Vox Clamantis
To the Editor:
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To the Editor:
The article "College allocates campus space" [The Dartmouth, May 22] frustrated me tremendously. This article discussed the Facilities Advisory Committee, described the plight of the Women's Resource Center to move to a larger more central location, talked about Alpha Xi Delta's recent occupation of the Beta Theta Pi house and even managed to mention newly recognized Lambda Upsilon Lambda fraternity's desire to one day attain a permanent space for their organization. This is very admirable and noteworthy.
I am a very prejudiced person. Far be it from me to pretend as if I do not emit racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnocentrism and classism into the Dartmouth environment on a regular basis; and while I blame a society that does not care for its children for most of my acculturated bigotry, I do not absolve myself of the responsibility of perpetuating jingoist attitudes, nor do I deny my greater obligation to attempt to prevent the transmission of my narrow-mindedness to my children.
Censhorship has never resolved any problem of human miscommunication or misunderstanding. Language and ideas only truly belong to those who put them upon printed pages, or utter them into the audible air, when both the transmission of the message and the manner in which it is received can be controlled; otherwise, words and concepts are subject to multiple meanings, implications, interpretations and project disparate moral and ethical intentions. To paraphrase Professor William Cook of the English department, we all belong to multiple, varying, and often divergent discourse communities , and thus, dialogues which embody one set connotative and denotative properties in one context can contain opposing properties in another.
Like many Dartmouth students and Upper Valley residents I recently attended the viewing of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life and was instantly reminded of the controversy incited by this author's life and works. Perhaps most noteworthy for me was the painful reminder of Rand's view of the absolute and supreme value of human selfishness, citing it as the only true manifestation of human rights such as freedom and the embodiment of the most distinct human characteristics, namely logic and reason. However, while I do not wish this piece of writing to embody any sort of debate over Rand's hierarchical establishment of the individual far above the collective, I do wish to add a corollary to what I understand a central thesis of her philosophy to be.
My first year at this school I anxiously attended graduation and said good-bye to a few good friends, but knew very well that life would go on without the Class of 1995. Last year, I missed graduation, but felt a more significant sense of loss than the year before if only because I had grown to respect and admire many members of the Class of 1996.
To the Editor:
While visiting the Pow-wow on Sunday I felt tremendous pride and honor, but as I was walking home I was overcome with tremendous sadness.
To the Editor:
Last year Jon Heavey won the Student Assembly presidential election on the following platform: open up the Dartmouth telephone market; establish an Economics Department assessment of DDS; reform the service offices in McNutt Hall, especially the registrar; stagger the lunch hours of Dartmouth employees; keep Baker open; unlock all dorm doors; have Dartmouth Pride Dinners to build community.
John F. Kennedy once said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
Joan Baez, an alumna from my alma mater, Redlands High School, once said, "As long as one keeps searching, the answers come." These words seem obvious in minor everyday applications of them, but the answers don't come as easily when the questions concern larger, societal dilemmas such as prejudice and intolerance. We cannot be expected to resolve these fundamental issues within a year, or even over the course of our time at Dartmouth. Yet, we are morally and intellectually obligated to address them, and to understand the degree to which they affect our own community.