President Wright's Road to Damascus
By Joseph Rago | Friday, March 11, 2005
On February 7th, 2005, I initiated the following exchange with President James Wright and Dean of the College James Larimore under the auspices of the 'Dartmouth Town Hall Meeting," organized by the Student Assembly. It concerns the recent Review investigation into the inner workings of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative.
 — President Wright and Dean Larimore at the Town Hall Meeting. —
Joseph Rago: My name is Joe Rago. I'm a member of the Class of 2005, history honors major, Phi Delta Alpha, and the editor in chief of The Dartmouth Review. I have a fairly specific question, so I hope you will bear with me.
In the most recent issue of The Review, we published important disclosures about the Student Life Initiative. President Wright has indicated to me that he does not wish to comment on the deliberations of the S.L.I. committee, as he was not one of its members.
However, we also found indications that the S.L.I. is a part of a much broader effort to fundamentally change the character of Dartmouth College. These come by way of a former Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Sandy McCulloch, who was involved tangentially in the S.L.I. McCulloch situates the S.L.I. in the larger context of an effort by the Trustees and the administration to diminish the importance of "the Dartmouth family"—that is, loyalty, fellowship, to each other, to the institution, in favor of an increased emphasis of academics. In order to do so, the Greek system must be gradually phased out. Though McCulloch stepped down in 1988, his continued involvement with the S.L.I. committee demonstrates his influence.
In 1987—while McCulloch was still on the Board—President Wright chaired an ad hoc committee that came to many of the same conclusions as the S.L.I. committee: that is, to gradually deemphasize the Greeks in the life of the College.
After the S.L.I. was handed down Trustee William King commented, "These are issues that have been on our plate for a long time," Trustee Kate Stith-Cabranes echoed, "They have been since I became a Trustee ten years ago. Last year, we had an opportunity to choose a new President who we knew would address these issues."
"The decision that was made by the Trustees last week was two decades in the making," President Wright explained at the time. "When the Trustees chose me as President, they had these issues in mind."
"Such a cultural modification may take 5-15 years to implement, and is, I feel, far larger with more widespread implications than we now realize," Norman McCulloch postulated. "The increase in new facilities and social alternatives must take place before, or in lockstep with, the decline of the Greek System. Change must be gradual."
All this seems to me evidence suggesting a slow-motion institutional agenda.
I hope the President will please specifically address these issues.
James Wright: Joe, I will talk now and you're quite right, you did allow me to see some of these documents before you published them and I felt I did not want to comment on the letters and correspondence that were communicated in confidence. I guess they are less confidential now.
I think the Student Life Initiative has been many years in the making, in fact it goes back to 1969 when I came here. There was a great deal of discussion about fraternities and sororities, well at that time, only fraternities at Dartmouth. I think what I have learned over the last several years is that we need to continue to work with organizations to make them a stronger part of this community. I think that your own house is one that did not have to be reorganized again last year. We agreed to do that because of brothers there that wanted to bring it back. We worked with you to move to change the rush to the fall term in response to the requests that came from some of the houses. I think those things are contrary to some sort of secret plan that you suggest.
Sandy McCullouch did leave the Board in 1988. He had no ongoing goal. I suspect if you interviewed him today he would not be very happy with the way the Student Life Initiative is moving along. My view of what it is that we should be doing is to work with the Greek houses and I think we have continued to do that. I am pleased with the progress that most of the organizations have made over the last several years and the Board is satisfied with the progress that was made. I think if you simply look in at all the secret correspondence of the Committee and find people writing letters that propose all sorts of things—I can assure you I have seen a lot of proposals for a lot of things having to do with the Greek organizations and other things. So the group of ideas the Board announced early in the April of 2000 is affirmative of the Student Life Initiative and its goals—there are no secret documents behind that.
That is basically what we've got. I think what I have said to many of you in many conversations over the years is that it's very hard to prove the absence of a secret plan and that all we can do is to continue to work with the organizations that we have. I think that the presidents and the leaders of the houses over the last several years along with alumni leadership have worked well with us to try to move things along and to make certain the houses play a part in this integrated community. I think you're doing a good job. And I'm satisfied with this and I think Phi Delt, by the way, has done a good job in that regard. I'm just sorry that people keep looking for secret plans to demonstrate something that isn't there. What's there is what it is that we're doing.
James Larimore: There may be one or two other people in the room who can join me in saying that we're recovering members of the Student Life Initiative Committee, the original group who was charged with taking a look at the upperclassmen experiences at Dartmouth and make some recommendations to the Board. The Committee met with a lot of people and Sandy McCullough was one of the many people who had a look at things. The Committee definitely did its own work and, in the great Dartmouth tradition, did its own thinking and came up with a set of recommendations to the Board. The Board accepted some recommendations and set aside some others, that's also part of the way the process works in a place like this. I wanted to tell Joe—it's been a while since I had the opportunity to teach in a classroom setting so I wanted to teach a little bit of information now from your remarks.
You were absolutely accurate when you said that Sandy McCullough had addressed the office of the College and was tangentially involved...* When you say you think this is evidence of continuing influence, I really think that's a pretty bogus claim. He spent probably the better part of an hour with the Committee and then moved on but the Committee did its homework and met with lots of other people after that. Some people were pleased with the recommendations that the group made and some people weren't. The reason that I point this out is to draw the connection to the way I think about this in the classroom, which is that I think that the paper you're involved in sometimes does very good job of working up a set of facts, which is an obligation when being involved in journalism, but its also important to take into equal account evidence that confirms what you believe and evidence that disproves what you believe. I don't know that so far there's been a great deal of disconfirming evidence that has been put out there. All that I can put out there is that.
What follows is my evaluation of the exchange, and should be considered a companion piece to the February 1st article.
At the Town Meeting, I was pursuing a different line of inquiry than the one President Wright and Dean Larimore spoke to. I was questioning (a) the historical circumstances of the Student Life Initiative and hoping to (b) get into what that said about the present and the future.
College officials of course have the obligation to steer the course with an even keel—whatever they say is highly-scrutinized and often triggers controversy, as the recent explosions here in Hanover over Dean Karl Furstenberg and down in Cambridge over Lawrence Summers will readily attest. In any event, the administrators addressed both parts of my question, and somewhat disingenuously, I thought, to maintain that even keel.
They dismissed the first part with intimations of crypto-conspiricist pathologies—an imagined secret plan that existed only in paranoid minds. It's a point, and a canny rhetorical strategy that I might have employed if our positions were reversed.
President Wright is a historian, and a fairly good one at that, from what I hear. One essence of History as a discipline is a willingness to ask questions—not to take things at face value. This does not appear to be President Wright's philosophy as an administrator. I mainly drew correspondences, marshaled facts, and raised questions. These questions were always open-ended and filled with qualifiers emphasizing the contingency and choice of the matter. There was no how-dare-you indignation. And, contrary to Dean Larimore's assertions that I ignored "disconfirming evidence," the S.L.I. article in fact cited every argument that he and President Wright were able to assemble in support of their support for the Greeks.
 — James Wright comments on the "Wright Report" in 1987. — That being said, however, no one can reasonably look at the last twenty years of College life and not be concerned about the fortunes of the fraternities and sororities. We know even more now with the S.L.I. disclosures. In fact the S.L.I—in its development, announcement, deliberation, and execution—is full of anti-Greek overtones. Sandy McCulloch only served up the worst of it.
It is more difficult when we talk about the present. It is easy to make predictions about the future based on extrapolations from the events of the past. However clear the trends—here that might be defined as sensitivity to historical indications—predictions remain still only predictions. I do not have a crystal ball.
Perhaps it is best to envision the issue as a cannon firing a shot at some indeterminate angle and with indeterminate force, and we are to somehow chart the trajectory of the ball as it moves through the air. This, it hardly needs be said, is a tricky thing—not just because the ball is still moving and we would like to know where it will land, but the more so because of the various unknowns.
I think the shot is still aerial. I will withhold my assessment of where it will go, on account of lack of evidence. There was an opportunity at the Town Meeting, and previously in my requests for interviews, to flesh out the indefinite. These were not taken. President Wright and Dean Larimore would have you believe that the cannon was never fired in the first place. This strains credulity. Such a position relies on a faint institutional memory that views the present though occluded lenses, evincing little understanding of College history.
But there are, admittedly, other possibilities in play. The S.L.I. may have significantly deflected the force of anti-Greek sentiment on campus. The ball abruptly changed course in mid-flight. A legislative body—or in a bureaucracy, I suppose, a committee—can reach durable compromises because it gives a sense of resolution to divisive issues by balancing competing interests. There are some indications that a dénouement has occurred here.
There is also the possibility that the trajectory of the shot has peaked, that the ball has lost velocity and is coming back to earth short of its target. (This could be seen as a return to common sense.) President Wright alluded to this when he commented at the Town Meeting, "I think what I have learned over the last several years is that we need to continue to work with organizations to make them a stronger part of this community."
There is more evidence that this may be the case. On January 12th, in Los Angeles, President Wright commented in address on the Dean Furstenberg controversy and the role of athletics at the College,
It may be useful to observe that the world in which I live, the world of which I have been a part for the last thirty-five years, is a world marked by debate and argument and opposing positions and interpretations. I have heard plenty of things over the years that are at variance with my views—on matters ranging from affirmative action to our support for need-blind admissions to the place of fraternities at Dartmouth.... I have heard many people challenge the value of athletics in academic institutions. I have enjoyed debating with them and have made quite clear my vision for Dartmouth. I value and support athletics—just as I value affirmative action programs, need-blind admissions and financial aid, and a strong fraternity system.
Then, in a February 15th address in Chicago, President Wright delivered even more remarkable comments. "But while my assessment of the state of the College is very strong, I have been struck in my many discussions with alumni that there are questions that come up. Let me address some of them directly." He went on to address point-by-point the tensions between Dartmouth as a college v. university, a perceived shift away from an undergraduate focus, issues of financial management and priorities, the issue of speech codes, and the place of the fraternity system at the College. "Is the College in the middle of a campaign to eliminate or to significantly curtail the Greek system" he asked on this last, rhetorically.
No, not at all. Although there are those who persist in arguing that there is a secret plan to do just that. The Student Life Initiative of 1999 started a process, the purpose of which was to make the campus a more inclusive place... In terms of the fraternities and sororities our goal has been to make them more fully a part of the community rather than apart from the community. Because of the responsiveness of student leaders in these organizations as well as alumni leadership in the corporations, this effort has been largely successful.
Well—these two together certainly constitute a vigorous position, though they seem out of keeping with previous positions. An April 24th, 1987 document issued by the Ad Hoc Committee on Residential Life, chaired by then-Professor Wright—alias "the Wright Report"—asserted, "We believe... that the fraternities and sororities play too large a role in the social life of this campus... Our charge and our goal has been to reduce the role of fraternities and sororities... and we have concluded that such a reduction does require a reduction in membership."
Declarations, of course, are not evidence and argument. On the other hand, that was in 1987, and the new commentary came in the past few months. On March 1st, President Wright also convened a banquet at the President's Mansion with C.F.S. presidents and several high-level faculty and administrators, including Dean Larimore; Stuart Lord, the Dean of the Tucker Foundation; Josie Harper, the Director of Athletics; Harry Kinne, the Proctor of Safety and Security; and Susan Wright, Dartmouth's First Lady. It was part of the P.R. campaign to cast Parkhurst as the Greek's best friend.
Maybe there has been a genuine change of heart, a greater understanding of the affinities of the alumni and students. And, while this is only speculation, I imagine that it also comes down, ultimately, to powerful financial considerations. The Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience is in full swing, and alumni discontent hardly encourages well-drafted donations. But such psychological thinking gets us nowhere.
In my capacity as a student, I have gotten to know many of the administrative personnel in the Office of Residential Life rather well, and I do not believe that there is some covert apparatus in place there that will swoop down from the sky one day and obliterate the Greek system. Of course, there is always the possibility of that. But the men and women that I have gotten to know are well-intentioned, and, if they are at times overly preoccupied by fine distinctions, this too can be said of the College as a whole. Moreover, the current Dean of Residential Life, Martin Redman, was not involved in the conception or the drafting of the S.L.I.
I do not think that either President Wright or Dean Larimore are evil men, or of poor character, or draw from a deep well of dislike for students. I do think, however, that their priorities are often misplaced. If their priorities have legitimately changed (perhaps they have), well, it is certainly encouraging. Count me carefully—make that very carefully—optimistic.
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