Overblown Rhetoric and Tiny Tragedies

By Andrew Grossman | Monday, May 7, 2001

I spent last weekend—seemingly the only spring we've had so far between last month's snowfalls and this month's inescapable heat—in Woodstock enjoying the unhurried rhythm of off-season, small town New Hampshire. Between chatting with locals and helping a little girl who'd had difficulties with her bicycle, I basked in the sun working slowly through the pages of a so-trite-as-to-be-transcendent novel.

Life moves faster in Hanover, from crisis to crisis to crisis. One responds, but one hardly has time to think amidst the chaos of homeworks and readings and examinations and thrown accusations and administrative fit-takings and so on and so on and so on. One cannot truly be in repose on the Hanover Green when BlitzMail beckons from just across the street.

Thus, there is a need for small jaunts out-of-town and a need for reflection on the complexities brought on in chaos. If only more of the Dartmouth community took such occasional cures.

Consider the 'Public Letter to President James Wright and the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College' run in the May 3rd Daily Dartmouth as an advertisement and signed by 101 members of the College's faculty. The letter accuses Dartmouth's Greek system of 'acts of verbal and sexual violence,' of causing 'systematic and incalculable harm' to both students and the faculty's own 'pedagogical work[s].'

Sitting on a bench in Woodstock, Vermont, the letter appears more easily as what it is: posturing and campus provincialism, the overblown rhetoric of those unable to remove themselves from the day-to-day tiny tragedies of campus life. It is impossible to take seriously, a parody from the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For the past two weeks, we on campus have gone over Zeta Psi ad nauseam. Heated, impassioned debate has left the matter in the hands of College administrators who will do, as always, as is their want—likely to issue an edict that concludes that the fraternity may apply for re-recognition in the short space of two years. Their crime? Discussing women crudely.

A pastry chef I met in Woodstock was unimpressed. After divining my Dartmouth affiliation the gentleman, from behind his counter, was eager to comment on the story that he had read in the Rutland Herald a day or two before. 'The things we used to do back when I was in college,' he exclaimed. 'I guess I'd be thrown out of college nowadays.' Still, he wondered, 'Why's everyone over there in such a snit? They put in naked pictures of girls or something?' I explained to him as he rang up my corn muffin and orange juice that the only naked woman involved, topless, was not even a student. He chuckled. 'I never understand these things.'

And for good reason. Divorced from the hubbub of campus, there's little decipherable in the College's response to Zeta Psi or the recent 'Public Letter.' All is reduced to a simple disagreement between free-wheeling, occasionally over-zealous, limit-pushing youths and their buttoned-up professors. Thankfully, phrases like 'substantive changes in student life' and 'institutionalized practices of sexist and racist humiliation' mean little off-campus when used with respect to college life. Students, given their age and experience, will be students. And thus college will always be college. Political affiliations may have shifted since the Left overran the academy and excised the civil liberties plank of its platform, but the tensions of college politics remain more or less the same, even as grievances shrink into minutiae and superlative language consequently multiplies.

Given these tensions, no college will ever become the utopia the reform-minded deem to be right-around-the-corner of massive upheaval. Nor will any college distance itself enough from self-proclaimed do-gooders to allow students all the freedoms they desire—such may be incompatible with maintaining a faculty, nowadays. So, given that we'll undoubtedly be butting heads for our entire academic tenure—well into alumnus-hood even for those of us who find the tenure-tack unappealing—why not step back and think about what it is we're really arguing about. Are we fighting for values and freedoms or petty grievances and small wounds?

And, for those whose minds are forever in Hanover, how long does it take for the brain to atrophy so that it is no longer able to tell the difference?

Overblown Rhetoric and Tiny Tragedies

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