On the Evils of Banality

By Nicholas S. Desai | Thursday, October 5, 2006

It’s been quite a task keeping up with the letters, e-mails, blog posts, and articles about this Constitution business. I for one do not pretend to master all the intricacies and minutiae of the document, but I do have one thing to add: this is all so incredibly dull that I can hardly keep my noggin perpendicular to the ground. Sure, the stakes are high: the trustees ultimately govern the College, and therefore our school’s future has a lot to do with how these people are elected. I agree that it should interest me. But the cascades of committees, the voting systems, the clubs, the websites, the smarmy army of sweater-clad bureaucrats… One doesn’t like to exaggerate, but the whole matter makes me twitch with existential pain, writhe on the carpet, and foam at the mouth.

Do not misunderstand. I don’t intend a hands-off centrist pox on both houses: I favor the No faction because the Yes people clearly dislike the write-in trustees, not a very principled reason for election reform. But whenever the rhetoric of the debate gets more exciting than that of, say, your average lawn chair assembly manual, its usefulness immediately dissolves, by which I mean a “swing voter”—to pile that cliché onto an already cliché-laden matter—will not be suitably convinced by abstract talk of “democracy,” “common sense,” and “cabals.”

A few weeks ago, I had the distinct misfortune of attending a panel on the alumni constitution, apparently meant to palliate student discontent. There was something vaguely self-satirical about it, especially since the Student Assembly, which had organized the event, had booked a fairly large room in Rocky, which I imagine could seat about sixty people or more if some chose to stand. The punch line is that about a dozen people showed up, the majority of whom were affiliated with some sort of campus publication or web log. The panelists were three members of the Alumni Governance Task Force, the group that wrote the proposed constitution. The only non-student in the audience was Tim Dreisbach ‘71, who also knew the panelists enough to engage in some sub-snarky back-and-forth before they got down to brass tacks.

The panel consisted of Martha Hennessey, Joe Stevenson, and Jim Adler. Many of their comments were either affectedly mysterious (Adler: “[The write-in trustees] have an ideology. Call it an agenda….”) or grandiloquent (Hennessey: “If the trustee is actually running on one platform, that is antithetical to the mission of the trustees, sir!”). There were plenty of non sequiturs, especially when the discussion jumped the rail and began speeding toward affirmative action. The questions, when hostile, tended to be deflected and not really addressed. The friendly questions were received in a friendly manner. I admit to staying longer than most of the original attendees, but I couldn’t bring myself to dally until the bitter end.

I have two suspicions. Neither is in the least scientific. First, I suspect that overeducated voting populations—and here I think Dartmouth certainly qualifies—tend to vote in strange ways. Each voter, feeling like an intelligent minority of one, pulls the lever—but then these many minorities of one add up to a bien pensant plurality. Often, this elects the underdog candidate. Anyway, this “herd of independent minds” (as Harold Rosenberg called the intellectuals) tends to behave in a very contrarian fashion, though en masse. From this, I postulate that the constitution is not somehow biased toward the conservatives; in fact, if a “progressive” candidate ran a vocal campaign as a write-in candidate, I have a hard time believing he would lose. In fact, that electorate might elect both a conservative and a progressive the same year. This same logic leads me to believe that the constitution will not be approved.

My second suspicion is that under all of these appeals to democracy and common sense, this is all simply an argument—within a very small group of people who all know each other—about which of them should control the alumni bureaucracy. I know: not exactly the most mountain-crumbling political insight since Machiavelli. But if you are slightly perplexed as to why some seem disproportionately worked up about this business, you can remember that, oh yes, you have no interest in becoming chief Pooh-Bah of the alumni such-and-such. Much as there is that child that only a mother could love, most of this debate has been such a bore that only members of this small group could enjoy attending to it so lovingly: it’s their baby, after all. Yet, in its insidious way, this issue uses its own Byzantine twists and turns to call disproportionate attention to itself. This is the evil of banality. Vive l’apathie!

On the Evils of Banality

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