Owing an Arm, a Leg and a Future
In Google, search for "davidson college loan," and you will find various articles having to do with Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., dropping the loan component from its financial aid packages on March 19.
December 11, 2023 | Latest Issue
In Google, search for "davidson college loan," and you will find various articles having to do with Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., dropping the loan component from its financial aid packages on March 19.
Before I begin this editorial, I must take a break and go to class. My thoughts, in a compressed, stream-of-consciousness sort-of style: My neighbors can see and hear everything I do and they laugh at me (I don't care), butch it up, lock the door, did I brush my teeth?
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. We are barely five months into the 21st century, and the Greek system, that gloried institution of everything Dartmouth, has clearly demonstrated its obsolescence.
The Greek system is classist, homophobic, misogynist and racist; it must be abolished. It is a decadent institution that exists only at the painful expense of others ("Others"). It can never provide adequate reparations for the psychic damage inflicted on those upset by the Saigon party, the Greek Week '98 and other t-shirts, the ghetto party, the luau, the "wah hoo wah" incident and, most recently, the Zeta Psi salacious papers affair. It originated in 1841 and was created primarily by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men for the benefit of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men.
A joke: one day, three campus liberals, one a women's studies major, one a sociology major and the other an education minor, stopped protesting whatever it is they were protesting.
It is an expression of fear and a declaration of strength. It is an act of aggression and protection.
The following letter is one of many that the United States Postal Service annually marks as undeliverable, because it is ambiguously addressed to a "Santa" at the "North Pole." I now possess the letter, because the Postal Service makes those letters that cannot be returned to the sender available to the public.
My days at Dartmouth have been colored by a pseudo-political activism, a desire to engender real change in the Dartmouth "community." (One of these days, I'm going to write an editorial on quotation marks.) Operating on the "Student Assembly Model" of effectuality in change, I've conceived throughout my student career a number of committees that have elicited great hope and excitement yet done nothing.
Columnists' conversation
I am programmed to be proud of a lot of things. Proud to be American, proud to be black, proud to be a black American, proud to be a Dartmouth student, proud to live in a "free" society, proud to be a Christian, proud to walk upright, etc.
