Convocation ‘06: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

By J. Stethers White | Thursday, October 5, 2006

One doesn’t attend College ceremonies hoping for rousing oratory. In fact, a set of better-than-dismal Convocation speeches would be a success of sorts. Not that it was always so: in 1946, President John Sloan Dickey, speaking to the College’s first postwar class, said, “The world’s troubles are your troubles… and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.” A bit optimistic, but far more spirited than the banalities that dominated this year’s ceremony. In trying to stake out bold positions, the Convocation speakers appealed instead to the fads of the moment. Unlike Dickey’s words, posterity will not fondly recall theirs.

An aside: Before the speeches began, one couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming maleness and paleness of the trustees, administrators, and speakers on the stage. How terribly ironic for an institution so vocally committed to “diversity.” It served to illustrate that so-called “diversity” is less a tangible quality, than a word that Baby Boomers use for the sake of emotional masturbation.

To return, the first speaker was Timothy Andreadis ’07, current Student Assembly President and meanwhile Justin Timberlake look-alike. Timmy misfired only several sentences into his speech, informing the audience that, “the Class of 2010 is special.” Swell. That’s probably the last thing that a crop of over-achieving brats (with “the highest SAT scores of any Dartmouth entering class,” no less) needs to hear. Instead of cracking open a bottle of self-esteem and pouring it into their already overflowing egos, it would have been far more beneficial for the pea greens to hear that regardless of how special they believe themselves to be, they are no more special than any earlier Dartmouth class.

But perhaps I judge too harshly—after all, the class of 2010 is indeed unique. Not only is it, as Timmy informed us, “the most diverse,” but it also has the “highest percentage of women ever to be in an entering Dartmouth freshman class at 51.6 percent.” That’s hard to argue against. With two statistics like that, one cannot help but feel a warm gush of Specialness flowing from the 2010s and overwhelming the College.

Apparently, though, being special isn’t enough these days. No, Timmy explained that “having an entering class with the highest percentage of women ever does not necessarily mean that all women on this campus will feel welcomed or comfortable in every space at all times.” He is certainly correct in that regard. In fact, I’ll one-up Timmy: even if the College’s undergraduates were 100 percent women, all women would not feel welcome or comfortable in every space at all times. Consider for a moment just how meaningless his assertion actually is. It would be impossible on a campus of this size to make all women feel welcome or comfortable in every space at all times. If he thinks that this is a legitimate goal to work towards, he clearly drank someone’s Kool-aid. (NB: He belongs to the Women and Gender Studies Program; so yes, he definitely drank the Kool-aid.)

The surreal standard to which Timmy holds Dartmouth undercuts the rest of his concerns. Calling for “better gender relations” is meaningless when one’s stated goal is outrageously unattainable. No matter how much of the campus is sissified in the pursuit of making it female-friendly, the College could never come close to his “all women, every space, all times” standard of comfort. Of course, accepting the challenge would lead to all kinds of Student Assembly committees, roundtable discussions, silly rallies, and sillier bureaucrats. Although they would never accomplish anything substantive, they would generate that warm, fuzzy feeling of activism that functions as a high for Timmy’s ilk.

Happily, the students in the audience weren’t buying what their SA President was selling. Particularly gratifying were the awkwardly long pauses littered throughout the speech—Timmy seemed to be waiting for applause, but instead received dumb stares of incomprehension. An appropriate response, to be certain.

Following Dartmouth’s illustrious SA President, the next speaker was Juan Carlos Navarro ‘83, current Mayor of Panama City. He provided a welcome respite from Timmy’s Gender Studies lunacy. Despite his distasteful beginning remarks, during which he spoke fondly of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro (though that is presently to be expected at an academic event), he soon transitioned into the bread-and-butter of collegiate addresses: lending undergraduates advice on how to take advantage of their time at the College.

Along with advice, Navarro peppered his speech with the typical ‘Welcome to Dartmouth’ humor, commenting on the cold winters and short days. But the funniest part of Navarro’s speech was unintentional: he told the audience, “As John F. Kennedy said, ‘Of those to whom much is given, much is required.’ ” Kennedy said it, of course, but he wasn’t the first—in fact, he was quoting Jesus Christ. Still, perhaps the misattribution is understandable, given the outsized furor caused by last year’s Christ-reference at Convocation. [See TDR 10/7/05]

Overall, Navarro’s address was about what one would expect for Convocation, but given the context, it was most notable for what it was not. Whereas Timmy and President Wright were somberly preachy, thereby encouraging thousands of eyes to roll in unison, Navarro challenged, advised, and joked with students.

Wright started out with the usual banalities, telling the freshmen, “Collectively, you come here with 1,081 sets of dreams,” and “your values are… deeply personal and intensely held. They are yours—and they define you.” For a moment it seemed as if he were channeling Barney the Purple Dinosaur. Like a good Baby Boomer, he found time to quote Simon and Garfunkel, before finally outdoing himself in the hackneyed department with a Gandhi reference—one wonders if it is even possible to attend a public address without a token Gandhi quotation.

After easing down on the feel-good claptrap, Wright got into the meat of his speech. Quoting Eric Hoffer, he spoke out against “true believers… preachers and demagogues,” with whom he equated anyone holding a belief in Truth. Why are such people particularly dangerous? Because “in our free society… [there is a] decline of a tolerance for difference.” Worrying, quite worrying. The solution? “The values of the University,” of course! Wright proceeded to array himself against the notion of absolute truth, and in doing so, made an idol of self-doubt, especially the academic variety. Academics, you see, have the “confidence to admit to not quite knowing;” they “steer clear of any easy path through life that would enable [them] to avoid being challenged intellectually;” and, of course, they are always “challenging [their] deepest beliefs.”

What balderdash! Challenging deeply held beliefs is hardly courageous in academia. In the reality of today’s university, anti-dogmatism is the uncontested dogma. Professors have made it their solemn duty to assault established cultural norms, along with any other received wisdom. If an academic truly wanted to be courageous, he would venture to defend the truth held within a culture’s “deepest beliefs.”

This is not to suggest that healthy skepticism is not essential to intellectual inquiry—it is—but skepticism for its own sake misses the mark. Skepticism should be used in pursuit of Truth, not for a nihilistic denial of all truths. Confusing this point leads too many intellectuals to mistake hollowness for bravery and conflate cowardice with conviction.

One wonders what John Dickey would think. Surely his “better human beings” would need stronger bedrock than all-encompassing doubt. We can only hope that universities, contrary to President Wright’s boasts, are still willing to encourage such a foundation.

Convocation ‘06: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

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