Resilience.

By Joseph Rago | Monday, January 31, 2005

Resilience is no easy thing. It is, in cultural terms, the ability to bound back from adversity and overcome extreme circumstances. It is toughness, density. The opposites of resilience are weakness, fragility, vanity. Many are envious of things resilient, and lacking its temper themselves, their attacks build with clocklike regularity. But when cultures become soaked through with resilience, they begin to acquire something like permanence.

In this issue, we explore two important, contentious events in the history of the College. The controversies roiling around these issues are different, though they share many similarities, and their consequences, known and unknown, remain with us today. They both constitute, principally, betrayals of trust. This is a serious charge, but I believe I am supported by the evidence.

During the fall term, we acquired from an anonymous source hundreds of internal, confidential papers from the Student Life Initiative, specifically from the Trustee Committee that was convened following James Wright's accession to the Presidency and charged with radically overhauling the social culture of this campus. These papers are a wealth of primary source material—memorandums, reports, minutes, letters, agendas, copies of handwritten notes—of a kind that is simply unprecedented, and it is almost impossible to overstate their value.

These papers expose, in detail, an infamous moment in Dartmouth's history and they are examined here in depth. What they expose is sorry indeed: a strenuous effort that very nearly eliminated the Greek system entirely. To those familiar with campus politics, this is no bombshell. When you expect little, you find yourself thankful for small mercies. What is surprising is the level of detail, what we now know and what cannot be reasonably disputed. The Student Life Initiative is plainly not the benign stroll towards progress that it is pushed as these days.

It is somehow appropriate that these revelations come on the heels of the controversy surrounding Dean Karl Furstenberg and his smartass comments about the football team. Furstenberg, of course, famously dismissed "football, and the culture surrounding it" as "antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours" in correspondence with the President of Swarthmore, applauding him for cutting their team. "Other institutions would do well to follow your lead," he confided, on Dartmouth letterhead.

The uproar was swift and blistering, and poor Furstenberg was forced to recant, kind of. Taken collectively, the College's press releases and prepared statements of apology amount to a short treatise. The general argument is, this was a private letter expressing personal opinions, but an unfortunate instance of poor judgment. Anyone might have a right to poor judgment, but that is hardly a suitable defense for a man whose entire job comes down to making judgments. Furstenberg superintends the fine distinctions that determine the composition of the student body, and, as we all know, that is a deeply subjective process. The wound his personal credibility has suffered appears to be mortal.

We are in an academic environment, and the controversy here has turned strictly academic: that is, arcane and fantastically petty. The party line is that there's a "healthy tension" between Athletics and Admissions. But why is there any kind of tension at all, even the healthy kind, whatever that is? Some observers, most of them alumni, many of them former athletes and understandably outraged, have drawn the analogy: well, what if Furstenberg had directed his remarks towards any other group—blacks, or women, for instance? They're partially right: something is wrong when at Dartmouth, of all places, it is a so fashionable badge of intellectual authenticity to disparage the football team, or the athletes, or the Greeks, for that matter.

It's a mistake, though, to draw 'diversity' into this, and all its victims, real and imagined. There's a legitimate case to be made against the worst excesses of the diversity movement at Dartmouth, but then, many of the worst excesses have been moderated in recent years. When things grow too radical, there is usually a recentering, a return to common sense. And it's difficult to see how any informed and fair-minded person could object to broadening the Dartmouth experience to include historically-excluded groups. President William Jewett Tucker 1861 put it best at one of his Sunday Vesper Services. "We can easily broaden and not deepen," he said, "We should do both."

These issues detract from what is most striking about Furstenberg's comments, and aside from their spectacular imprudence, this is the way they're fraught with an unmistakable sense of,—this guy just doesn't get it. It's the deepening that's important, and Furstenberg, along with the buttoned-up covey that share his sentiments, don't seem to get the depth.

While the quality of the faculty can be uneven and the quality of the students can be uneven, there is little doubt as to the academic depth of Dartmouth. As for the rest of Dartmouth's depth, it is less certain.

And the governance here often seems to misunderstand or take for granted the experience of the place, or, worse, is busily at work negating it. James Wright has said we need to "salute difference," and he's right—but we need to turn the convention on its head and recover its original sense of meaning: not so much that Dartmouth students are different from each other, but that Dartmouth is different from everywhere else. And now, there are hints of suffocating anxiety: that breadth is replacing depth.

It is easy to be unhappy with the way this school is run. It is difficult, however, to be unhappy to be at Dartmouth. This, I think, is because the College is more permanent than plastic. Now, we should be reminded of the underpinnings that make this place great, which are so often today treated as irrelevant, as extraneous, or as embarrassments.

A robust athletic tradition and a dynamic Greek system are inherent to the character of Dartmouth, at least the equivalents a thriving intellectual culture. These, being assertions, are not entirely self-evident, but I will only assert them here, as in the pages that follow their character is rigorously fleshed out. Here is President David McLaughlin 1954 (who was recently described to me as a man who "lived and died for the College"), on athletics: "Clearly, the lessons of the liberal arts are manifest in the discipline and the sacrifice of athletic endeavor. Team and individual competitive endeavors are a positive force in the process of liberal learning at Dartmouth. Over the years, I have been persuaded that the scholar/athlete is a reliable model for determining leadership capacity for a broad range of roles within society." And here is a very lucid exposition issued by the Dean of the College in 1960, on the Greeks: "Fraternity life is inseparable from College life, and the one augments and completes the other... The loyalties and interests and ideas of the seventy-two percent of upperclassmen who are fraternity men are totally consistent with and an integral part of the loyalties and interests and ideas which are Dartmouth itself. Together they do, in fact, form the cornerstone of campus experience."

Things, certainly, have changed. What the two conjoined studies reveal is an institution tepidly unsure of itself—fundamentally insecure, uncomfortable with its own unique character. Discussing American letters in 1929, Robert Frost 1896 spoke about how "we seem to lack the courage to be ourselves." The same might be said of Dartmouth College. I derive no pleasure in saying this.

But this issue is also an expression of optimism, a study in resilience. The Greek system managed to weather the S.L.I., and today it is stronger and more vital than ever. The upside of the whole football matter is that the team will probably be strengthened in the aftermath. A new coach, Buddy Teevens 1979, managed to extract several fine concessions as part of his new contract. It appears the football team will be reinvigorated in the coming years.

Dartmouth is resilient. The values and institutions that lend this place meaning have lasted. They are still important, and they are not done yet—not yet, not yet. When it is thought about in this sense, the more invaluable this world of endeavor seems.

Is Dartmouth more permanent than not? I do not know, and cannot know—no one can. I hope so. But maybe we should say with Vigil, forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. These offenses are bad, but they could be far, far worse. Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.

Resilience.

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