Never Trust Anyone Under 30

By Steven Menashi | Monday, January 24, 2000

Five years ago, the University of La Verne in California announced that the rush process for fraternities and sororities would be delayed to later in the school year. In response, La Verne's chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity commenced legal action.

'What is rush?' asked John Howard, the attorney who represented SAE. 'All rush is is speech. It's trying to convince people that you're a good organization that somebody would want to be a member of. It's solicitation, and it's not business solicitation, because it's solicitation for a social undertaking; fraternities do have an advocacy purpose. Rush is pure speech, and the Supreme Court has said that a delay in speech of even a minute is a denial of your free speech rights.'

Threatened with legal sanction, La Verne quickly abandoned its plan to delay fraternity rush. The students won.

Before students in Hanover rejoice, however, it should be noted that students at private schools in California enjoy greater civil liberties protections than do students at similar institutions in New Hampshire—and Dartmouth is largely responsible for that situation.

Since 1993, California law has held that 'No private postsecondary educational institution shall make or enforce any rule subjecting any student to disciplinary sanctions solely on the basis of conduct that is speech or other communication that, when engaged in outside the campus or facility of a private postsecondary institution, is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or Section 2 of Article 1 of the California Constitution.'

Freedom of speech is a primary value not only of American democracy, but also of liberal education, so the notion that students should be protected by the First Amendment received widespread popular support. One supporter was New Hampshire State Senator Thomas Colantuono, who introduced a bill with almost identical language to the California law in 1994, to extend the same First Amendment rights to New Hampshire students.

After extensive lobbying by Dartmouth College, however, the bill was amended to exclude private universities. After testimony before the legislature by Dartmouth's attorney in Concord, it was narrowly defeated.

Dartmouth maintained that it opposed the legislation not because it values censorship, but because it resented state intervention in its 'internal affairs'—a curious contention, since the College had welcomed similar regulations relating to anti-discrimination. In any event, the College insisted that while it would work to kill the free speech bill, it did not intend to deny its students the enjoyment of First Amendment rights.

This past January 10, two Dartmouth Trustees signed on to a proposal for social and residential life at the College that reverses that promise. The Report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative outlaws the formation of new voluntary Greek societies on campus, and substantially restricts student participation in current associations. Dartmouth's social plan extends beyond residence halls to limit even expressive conduct. A new 'campus-wide judicial system' would censure students, or dissolve student associations, for violations of Dartmouth's 'Principle of Community.' As an example of such an infraction, the report mentions fraternity theme parties, when some find those themes offensive.

Privately-owned Greek houses would be required to relinquish their facilities to other campus groups to hold events and meetings; the house's occupants and owners would have no say in what sorts of events took place there. The report also mandates changes to the organizations' selection and initiation practices so that, in essence, there won't be either.

Greek societies have been subjected to harsh criticism in recent years, and Dartmouth has been especially vicious in this regard. In the past year, Greek society members—half of all upperclassmen—have been painted as racists, sexists, drunkards, and buffoons by Dartmouth administrators and Trustees. It's no secret that the College resents the Greek houses for their dominance of campus politics and social life—the main obstacle to the College's more utopian vision. And so the Committee on the Student Life Initiative has singled out these particular students, in these particular off-campus residences, for special restrictions on their rights.

To justify the discrimination, Dartmouth points to assorted survey data regarding alcohol use, membership rates, and 'behavioral issues.' But what Dartmouth doesn't realize is that it's still discrimination. 'Fraternity profiling is no more acceptable than racial profiling,' 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. 'When police stop people because of their skin color, I am totally unimpressed by their citing aggregate statistics. Individuals are responsible for their own individual behavior and their own individual violations of the law. Profiling—by skin color, by politics, or by voluntary associational choice—is a contempt for individualism that is unseemly at a great university.'

Adds Silverglate: 'They wouldn't do this to somebody who was a racial minority student, but they would do it to a member of a fraternity. They don't understand that it is essentially the same thing. So it's just a question of them hypocritically failing to observe a single standard.'

Dartmouth has, for the past year, engaged in precisely the sort of pernicious stereotyping that it decries. Now the College is making those stereotypes official college policy, by differentiating students according to the associations they join and placing special burdens on those who join disfavored groups—fraternities and sororities.

No one can object if students who routinely attend classes drunk routinely fail their classes. Nor can anyone say that expulsion from the College is too harsh a sanction for violent offenders. Dartmouth, though, refuses to treat students as individuals or even adults, responsible for their choices, and insists, instead, that a centralized technocracy run their lives for them.

One wonders how the generation that now runs Dartmouth, who, as students, rejected intervention by college officials in their private lives, has come to champion the same administrative control in their own students' lives. The Committee argues that Dartmouth should nurture students' 'social, emotional, moral, and physical well-being'—that social and residential life is part of the 'learning experience' and so cannot be left to student devices. These are the same arguments once employed to mandate students' attendance at weekly chapel services, or to suppress politically disruptive speech and protest. The only difference today is that the academy is controlled by a different sort of ideologue.

Dartmouth's Student Handbook claims that the College respects its students' rights to 'freedom of expression and dissent' and even 'protest or demonstration.' But Dartmouth now seeks to prohibit students from joining together in voluntary associations to advance their shared goals or aspirations. Greek societies, for all the College's attempts to debase and to trivialize them, do entail the espousal of common beliefs and values; most maintain official creeds. Dartmouth, however, claims the authority to discipline students for attitudes or beliefs that administrators deem inappropriate at their college. Dartmouth—and this is devastating for a liberal educational institution—seeks to invalidate the personal moral choices of its students and to replace them with Dartmouth's prescribed institutional values.

Much of the report is justified in terms of diversity. Part of living in a diverse community is a certain discomfort with others' moral choices. Living in a diverse community at a liberal institution requires a respect for the rights of others to make their own moral choices governing their lives, and to express themselves according to the dictates of their own conscience. Dartmouth, however, doesn't want a diverse community. They don't mind students who look different, as long as they all think the same.

Dartmouth's new community is based on the College's refusal to respect students as individuals capable of moral choice. Students can't be trusted to control their own residences. They can't be trusted to plan their own social events. They can't be trusted to pick their own friends. They can't be trusted, in short, to arrange themselves according to the desires of Dartmouth's social planners.

It remains a curiosity that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement somehow culminated in restrictions on free speech, or that individuals who once held fast to the maxim, 'Never Trust Anyone Over 30,' suddenly can't conceive of university students as anything other than moral infants. If Dartmouth is really serious about producing free-thinkers, maybe it should try permitting its students to think freely.

Never Trust Anyone Under 30

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