as far reaching as it could have been — plan to “move Dartmouth forward.” He started his address with a story about College President Emeritus John Kemeny and his visionary guidance of the school into coeducation. At this point, and based upon the fanfare leading up to the speech, I expected some drastic changes to be proposed that would fundamentally alter the course of our school and entirely reinvent the social system. I expected a set of changes that would be second only to coeducation, a visionary plan that would restructure the school’s very mission. He delivered lofty goals and ambitions for Dartmouth’s future that we can all agree with, but in terms of sweeping changes, Hanlon left something to be desired — that is, if sweeping change is what you were desiring.
(01/15/15 12:40am)
This is a column about sororities, written by a man who is not in a sorority. I have spent countless hours over the past year speaking to friends who have diverse relationships with sororities, and I have been left with one overall striking impression — national sororities on our campus are problematic. I want to stipulate that Dartmouth’s fraternities are problematic as well, and I do not suggest that national sororities are single-handedly to blame for the problems surrounding the Greek system. I recognize that I cannot provide first-hand, personal criticism of these organizations, but I’m going to use my soap box here to declaim my informed belief that all national sororities at Dartmouth should sever ties with their national organizations. These sororities should go local, and the College should provide the funds required for this transition.
(11/07/14 1:37am)
Students who rushed this fall attended an hourlong Dartmouth Bystander Intervention session, which focused on how individuals can prevent sexual assault on campus. The program I attended focused narrowly one kind of sexual assault: those that result from predatory men preying on incapacitated women. Per my recollection, the program did not allude to the possibility of a male victim. And the presenters did not provide definitions for words like rape, sexual assault and consent in their conversations about sexual assault.
(10/09/14 10:37pm)
I am a profiler, and I’m the first to admit it. With the tailor-made boxes so many of us find ourselves falling into at Dartmouth, it’s all too easy to define and be defined only by appearances. In my experience, we inevitably make superficial judgments of people, describing them not by their interests but by their affiliations, majors or some other classification systems — things that don’t really speak to who they are as people. I often only get to know people in a very cursory way before making a decision about who they are and what kind of relationship we will have. In our community, which is composed of many small groups, it often feels impossible to keep things like clothing, teams, classes or Greek houses from coloring the perceptions of those we meet. But we must collectively fight this reflex and break the habit of social stereotyping.
(05/19/14 10:35pm)
As I rounded the bannister of the second floor landing in Russell Sage hall on Sunday night, I saw it blinking there, on and off. A sad little light, crying for attention. At first I didn’t believe it, but my eyes weren’t deceiving me. A displaced paper towel dispenser, torn from the walls of the bathroom and for some unfathomable reason placed on the second floor landing where it proceeded to occasionally make a halfhearted effort to add to the rolls of unused paper that covered the staircase. How it got there may forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it’s related to the fate of the mangled wooden chair sitting at the bottom of the stairs, or the trail of destruction strewn throughout Russell Sage and beyond.
(04/20/14 10:45pm)
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed, “Oppressed by the Ivy League” that many on this campus read, shared and discussed. I myself shared it on Facebook with the preface that, “something’s amiss when I agree with most of a [Wall Street Journal] op-ed.” Caught up in the heat of the moment, I was frustrated with what I saw on campus, and the frustration that came across in the piece’s rhetoric resonated with me. But now I owe a mea culpa.