Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2000/02/07/csli_more_of_the_same.php
Monday, February 7, 2000
The report produced this term by the Committee on the Student Life Initiative (CSLI) is merely the most recent in a long line of College analyses of social and residential life. Like its predecessors, the report deals at length with the Co-ed, Fraternity, and Sorority (CFS) system. The Committee, however, seems to have paid little attention to the effect of those previous reports on College policy—both what has already been attempted, and what controls are currently in place. The majority of CSLI recommendations on the CFS system are either redundant, or repetitions of failed experiments of the past.
In 1983, a set of 'Minimum Standards,' still in place today, was established as the basis for College recognition of each CFS house. At that time, the College imposed a physical plant standard on Greek houses. That standard was met by few, if any, of the houses at the time. Greek house corporations expended significant sums of money to bring their houses up to par. Since then the College has regularly inspected CFS houses to see that they are complying with the standard; failure to do so is punishable by derecognition.
New standards for physical plants, as proposed in the CSLI report, are only necessary, therefore, if the College has failed to hold houses accountable to its own standard, already in effect. Nothing has changed on the Dartmouth campus that mandates a higher burden for CFS houses today. If the problem is that the standard is not being enforced, the logical plan for the College would be, simply, to enforce it—rather than to raise the bar higher.
It should be noted that in 1984, the cost of the College-mandated renovations drove Chi Heorot Fraternity into bankruptcy—resulting in the sale of its property to the College. Members of the Committee, perhaps, have proposed the new change in the hope that history will repeat itself on a larger scale.
Another recommendation of the Committee that is entirely redundant is that the Office of Safety & Security have 'unlimited and continuous' access to all CFS houses. This may sound like a great imposition, which of course it is, but it is not one that has been held back in the past by the houses themselves. The CFS Council Constitution, adopted in the early 1990s, explicitly permits any College officer to enter any recognized house at his discretion.
In other words, the reason S&S officers do not conduct constant patrols of CFS houses has nothing to do with their authority, and everything to do with their own assessments of feasibility and desirability. This is not a problem that needs to be solved by new policy-making from the administration. If anything, the College should be asking why the patrol system, totally under its own control, functions as it does now.
The same argument applies to the recommendation that calls for unannounced inspections of CFS houses to judge compliance with physical standards. The College, at this moment, already has the option to do exactly that. The reason it doesn't perform such inspections is its own employees feel that to do so would be unfair and counterproductive.
Pushing rush back to sophomore winter is another recommendation that has been tried in the past. In 1991, the College changed rush in precisely that way. The stated purpose then was that students needed more time to make an intelligent decision about whether to affiliate with a CFS house. This time, the ostensible purpose is to relieve the fall housing crunch.
The fact that no such relief occurred in 1991-92 when the same policy was in place apparently escaped the Committee's notice, as did the fact that rush was moved to fall term after that brief trial run. The reason for the change in 1992 is that Winter Rush had failed to achieve the main goal—to reduce substantially the membership of CFS houses. A mere eight years later the Committee has chosen to resurrect the issue. One can only assume that either they didn't do their research or, more likely, that they have greater hope this time around for a late rush to reduce Greek numbers.
The events of the early 1990s are also relevant to the Committee's proposal to remove taps from the campus social scene. The objective of this proposal is to change the drinking culture at Dartmouth. The theory, apparently, is that taps make it too easy for people to consume large quantities of beer in a short period of time. The essential component of that alcoholic equation is the kegs; they provide quick, cheep, and plentiful beer to Dartmouth's drinkers.
A keg ban was actually attempted in 1992, and failed miserably to impact the campus drinking culture. The ban was rescinded a year later by then-Dean of the College Lee Pelton, a notorious opponent of drinking cultures at a number of schools. If even he acknowledged that removing the kegs didn't work then, one should be skeptical that the Committee's ban on taps years later will accomplish anything substantive.
The CSLI recommendations discussed above are the most significant of those that replicate existing College policies, or that duplicate failed experiments. There are, of course, others. As a whole, the CSLI report is seriously lacking a realistic assessment of what the College is actually doing—compared to what the College says it is doing.
In a number of areas it is also clear that original and creative thinking were not in great supply on the Committee. Sadly, both of these trends are noticeable mainly in the recommendations concerning the Greek system. In many respects it looks as though far less thought was devoted to envisioning how the CFS system could work with Dartmouth than the Committee spent on ways to expedite the removal of Greek houses from Dartmouth, and to replace them with College-run facilities.
For all President Wright's talk about 'reimagining' social life at the College, the Report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative is filled with more of the same old proposals to cripple the Greek system that have periodically resurfaced since 1976, when English Professor James Epperson first proposed that the College eliminate fraternities. Of course, the scope of the report is professedly much grander; there is talk of common houses and residential clusters and College-trained, certified beer-pourers for parties—all of which is supposed to make old ideas seem excitingly new. Or at least to make the same warmed-over platitudes students and alumni have been fed for twenty years more palatable the nth time around.