Letter From Cook Auditorium

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, November 19, 1997

I sat in Cook Auditorium on Thursday night to watch a depressing anti-climax: the presentation of the College Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs' (CCAOD) report on campus alcohol consumption to the College Community.

There were several hundred undergraduates there with me, and every single one of them knew exactly what would be announced. The details, at least the juicy ones, had been published in The Daily Dartmouth the previous morning. Kegs limits will be tightened drastically. Individual houses will be called upon to come up with specific plans to keep underage students from drinking. Most outrageously, Safety and Security officers will replace the peers who currently monitor fraternity and sorority parties, and will be given unprecedented and unjust powers to enter any Greek house on a whim and conduct whatever search missions they deem reasonable — a latter day writs of assistance.

I came, with the rest of the people in Cook, ready to challenge the validity of the proposal, and ready to hate Sean Gorman, the Chair of the CCAOD who had appointed himself villain of the day by virtue of his personal condesencion and bitterness and by his misguided and out of touch politics. The crowd came ready to tell Gorman and the rest of the CCAOD that they were wrong, that the measures recommended wouldn't reduce underage or binge drinking, they would just make a lot of people unhappy, and were illegal and immoral to boot. Then the crowd got depressed and thinned out when it became increasingly apparent that we weren't changing the Committee's collective mind.

I think we missed the point.

The real villain of the day wasn't Sean Gorman, but M. Lee Pelton, the charismatic Dean bent on social re-engineering who managed to pile intelligent jargon on the crowd, make it seem like uncontrollable forces (distant legislatures, the even more distant and mystical Board of Trustees) had backed him into a situation where he could do nothing but implement the recommendations of Gorman's committee, and receive a full round of applause every time he rose from his seat to speak. Pelton had organized the CCAOD, convened specifically to study systemic alcohol overconsumption and recommend solutions. It was a committee formed with an inherent agenda, to try to alter the Greek system's dominence of Dartmouth's social scene.

The real agenda of the Report wasn't to reconcile College policy to federal law; that claim is entirely bogus. Dartmouth is under no pressure from any government agency to reform its policies, and is now in perfect compliance with the body of law. The real agenda was, and is, to change Dartmouth's social set-up.

The College's administrators aren't evil, just paranoid. They really think that the fact that we gather in groups of one or two hundred to party and form friendships instead of one or two dozen means that we are unthinking, unfeeling, immature beasts. They think that we are wildly misled youngsters who just need a steady hand to show us the correct path.

During the course of the discussion, Scott Brown, the Dean of the Tucker Foundation, said that he hoped the CCAOD's plans would cause the College community to think very hard about the social context it chooses.

We have. We do. Every day the men and women of this College give tacit approval to the Coed Fraternity and Sorority System by maintaining its numbers,
by going to its parties, by affirming its values.

And every day Lee Pelton and his supporters within the administration think if they just push a little harder, make the right alliances, and fight the little battles, the students will all realize how wrong we are, and disavow the twin sins of group identification and alcohol.

But we haven't. And Pelton and Brown know we haven't, and this frustrates them, because they really think they're right. So they push; if we won't just accept how wrong the CFS system is, they'll prove it to us, by making us change it, and hence change ourselves. Its intellectual Dartmouth vs. the Frats, they think, and intellectual Dartmouth will win. What they don't realize is that a creative, thinking, intellectually dynamic campus and the Greek system can coexist. They do, at Dartmouth.

I don't think many people who went to the discussion at Cook Auditorium are fooled any longer. Everyone I talked to seemed to get the same impression I did; that the new regulations were part of a much broader plan to force change in Dartmouth's social composition.

We all came ready to Cook Auditorium to challenge the plan's merits, its specifics. What we realized, before we left, was that we were fighting not a law or a policy, but a fundamental, intractable, administrative attitude.

It's time for the administration to stop condescending to us, the way they did in Cook Auditorium on Thursday night. By accepting us into Dartmouth, the administration has judged us intelligent and mature. They should follow through on their initial judgment; we are smart enough to balance our lives.

I don't think Dean Pelton is malicious. I don't think he's evil. I don't think he's vengeful. I think he's genuinely trying to help make Dartmouth a better place.

I do, however, think he's wrong. And I think that's reason enough to oppose him.

Letter From Cook Auditorium

Article Tools

Related Articles