James Wright is Watching You

By Steven Menashi | Monday, January 24, 2000

Last Winter, Dartmouth President James Wright urged the Board of Trustees to adopt a comprehensive approach to social and residential life at the College. So the Board appointed a committee of social planners to design a community 'based on Dartmouth's Principle of Community and on adherence to norms of civil behavior.' The Report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative, from which that line is taken, became public January 10 and includes a blueprint for the way students are to conduct themselves outside the classroom.

Hand in hand with the freedom to lead one's social life, or to choose one's friends, says the Committee, 'goes the responsibility to uphold the Principle of Community.' If students fail to abide by Dartmouth's prescribed community values, students and student groups 'must expect to see their freedoms restricted, for the good of the community as a whole.'

The report does substantially restrict student freedoms, imposing regulations on where and when social events may and may not happen, what sorts of entertainment and food can be present at parties, what furnishings may and may not be present in Greek houses, which students must live in which residences—on top of limits on the number of student associations permitted on campus, mandatory community service hours, and increased campus police surveillance.

The report does mention the freedom of students to arrange their own social activities, and even the right of students over 21 to have alcohol present at some of those activities: 'The committee proposes that this freedom apply to students in groups of 6 or fewer who are drinking in a residential room on campus, in groups of 10 or fewer in a residential suite, and in groups of 15 or fewer in any campus social space.' Any social activity in which more than the prescribed number of students participate 'would have to be registered with a designated College office.' Students must hire 'a College-certified, trained, non-student server' to dispense any alcoholic beverage, even individual cans, as well as another 'certified non-student' to check IDs. A 2:00 AM curfew would apply to all such gatherings and 'Safety and Security personnel [campus police] must have unlimited and continuous access to all spaces.' Finally, all financial receipts for the event must be disclosed to the College.

To enforce the new rules, 'Under the committee's proposal, failure to register, failure to comply with certified server requirements, violation of curfew, or off-the-books alcohol purchase would be deemed serious offenses.' Two such violations would get a student suspended for one year.

The report reads, 'The committee concluded that it is not desirable for Dartmouth to become a police state. However, we also deemed it unlikely that the problem of excessive alcohol use can be dealt with effectively without stepped-up involvement by Safety and Security staff.'

Indeed, says the Committee, 'few abusers lack education about the dangers of excessive alcohol use—and therefore education alone is not a sufficient strategy.' The Committee is not satisfied that students of legal age are making informed choices about their social behavior. Instead, suggests the Committee, campus police should enforce a curfew, and other rules for social behavior, on penalty of expulsion.

'American college students of your generation are victims of a generational swindle of epic proportions,' says Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author, with civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. 'The generation that now has power in American universities at administrative levels smoked pot, dropped acid, and had no interventions by the university in their private lives, and they now are waging a war against beer out of their contempt for disinhibited hormones. No one can object if Dartmouth intervenes in the case of people who are putting other people at risk, or interfering with the rights of others, but this kind of paternalistic, selective intervention in young adult lives seems to me very bad faith from a generation—my own generation—that secured the treatment of itself as young adults, free to do what they choose with their lives.'

The Social Life Report, however, chastises Greek societies not primarily because of alcohol abuse, which, the Committee recognizes, exists outside fraternities as well, but because 'these organizations tolerate or even promote conduct that is inconsistent with the Principle of Community and with the academic mission of the College.' The argument advanced by the Committee—that out-of-classroom behavior is part of Dartmouth's learning experience and must conform to 'the spirit of community and Dartmouth's institutional values'—is the same argument advanced by college administrators in the 1950s and early 60s to justify mandatory chapel services or patriotic loyalty oaths—and is no less an intrusion on freedom of conscience.

Dartmouth's Committee mandates that each Greek association adopt a statement of purpose that will swear allegiance to the College's academic mission, the value of 'diversity,' and community service. All students who wish to join such an association must sign a contract 'to honor a new code of personal conduct' defined by the Dean of the College. Students would be required to devote a specified number of hours to community service, the quality of which would be evaluated by the Tucker Foundation. Greek associations would lose the right to set standards for membership, to determine the number of their members, and to maintain pledge programs for new initiates. They would be forced to surrender their facilities for use by other student groups to hold meetings or events, would be required to give one of their rooms to an Undergraduate Advisor, and must allow 24-hour access to Safety and Security officers and college officials for unannounced inspections.

Most controversial, though, is the creation of a 'unified College-wide judiciary system' to replace the current peer-controlled judiciary system. The new body would adjudicate violations of Dartmouth's 'Principle of Community.'

'CFS members behave,' writes the Committee, 'in ways that clearly violate norms of civilized behavior and the College's Principle of Community.' Any violation of the Principle by any members of a Greek society would constitute a failure of Minimum Standards. Two such infractions would result in de-recognition of the association—that is, its members would be evicted from their house (whether privately or College-owned) and any student who maintained membership in the association would be expelled.

The Principle of Community reads, 'The life and work of a Dartmouth student should be based on integrity, responsibility and consideration. In all activities each student is expected to be respectful of the rights and interests of others and to be personally honest. He or she should be appreciative of the diversity of the community as providing an opportunity for learning and moral growth.'

Some are alarmed at the broad mandate for control of students' lives that an enforced Principle of Community would give the College. One example of an infraction that the new judicial system would punish, the report says, is last year's 'ghetto party,' a fraternity party that had a theme some students found offensive. The scope of the new 'unified College-wide judiciary system,' then, would include supervision of expressive conduct, including speech. The Principle of Community also seems to apply to casual interpersonal relations and political beliefs, especially beliefs about the educational value of 'diversity' and affirmative action.

'This is brainwashing, pure and simple,' says Todd Zywicki '88, Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University. 'They want to ensure that students think in the way they desire. This report is an astounding social engineering document and its aim is the re-education of students once they get to Dartmouth. The College doesn't like that it doesn't know what goes on behind the closed doors of a fraternity. They want pervasive supervision of students.'
The dismantling of fraternities and sororities at Dartmouth would mean the end of student-controlled social spaces and the regulation of student social lives by the Dartmouth administration. In this way, campus critics argue, the Social Life Initiative represents the infantilization of students at Dartmouth.

'The brothers of my fraternity choose to be part of a Greek house. We question the right of the College to take away that freedom,' says Brendon Endicott, president of Gamma Delta Chi. 'The report attacks the ability of students to act and think independently—two qualities that any college should encourage.'

Liberal education, surely, aims to facilitate independent thought, to enable students to identify their conception of the good life and to act in its pursuit, and so relies on the capacity of students to make moral choices regarding the direction of their lives, and to freely express any viewpoint. 'The tolerance of maddeningly different points of view,' former Dartmouth president James O. Freedman noted in 1986, is 'essential to the maintenance of a community of scholars and to the passionate exchange of ideas.'

Even many critics of fraternities, like Freedman, recognize the imperative that students be allowed to act independently within a liberal educational institution, whose objective, after all, is to produce independent thinkers, who are skeptical of authority, as Freedman noted at Willamette University last February.

Educators, of course, disagree on the educational merits of Greek societies themselves. 'A lot of students are mesmerized by the houses, impressed by the members, swept up in the social scene, and before you know it, they're flunking their midterms,' Andy Robinson, assistant dean of students at Purdue University, told The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. 'On the other hand, you could get swept up in leadership and community service. I think that over the long haul, fraternities have been a good investment, mostly because of their contribution to the campus community, and the alumni loyalty that they foster.'

'Greek organizations are Burke's 'little platoons' that link atomized students to the history and legacy of Dartmouth, and act as the mediating institutions that Tocqueville talked about,' says Zywicki. 'Fraternities provide a comfort zone for students to consider and debate uncleansed ideas. That's why Dartmouth wants them broken into atomized pieces, the better to remold them into the new Dartmouth mindset.'

Whatever the particular merits of the Greek system, Dartmouth's move to tightly regulate the social lives of students on and off-campus signals the adoption of the in loco parentis role that universities abandoned in the 1960s and 70s in response to student protests. 'Students don't rebel against adult guidance in the way they did 30 years ago,' President Wright told The New York Times last March. Wright's Dartmouth is leading universities in returning to the pre-1960s mission of defining students values—in his case, 'based on Dartmouth's Principle of Community and on adherence to norms of civil behavior.'

It's clearly a break from the past. 'I graduated from college in 1968 and the whole point of going to college then was to get institutions and parents out of my life,' Harry Lewis, Dean of Harvard College, said in the same March 3 Times article. 'I worry about the narrowing impact that such a well-supervised college experience might offer... There is something troubling about students working so hard to fulfill the dreams of others. It makes it harder for them to discover something of their own, get excited and pursue it.'

Indeed, some educators regard the new attitude as antithetical to the aims of liberal education. 'An important and prestigious university that presents itself as a free university ought to treat its students as young adults, and ought to respect categorically the right of their students within the law to have whatever voluntary associations that they choose,' says Kors. 'So it is as absurd for Dartmouth to say that a student cannot live in a fraternity house as it would be for Dartmouth to say that you can't live with atheists in Hanover, or you can't live with evangelical Christians in Hanover. It seems to me that Dartmouth students, as young adults at what should be a free university in a free society have the right to voluntary association. This is an unbearably paternalistic intervention by Dartmouth in the voluntary associations and private choices that are perfectly lawful, and is obviously intended to be prejudicial against one set of associations, namely fraternities.'

The new in loco parentis powers of universities, critics argue, are in the hands of political partisans who employ them to transform students according to their own ideological desire, with disastrous consequences for freedom of conscience and independent thought. According to recent polls, most students agree.

James Wright is Watching You

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