Wah Hoo Wah, Round One

By Deborah Stone | Friday, April 21, 2006

Originally Published October 29, 1986.

Which of the following do you consider unacceptable and boorish behavior?

1) Unfurling a handsome Indian banner at a football game in a celebration of a one-hundred-year-old symbol, or 2) Emptying a bag of unnaturally bloodied tampons at the feet of President McLaughlin and his wife during the Dartmouth Night festivities in front of Dartmouth Hall.

In the unlikely case that you can’t decide, here are some additional details: the Indian banner was displayed during halftime by a group of about ten freshmen who acted in accordance with campus police requests; the tampons were deposited by a group of about ten students who were disguised in ski masks and who fled immediately after staging their protest. The tampon tossers were presumably part of a group called “womben to overthrow dartmyth”; in a flyer distributed around campus, this group explained that they were using the “bloodied tampons in protest of both the alma mater ‘Men of Dartmouth’ and the governing structure of dartmyth college.” The protestors concluded, “We force you to acknowledge our presence.”

Most would agree that the answer is 2). It seems that President McLaughlin, however, would answer differently. In a letter to the Dartmouth community, McLaughlin criticized two incidents which occurred over Homecoming weekend. One incident was the tackling of some Harvard cheerleaders by freshmen; McLaughlin called this an “institutional embarrassment” for which he sent a letter of apology to Harvard President Bok.

The other incident criticized was the display of the Indian banner, which McLaughlin called “a display of thoughtlessness.” He wrote: “To those misguided students who feel compelled to flaunt the ‘Indian symbol,’ I say unequivocally that such conduct will not return the Indian symbol to the athletic fields of Dartmouth College. . . . Those who persist in offending this community by using the Indian as a symbol are guilty of an insensitivity antithetical to the purposes of Dartmouth.”

McLaughlin’s only reference to Dartmouth Night, which was disrupted by the masked feminists, was his description of the “outpouring of enthusiasm, loyalty, and good will.” Majority support for the Indian symbol, which is orderly and respectful, will never bring it back, but reckless and tasteless protest against the alma mater by a handful of fringe students could soon result in its abolition. Making decisions without consulting students and alumni is one recent tradition that the McLaughlin administration holds dear.

In addition to the unfair psychological intimidation McLaughlin employed in his letter, he falsely outlined the circumstances of the Indian symbol abolition. The president declared that the decision not to use the symbol has been “reaffirmed repeatedly by the Board, the faculty, and the students of the College.” This is simply not true; the initial decision was illegitimate—and it has not even been reaffirmed. A majority of students and alumni support the Indian symbol, but alumni are ignored, and students are pressured not to use the symbol.

Members of the Afro-American Society, who tried to rip the Indian banner, were not chastised for their harassment of fellow students. Instead, the administration called an “emergency meeting” of the freshmen class at which the freshmen were ordered not to run on the field at halftime and not to use the Indian symbol. Freshmen were told again at this meeting that the use of the Indian symbol is “not an issue of free speech.” Judging from the administration’s reactions to these various campus incidents, one thing is clear: President McLaughlin, Dean Shanahan, and the rest can’t distinguish between good and bad behavior. And people thought Secretary of Education William Bennett was going off the deep end when he charged that leading universities lacked virtue.

Wah Hoo Wah, Round One

Article Tools

Related Articles