It's Nonsense, in Theory

By Ryan D. Gorsche | Wednesday, January 14, 2004

President Wright released his five-year report detailing what he sees as the goals and successes of his administration to date. Truth be told, the period from 1998-2003 hasn't been completely unsuccessful: Dartmouth has a few new buildings, some Ivy League championships, and a few more anniversaries under its belt. But, along the way, the College nearly lost its swim team, closed Sanborn Library, and obstructed free discourse by banning door-to-door delivery of student publications. Best to balance those positives with a few negatives, lest the student body feel they've scored a $140,000 bargain.

For now, I'll set aside the usual quarrels: Maybe President Wright never signed off on the door-to-door ban, and, to be fair, it wasn't his E-Trade.com account that left the school's investments overly bullish. He has, however, stood by this statement since his inauguration: "Dartmouth is indeed a university in all but name." The disagreement between Wright and conservative students—whether they be class of '45 or '05—isn't merely semantic. As Wright has acknowledged: "The perceived tension between research and teaching reminds us of the need to balance these two aspects of our mission—the education of our students and the creation of new knowledge." This tenuous balance is not what most prospective students envisioned while perusing their admissions prospectus; most wanted solid teaching and the ability to leave Dartmouth fully versed in our cultural canon—not to be classroom guinea pigs for a left-leaning professor's thought experiments (see TDR "Brown Band-Aids V. Board of Education" 11/14/03)

I'm not calling for the revocation of the medical school's charter or a real-estate auction down Tuck Drive, but as Review seniors reminisce about the past four years and our freshmen look to their immediate futures, all usually agree that this balance is lopsided. Dartmouth recently unveiled "Dartmouth Faculty Scholarship Today," a website devoted to tracking the sundry pursuits of our professors. Some of it seems interesting: "Do Technologically Advanced Weapons Make for Shorter Wars?" by Professor Alan Stam. But much of it occasionally reads like this:

If one examines cultural subdialectic theory, one is faced with a choice: either accept deconstructive theory or conclude that the goal of the poet is significant form, given that Bataille's essay on the neocapitalist paradigm of discourse is invalid. However, if cultural subdialectic theory holds, we have to choose between the neocapitalist paradigm of discourse and subcapitalist narrative. The main theme of de Selby's model of postdialectic socialism is the rubicon, and eventually the stasis, of capitalist society.

That's right. Pure gibberish. This example is, in fact, complete nonsense; it is excerpted from the Postmodernism Generator—a program that randomly creates academic essays. Yet, throughout my Dartmouth career I've read even more preposterous essays purporting to provide insight into whatever debate the class was entering. If you think these complaints are only those of a disgruntled undergraduate, even the professors are starting to agree. In a New York Times article entitled "The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter," in a moment of candor, one of the academy's own, Professor Sander L. Gilma from the University of Illinois-Chicago admitted:

I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways.

This is where Dartmouth College—rather than Dartmouth University—provides students the greatest service for an undergraduate education. Once Dartmouth students graduated with a firm grasp of the humanities and some sciences—subscribing alumni remind us of that regularly—and even if it wasn't on the cutting edge of the Academy, it provided a solid foundation for graduate study and, more importantly, a fine life. But now, without careful choices by the student, most class consists of a slim volume of primary material and a thick file of essays straight from the Postmodernism Generator. Four years of Dartmouth no longer guarantee a proper education, but rather a mishmash of theory learned through an academic trial by fire.

It's Nonsense, in Theory

Article Tools

Related Articles