Arrington: What I Want to Be When I Grow Up
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
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“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Established in 2016 as part of College President Phil Hanlon’s Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative, the house communities were designed to revolutionize the social lives of students. A way to subvert the influence of Greek life, the advent of the six house communities brought a Harry Potter-esque promise of camaraderie and continuity to what some would consider an otherwise disjointed campus.
This column is featured in the 2021 Freshman special issue.
This column is featured in the 2021 Freshman special issue.
The steady rise in global temperatures significantly impacts the number, frequency and duration of natural disasters. In Haiti, the official death toll has risen to over 2,000 after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit the western part of the island last week, with rescue efforts stalled by a tropical storm that lashed the fragile island just days later. Although the evidence supporting the association of natural disasters with climate change has only increased in recent years, some still argue that the data doesn’t reflect the whole story.
The American education system’s dismal underperformance compared with other wealthy and developed nations is well-established. More troubling than the disparity between the U.S. education system and those of other wealthy nations, however, are the vast disparities found between schools in the United States. There is tremendous variation in school quality — including academic and extracurricular offerings, college and career counseling and teaching effectiveness — across the United States. Moreover, the reason why this variation in quality exists is clear: vast discrepancies in funding. The American public school system needs reform — funding should be based on the number of students, not the wealth of their parents and school district.
Last week, the Hanover Selectboard voted to reinstate its indoor mask mandate, citing recent spikes in local COVID-19 cases as the Delta variant of the virus spreads nationally. The following day, Dartmouth announced that it would also reinstate indoor masking. These decisions seem decidedly unpopular among students, as evidenced by student sentiments seen in several pieces published in The Dartmouth last Friday.
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.”
The recent campaign for a seat on the Hanover Selectboard by David Millman ’23 has shed light on the tensions between student and non-student residents of Hanover. Exhausted by years of name-calling and othering by non-student residents — including prominent residents like Hanover town manager Julia Griffin — Millman’s campaign promised students a seat at the table where decisions impacting their lives are made. Though his campaign was unsuccessful, its underlying message does not have to face the same fate. Dartmouth students have long been treated like second-class citizens in Hanover politics; it is long overdue for the town to treat us as equals in the community.
The International Olympic Committee claims that sport is “one of the most powerful platforms for promoting gender equality and empowering women and girls.” Yet in the past few weeks, at least three notable injustices against women have occurred at the Tokyo Olympics, calling into question the IOC’s commitment to those goals.
We live in a world where many of our problems — climate change, poverty, inequality and more — are caused or exacerbated by corporations. It is easy, as individuals, to settle for just posting about these issues on social media platforms rather than striving for tangible change. And who could blame us for buying an unsustainable outfit on Shein, eating a sandwich from the homophobic Chick-fil-A or using a plastic grocery bag? Most of us did not directly cause or contribute to the major issues plaguing our world, and we have our own problems, such as being college students during a pandemic with a scarcity of time and money. Changing our behavior when we already have such a small individual impact seems almost pointless. However, we are more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.
On my graduation day, June 13, I published what I believed would be my last article in this newspaper. It was a bittersweet moment, saying goodbye to a place at which I had worked for years, first as a writer, then as editor of the opinion section, and finally as Executive Editor.
The entire Dartmouth community is yearning to break free of the COVID-19 pandemic and make the long-awaited return to in-person classes. Yet, as we emerge from the pandemic, we can’t return to what we knew as “normal.” Before last spring, what might have been seen as classroom norms in fact presented barriers that prevented many students from fully thriving academically. Though by no means perfect, some changes brought about by the pandemic — such as recorded content and lenient course policies such as forgiving absences and alternative participation methods — greatly augmented students’ ability to participate in their classes. Come fall, these improvements must be carried over into the new school year to make Dartmouth more academically accessible for every student.
Less than an hour after polls closed in Hanover’s 2021 Town Meeting, news broke that David Millman ’23 had lost his campaign for Selectboard. His campaign deserves tremendous credit for trying to get a student onto the governing board of this town — and for driving engagement with key local policy issues among the student body.
Since November of last year, the Ethiopian military has been at odds with insurgent forces in the country’s northernmost state of Tigray. Stirred by an increasing sense of ethnic nationalism, the current fighting has led many to call for the state’s independence. While the state is functionally independent as is, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has declared its willingness to formally and permanently part with Ethiopia if the violence continues. However, whether the world will accept an independent Tigray is a difficult question to answer. Self-determination has consistently been the subject of controversy in international relations, especially because the United Nations charter does not contain any clear and certain guidance on the topic. In one section, it claims to support the “self-determination of peoples,” and presumably the right of people to become independent — while in another, pouring cold water on any sort of secession, forbidding infringements “against the territorial integrity … of any state.” These respective articles have been used in the past to justify both pro- and anti-independence viewpoints, leaving conflicts with no clear path to peace. The U.N. Charter must be updated to resolve this contradiction once and for all.
This past June, the Supreme Court handed its latest victory to religious interests in the case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the most recent in a series of rulings expanding the scope of freedom of religion under the First Amendment. The Court unanimously sided with Catholic Social Services, an organization that did not recognize marriages between same-sex partners and refused to certify them as foster parents, allowing the organization to retain their place as an official foster service provider for Philadelphia. The case is yet another in the trend of organizations, corporations, and individuals using religious liberty to justify discrimination — over the past decade, an unprecedented series of ‘wins’ for religious freedom have threatened some protections against employment discrimination, allowed the refusal of service to LGBTQ+ people and weakened access to reproductive healthcare. We as a society must more specifically define what religious freedom is and is not and combat its use to harm marginalized communities.
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.
In the best of times, Dartmouth’s 10-week term is notoriously demanding — it’s nearly impossible for most students to focus on anything other than their academics. In the worst of times, the intensive Dartmouth schedule is nothing short of debilitating. Students’ schedules leave little room for anything to go wrong, so if — or when — that happens, they struggle to balance their personal situations and mental health with the omnipresent pressures of life at Dartmouth. And sometimes, things go wrong for nearly everyone, especially when tragedy strikes on campus. Many would expect the College to be sympathetic to students in such situations, but too often, it is not. At best, Dartmouth ignores students’ cries for help; at worst, the College exacerbates their problems. When the situation calls for it — when events make it impossible for academics to be a student’s top priority — the College must recognize reality and give students a break from classes.
In 2013, shortly before the last conflict between Israel and Gaza, the population of Israel’s West Bank settlements stood at just under 325,000 people. Eight years later, by the start of the most recent conflict — an 11-day war that claimed the lives of more than 200 — the population has surged to 475,000, and in the process, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced and seen their homes destroyed. Though last month’s conflict was centered in Gaza, where Israel has no outposts, the violence was precipitated by Israeli police raids and crackdowns on Palestinian protests — including protests against planned evictions of Palestinian residents from their homes in East Jerusalem — as well as violence from a far-right Israeli settlement organization, Lehava. Illegal Israeli settlements are the main problem, and the U.S., through the billions in foreign aid it offers to Israel each year, has unique leverage to stop them. Israel's continuing encroachment on the West Bank leads to violence and directly infringes on Palestinian human rights and sovereignty. The U.S. should halt foreign aid to Israel until it commits to ending settlement of the area.
Over the past few months, many students have felt disconnected from the Dartmouth administration. Many of us believe that, despite their sincerest intentions, the administration cannot possibly understand how profoundly the COVID-19 pandemic has affected its students. While, of course, the administration has been forced to make difficult decisions as a result of the pandemic, student perspectives have been largely absent during these decision-making processes.