Last winter when a Star of David with the message "Death to You" was scrawled on the door of one of the River apartments, the response was a forum in the Roth Center with a huge panel of students from all walks of Dartmouth life, followed by a break-out session in smaller groups, after which we returned to the larger group to present our ideas about ending hate at Dartmouth.
We have banned the G-word (the event we are attending today) and the A-word (what we become after the G-word.) We have had sappy conversations and teary trips down Memory Lane.
I spent one Saturday a long while back in the basement of Chi Heorot fraternity. Four of us -- a close female friend of mine and two guy friends -- were talking, just passing the time on an average Dartmouth night out. Suddenly, one of the guys noticed that a Pong table near us was unoccupied.
Last year the '99s seemed like new play things -- an endless selection of students to look at tenderly and say, "ah, not so long ago ... " So we '98s watched the new shmobs and said the same things to the '99s the upperclassmen had said to us, and waited for the day that another new class would arrive and the '99s would look back at us, their mentors, awed by our prescience, and say, "You were right.
At least from an off-campus perspective, Dartmouth's mascot seems to be the pressing issue of the term.
It seems that since the resignation of Danielle Moore '95 as student body president this past fall, everyone wants to discuss the role of women at Dartmouth.
When I entered high school, I felt naive, clueless, and a little bit like someone had pasted a big yellow smiley face on my forehead that only I couldn't see.