Dokken: Breaking The Bank
This column is featured in the 2023 Winter Carnival special issue.
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This column is featured in the 2023 Winter Carnival special issue.
In a Feb. 21 press release, the College announced that faculty and administrators had voted 89-4 to delay the development of proposed undergraduate housing along Lyme Road. The reason? Faculty members expressed concern about the distance of the housing from the core of campus, arguing that it contradicted the commitments Dartmouth made in its strategic master plan and threatened the quality of the “undergraduate experience.”
Yesterday, Dartmouth announced that the College would be reinstating its indoor masking requirement in light of the Hanover Selectboard’s decision to renew its indoor masking policy on Aug. 4. Interim provost David Kotz and executive vice president Rick Mills also stated in a campus-wide email that the decision was made to “avoid future disruptions” and offer the community “the earliest possible return to normalcy.”
This past academic year, Dartmouth students have endured an unprecedented period of hardship and loss. Alongside the pandemic, which forced many students to go through the academic year relatively isolated from campus and their peers, students faced the loss of four of their peers — three of which were the result of suicide, according to reporting from The Dartmouth and the Boston Globe. These losses spurred outrage among students over the lackluster nature of Dartmouth’s mental health infrastructure, which many have blamed for creating an environment that does not adequately support students who are experiencing a mental health crisis.
The preferential treatment of legacy students in the admission process at many American universities is a practice that has been around for almost a century despite the practice’s anti-Semitic and xenophobic roots. In fact, the practice of legacy admissions began at Dartmouth in 1922, and soon after, other institutions adopted the practice as a means of reducing the number of recent Eastern European immigrants — a large majority of whom were Jewish — who were admitted. Today, universities maintain the practice more out of tradition and fear that without it, alumni donations will plummet, but its effect is no less damaging than it was at its bigoted beginnings. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Dartmouth’s use of legacy preference in admissions, Dartmouth should acknowledge the ridiculousness and inequity of this practice and end the use of legacy preference in admissions.
This editors’ note is featured in the 2021 Winter Carnival special issue.
When the pandemic began to spread throughout the U.S. last spring, seemingly everyone praised “essential workers” for putting their lives on the line to keep society running.
On Jan. 6, the nation watched in horror as a group of pro-Trump insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol in an event best understood as a pathetic attempt at a coup. The group, some armed with assault rifles, Molotov cocktails, bombs and even six-foot spears seized the Capitol building, forcing Congress to temporarily delay finalizing the certification of the electoral vote and President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
I am 19 years old — born the year of 9/11, and the year that U.S. troops first touched down in Afghanistan. I have never known an America that wasn’t at war, or an America before mass shootings. I grew up without financial security because this country decided that the cost of my father’s cancer treatment was my family’s peace of mind. I grew up watching Hurricane Michael, a hurricane of unprecedented strength obliterate my aunt’s town and home due to our country’s decision to prioritize corporate interests over its citizens. I grew up rehearsing what to do if someone decided to make my school into a murder scene amid our nation’s inability to enact common sense gun control while children continue to be gunned down in their classrooms.
Even before announcing his 2016 presidential bid, Donald Trump had a strained relationship with science. The president regularly tweeted claims that global warming was a hoax, that vaccines caused autism and that energy-efficient lightbulbs cause cancer — all of which are wholly unsupported by scientific evidence.
At the core of the news media industry, like any business, is the drive to turn a profit. And from the advent of radio through the boom in social media, news companies have learned that sensationalism sells. Sensationalizing the news and allowing viewers to dictate what should and shouldn't be covered draws in more profits than traditional, objective reporting. While complaints of different news outlets having a liberal or conservative bias are commonplace, it is important to acknowledge that the media operates under a system that rewards sensationalism.
As the 2020 election draws near, I am certain that many of you, much like myself, have found yourselves involved in some dispute with a family member or friend over politics. After all, many of us have been cooped up with our families for months. During these political discussions, older relatives often ask in exasperation: Why does the younger generation get so strung out over politics? Why should someone’s political beliefs determine whether or not you’ll be friends with someone? Can you not handle someone having an opinion different from your own?
This column is featured in the 2020 Freshman special issue.
In June, the Department of Homeland Security released draft amendments to the United States’ asylum policy. The 161-page document recommends narrowing the definition of persecution, and subsequently, the grounds for asylum in the United States.
In 2020, Black people are still being killed because they dare to be Black in America — because they dare to walk in their own neighborhoods or go for a drive. These killings, however, represent only a fraction of the violence the Black community faces. Current definitions of violence — specifically those regarding identity-based violence — are too narrow to accurately portray the violence that marginalized groups face. This violence goes beyond the physical and explicit — it lies in the subtext of individuals' language and behavior, outside of the traditional definition of violence. We must change our understanding of what constitutes violence so that Black people no longer have to be beaten or murdered in order for racial justice to be perceived as an issue worth pursuing.
In preparing to write this column, I considered many different topics related to the LGBTQ community: from the prejudice within the LGBTQ community, how certain identities are considered more acceptable than others, how one’s level of queerness alters one’s experience both within and outside of the community, the lack of intersectionality within most portrayals of queer characters or corporations’ profiting off of Pride. Even then, some part of me felt that all of these topics were too niche and too specific to the queer community for readers unfamiliar with these debates to find worthy of their time.
The Spanish flu, AIDS, smallpox, the Black Death — new and deadly diseases pop up frequently throughout history. But in a world in which we carry computers in our pockets, it’s easy to forget about how much we still don’t know. In the face of COVID-19 and all of its unknowns, scientists are now taking much of the blame. Without proper representation in our legislative bodies, science is left undefended and unfairly battered.
With all of the world seemingly cooped up in their homes, many of us have turned to movies and television shows to escape the uncertainty of reality. It was during this recent pursuit of entertainment that I began to binge as many films and television shows featuring queer characters as I could.
It was in 1985, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, that the federal government enacted a law seeking to limit the threat of HIV in blood transfusions by prohibiting non-heterosexual men from donating blood.