The Systematic Division of Dartmouth

By Review Staff | Monday, January 24, 2000

The recommendations proposed this week by the Committee on the Student Life Initiative are nominally rooted in the spirit of 'The Dartmouth Way,' defined by the Committee as the basic guiding principles of the Dartmouth educational enterprise. It would have been more honest and accurate of the Committee to acknowledge that the new Dartmouth they are advocating has little in common with that of the past 231 years other than location. The residential and social life plan that the recommendations present amounts to a total alteration of the face of the Dartmouth experience, and indeed one that is in line neither with the College's past, nor with the principles that were supposed to guide its future.

The members of the Committee have said repeatedly in the days since the report's release that the changes to the Greek System should not overshadow the new plans for residential and social life. In many respects this is true, though not in the way it is intended by its advocates. The elimination of the Greek system—which is inherent in the new standards to be applied to it—is no more boldly wrongheaded than the rest of the report, and may in fact be less so.

The centerpiece of the new residential life plan bears striking similarities to the residential college systems in place at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. All students will spend their first three years living in the same residential cluster. Cluster social areas will be built for programming purposes, including parties where alcohol may be served. Small scale dining facilities serving light meals will be placed in each cluster as well. Students will live, work, socialize, and often eat within the same building complex, and with the same group of people, for all but a year of their Dartmouth experience.

The inevitable result will be the exact opposite of President Wright's oft-repeated call for everyone at the College to truly feel part of a single 'Dartmouth Community.' As at the aforementioned universities that currently have systems of this nature, the campus will be split along the lines of the clusters in which students spend all their time.

Students who have been encouraged by the system to interact with only one set of people in every aspect of their lives, save their classes and extra-curricular activities, will rarely venture out of this ready-made comfort zone for the nebulous purpose of creating a 'Dartmouth Community.'

The cluster system, however, is only one piece of the divisive new residential system. Another is the concept of seniors-only housing. While more luxurious apartment-style living for seniors does have merit, in conjunction with the clusters it can only lead to a disastrous lack of interaction between seniors and underclassmen. The Committee appears to ignore the realities of the way actual people behave. Seniors, in their own living and social space, will not be returning to their old clusters for social activities. They will, inevitably, associate with the groups of senior friends they have chosen to live with for their final year. This will mean the end of the friendships between older and younger students which have been one of the unique features of the Dartmouth experience.

Similarly, the freshman housing plan which would receive a trial run under the Committee's recommendations will eliminate the opportunity for freshmen to meet upperclassmen. While the Committee has been wise enough not to argue for immediate implementation of this plan, it has opened a dangerous door. As there is no quantitative means for comparing freshman-only and mixed housing, and no freshman student will ever be able to experience both, this experiment will require the same value judgement it does now.

Centralized dining for full meals—proposed as a buffer to a disunion of the campus—is laughably inadequate. That it is possible for people to meet random strangers in a dining hall is surely true. That it will occur enough to have any campus-wide effect is wildly unrealistic.

Certainly the campus social options proposed by the Committee can not be held up, even by the Committee itself, as an answer to this problem. The entire focus of social life will be placed within the clusters, with all the attendant problems already explained. Outside of this will be larger programming spaces, whose ineffectiveness as a genuine social alternative has been amply demonstrated over the past decade, and some form of campus alcohol service establishments. While the latter are, indeed, long overdue for creation at the College, they will do nothing to lessen the campus split. Since only students of legal age, the vast majority of whom are seniors, will be able to make use of these facilities, they will merely exacerbate the aforementioned removal of the senior class from interaction with underclassmen.

The Greek system's greatest service to campus social life has always been its openness. Students of different classes and interests mix freely on weekend nights in fraternities and sororities free of charge. No select group of students monopolizes these events. There is never a majority of students who know each other at them, and so everyone on campus attends with the assurance of not being out of place. These open events are to be done away with.

On the superficial level, house guest capacities are to be halved by prohibiting the use of basements. At the same time bartenders are to be required and tap systems removed, vastly increasing the expense of holding parties. Were these the only recommendations made, they might well end free parties open to the campus. But the reality is that the number of Greek houses is to be radically reduced over the next five years, when it is expected that the system as a residential and social entity will be abolished indefinitely. So over the next five years there will be fewer and fewer events where all segments of the campus can gather, and will want to gather. By 2005 there will be none at all. And for no reason other than to reduce the influence of fraternities and sororities, as an end in itself.

Greek societies would no longer be able to open their houses to the campus, so unaffiliated students, the majority of whom participate in the social life of the Greek system, would no longer have that option. Since most students enjoy these events, the end of open parties might, ironically, lead to a rise in Greek membership. Unaffiliated students would need to join a house to continue to participate. Of course, the ultimate effect would be to divide the campus and, the College hopes, isolate Greek members.

Social life is not the only area that will be hurt by the recommendations for the Greek system. The proposals also aim to remove the only barricade against the problems of Committee's residential college program. Greek membership, whatever problems one may ascribe to it, causes people of different backgrounds and interests to bond—central to that experience are the experiences of a pledge term, and of living together in the house. Under the new arrangement pledge terms will be prohibited, underclassmen in the houses will be gone, and, of course, the houses themselves will be eliminated in a few years.

Members of Greek societies maintain friendships outside their own houses, and these other friends are invited to participate in house events, and to meet one's brothers or sisters. Greek affiliation has never meant being limited to a small group of other students, but having a strong base of devoted friends from which to venture out and meet others. Social events held by Greek houses, moreover, are always open to the whole Dartmouth community.

The new residential life system, however, would isolate Greek and unaffiliated students from each other, since open social events would no longer be possible. New students will befriend the students in their clusters and stay with them, with no impetus—and few opportunities—to meet others. Students will, in short, be bound by institutional walls, confined by the College's residential system to a small segment of the campus. In many ways, the new residential system exacerbates what the College believes are the worst aspects of Greek societies: exclusion, isolation, and a divided Dartmouth community.

The new residential clusters are, in essence, second-rate versions of fraternities—except that students don't choose to join. At root, Dartmouth's current social system recognizes that students are entitled to choose their own residential environment and to direct their own social lives—though those choices are often heavily regulated. But the Committee's Dartmouth does not even regard choice as good for students. Under its system, you WILL be in a cluster for three years. You WILL NOT live in a Greek house, at least not unless you matriculate by next fall and make a very lucky choice with the house you join. In the new 'Community of Learning,' to use President Wright's phrase, you may choose to study, or not study, any academic subject, but you may not choose your friends, your home, or your out-of-classroom and off-campus social activities.

The report suggests that professors employ Thursday morning classes and exams as a means to transform the College's social life—an indication of Dartmouth's real priorities. The College has abdicated all authority to guide students' academic careers, but feels compelled to direct their social lives. Dartmouth's priorities, if its aim is to further the academic mission of the College, are amiss.

Dartmouth may have significant flaws, but these flaws are not primarily the result of student control over social life. Students have built at Dartmouth a community and campus life that puts Dartmouth on top in all surveys of student satisfaction. The proposal released this week is not even arguably a set of improvements to the residential and social system. It is the wholesale dismantling of the student-run social system and the imposition of a balkanized and rigidly regulated social order, controlled by Dartmouth's unwieldy technocracy.

'Before I attended Dartmouth I was told by an alum that at the College, wherever you went you would always know someone, but never know everyone,' observes one Dartmouth junior. 'It was what that alum thought was at the heart of Dartmouth's unique appeal. This has proved, in my time here, to be quite true.' At the Committee's Dartmouth however, students will often know everyone, and often know no one—and no longer be part of one Dartmouth community.

The Systematic Division of Dartmouth

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