College to Block Review Delivery in Dorms

By Andrew Grossman and Alexander Wilson | Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Dean Redman has announced that, when dorm locking goes into effect this coming summer or fall term, all commercial deliveries to students' dorm rooms will be curtailed. In this category he includes student publications, such as the Review, the Free Press, and the Contemporary. He has said, though, that students will, unofficially, be allowed to deliver publications to rooms in their own dorms and, perhaps, even clusters (a grouping of two, three, or four dorms).

Who benefits from such a policy? Well, the College's administration clearly does, being subject to less potent criticism, but also does the administration's chief information service, the Daily Dartmouth. With its distribution racks all over campus, the Daily D is the only publication that will see its reach unaffected by this policy (and will benefit, comparatively, as other publications find it harder to reach on-campus readers). It will also, like the administration, benefit from less criticism. In short, this policy will give the College license to pursue the publishers of any publication with which it disagrees while allowing the distribution of others.

And, conversely, who is harmed? If Redman does allow informal (within one's dorm) distribution, then the biggest losers will be students who hold minority viewpoints. The College is effectively saying that for a publication, flyer, or leaflet to reach the entire campus, it must have the support of a certain number of students (however many dorms or clusters there are). Whether an opinion is actively unpopular or simply as yet unknown, its proponents will not be able to reach students as easily or as effectively as those who espouse ideas with broader support. This is directly counter to the liberalism that the College professes to hold. Of course, the biggest losers will be students themselves, whose intellectual lives will be that much less rich for not having been exposed to dissenting points of view.

The College can make a clear distinction between student publications and commercial enterprises which hire students to make deliveries. It might simply examine publishers' for-profit or non-profit status. That Dean Redman chooses not to make this simple determination exposes yet again his disregard for student dissention and speech rights.

The purpose of dorm locking is to protect students. How the banning of deliveries relates to safety is the real issue. The only reason to limit food deliveries is to keep people from entering the dorms who wouldn't normally be able to. That group doesn't include students, who already have access. A strong case can be made that letting students deliver food would lead student employees of local establishments to lend their ID's to non-student employees for delivery purposes, justifying a ban on all deliveries. But this has no applicability to publications which are operated entirely by students. Banning Free Press deliveries won't have the slightest impact on the possibility of an assault at Dartmouth, which is the entire rationale for door locks in the first place.

Moreover, locking dorms doesn't increase safety. At best, it creates the illusion of safety for those who want it for just as long as there isn't another incident in the dorms. At that point even the illusion will be gone. In return for this immense benefit, Dartmouth is about to cut off a large portion of the intellectual ferment among students by limiting access to student publications and drastically reduce students knowledge of what goes on in the world. Plus, there's the added perk of having their movements constantly recorded.

College to Block Review Delivery in Dorms

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