Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/05/13/the_state_of_discourse_at_dartmouth.php
Monday, May 13, 2002
A great silence has descended upon the nation's college campuses. Once centers of national debate and dissent, colleges are now populated by students more concerned with the state of their résumés than the state of the world. In last month's New York Times, cultural critic Michiko Kakutani examines this phenomenon and diagnoses today's students with 'diminished debate syndrome.'
What has caused the syndrome? The cultural experts disagree. Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their book on the post-Gen X generation, Millennials Rising, argue that students themselves are the cause. Unlike the rebellious baby boomers, today's students value homogenization and conciliation. Kakutani suggests that national disillusionment with the vitriolic partisanship of politics in the 1990's may have something to do with this as well.
Several historians and professors argue that the rise of multiculturalism and deconstructionist scholarship have led to a debate-squelching environment of relativist thought and highly personalized arguments. Perhaps most controversial is the view, expressed by writer David Brooks last year in Atlantic Monthly, that today's students aren't interested in joining political or social movements because they're 'not trying to buck the system; they're trying to climb it.'
Brooks' argument can certainly be applied here at Dartmouth, where activist and non-activist students alike routinely decry the general apathy of the student body. Dartmouth students are often stereotyped as straight-shooting I-bankers in training. While far-left activism is fairly common—the pro-Palestine rally and the recent anti-ANWR drilling campaign—widespread student activism or anything resembling vibrant debate on national issues is absent. Conservative views are generally excluded from campus discussion, perhaps because so few professors or college officials consider these views even minimally acceptable. The result is a slate of events like the recent 'Perspectives on the Death Penalty,' which featured three speakers, all of them firmly opposed to the penalty. 'Perspective on the Death Penalty' would have been a more accurate title.
Even a recent debate on slavery reparations (which did actually include more than one perspective) pitted the strongly liberal Charles Ogletree against a moderate liberal. Wouldn't the addition of a conservative viewpoint have provided a far more balanced debate? The political one-sidedness of Dartmouth discussion threatens to render discussion irrelevant in a nation where more or less half of all voters vote for conservatives.
The real problem is that there is very little nationally relevant political discussion by students of either major party on campus. Student apathy is to be expected when the most prominent political voices are those of the radicals. The Dartmouth Greens are far more visible and active on campus than the Young Democrats, the Free Press offers little more than anti-globalization cheerleading, and the Campus Libertarians are at least as prominent as the College Republicans. It's difficult to get very many students excited about Marxism, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, or Randian economics.
Dartmouth can also certainly be an isolating environment for students. Put anyone in a small New Hampshire town, give them a full course load, sign them up for several activities and offer them free beer on Wednesdays and weekends, and their involvement with national issues is likely to decline. But are most Dartmouth students truly apathetic and, as Kakutani's article suggests, frightened of taking a stand lest they offend anyone?
Seeking to gain some insight on this, I surveyed the Op-Ed pages of the Daily Dartmouth, where students are given fairly free reign to write what they want. The pertinent question is, at a college where a Daily D columnist can be attacked for questioning the usefulness of wearing ribbons signaling one's opposition to rape (which we can safely assume most people oppose, ribbons or no), what do students want to write about?
The answer is actually fairly encouraging. Of 166 editorials printed in the Daily D from the beginning of 2002 until April 26, 93 took some identifiable position on a national or campus issue (these numbers reflect my best judgement as to the primary content of an editorial). The Daily D's Op-Ed page is often criticized for hosting a large number of 'editorials' consisting mostly of personal anecdotes or cheeky observations, and indeed there were a lot of these, 73. Still, it seems that Dartmouth students do have something to discuss besides their summer vacations or job prospects.
I broke down the 93 'issue' editorials into categories in order to get a better sense of what students felt compelled to write about. The largest of these categories was, encouragingly, National Issues, 47. Thirteen of these editorials focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the rest addressed topics ranging from cloning to the death penalty to religious issues to election predictions.
The political perspectives of these editorials were fairly balanced, with a slight tilt towards liberal politics, reflective of the majority liberal student body (62% of students polled supported Gore in 2000 compared to 23% for Bush).
The second largest category of 'issues' editorials was Academic Issues (35), with 25 of these pertaining strictly to Dartmouth. These included both non-controversial complaints about DDS and campus bicycle etiquette (though these were counted as 'issue' editorials for focusing on clear policy recommendations) and more controversial screeds either in favor of or against the Greek system. The proposed adoption of the Asian-American Studies minor was also a hot topic. The Greek and AAS editorials were also fairly balanced in number between for and against, with slightly more pro-Greek editorials—not surprising given the Greek system's popular approval.
These topics were also popular in the final 'issues' category, which I term Debate/Response (11). These editorials were written entirely in response to some other editorial with which the author disagreed. The mere presence of these editorials, coupled with the significant number of debate-style Letters to the Editor, suggests that there is at least some contentious debate on campus and national issues at Dartmouth. Although I wasn't always personally concerned with the topics of these argumentative editorials, as a reader I would gladly trade ten personal anecdotes for one of them.
So, contrary to the predictions of the cultural critics, Dartmouth students do occasionally take controversial stands and are willing to criticize and even offend others in the course of editorial debate. Why then does there seem to be so little debate on national or even campus issues outside of the Daily D's Op-Ed pages? I would guess that the combination of the College's dislike of dissent from its far-left positions coupled with the busy schedules of students largely accounts for the lack of structured campus debate. Debate over campus issues, the issues students are probably most directly concerned about, is also stifled by the pervasive and correct impression that students have little or no say in determining the College's policies. Handpicked College committees are not forums for vibrant debate over the future of Dartmouth, and even they have only a minimal impact on College decisions.
This dearth of person-to-person debate is especially unfortunate because it would likely be more fruitful and interesting than the occasional editorial debate in the Daily D. This is especially true for national issues. Though most student editorial writers are well informed, one can just as easily find opinion writing by experts in, say, the New York Times, or a variety of online political journals. Our nation's pundits, however, do not travel to Dartmouth to debate students. Students clearly hold strong opinions on national issues; sharpening their arguments in vocal debate would be beneficial and most likely fun. It would even better if students could debate campus issues in front of students who could actually vote on College policy. As Johns Hopkins professor Amanda Anderson puts it in Kakutani's Times article, 'To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, while they're in school.' If only more professors at Dartmouth shared Anderson's views.
Recently, Dartmouth's Greens, Democrats, Libertarians and Republicans debated whether U.S. foreign policy is 'imperialistic.' While a more policy-oriented debate (e.g. 'nation-building, pro or con') would have probably allowed for a less dogmatic argument, the debate is an event to be celebrated, the first such debate I can recall in my four years at Dartmouth. If Dartmouth is to have balanced and vibrant debate, it will most likely occur at student-run events like these. Let me be the first to call for all politically motivated Dartmouth students to put aside their differences, and then argue about them.