The Annotated President Wright
By Nicholas Desai | Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Day in and day out, I’ve been pounding away at the typewriter, hoping that in a year or so my magnum opus, The Annotated President Wright, will be ready for submission to some high-toned New York publishing house. The aim is to kind of contextualize his remarks and thereby produce a breezy read that Everyman can thumb through whether behind the eulogizer’s podium, at the beach, or in the privy. Here are two “relevant” preview excerpts, though of course the book is timeless.
During his convocation address on Sept. 19, 2006, President Wright contended that:
We need steer clear of any easy path through life that would enable us to avoid being challenged intellectually. And by challenged intellectually, I do not mean the incremental process of learning that which we had never known; rather, I refer to the dialectic of rethinking that which we think we know, and of challenging our deepest beliefs. Dartmouth needs to facilitate that challenge, but you yourselves, as students, must undertake it.
Robert Frost ’96 offered a slightly different—and perhaps, in these times, refreshing—take on this topic, which he presented during the 1955 commencement. Of course, the old man was often difficult to pin down, but this serves as an interesting point of reference:
…you came to college bringing with you something to go on with—that was the idea from my point of view: something to go on with. And you brought it with an instinct, I hope, to keep it—not to have it taken away from you, not to be bamboozled out of it or scared out of it by any fancy teachers. I’ve known teachers with a real hanker for ravishing innocence. They like to tell you things that will disturb you.
Now, I think the College itself has given you one thing of importance I’d like to speak of. It’s given you, slowly, gradually, the means to deal with that sort of thing, not only in college but the rest of your life. The formula would be something like this: always politely accept the other man’s premises. Don’t contradict anybody. It’s contentious and ill natured. Accept the premises—take it up where it’s give you and then show ‘em what you can make of it. You’ve been broadened and enlarged to where you can listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
You came from the “Bible belt,” say. You were confronted with the fact of evolution. It was supposed to disturb you about your God. But you found a way to say—either with presence of mind, wittily, or slowly with meditation—you found the way to say, “Sure, God probably didn’t make man out of mud. But He made him out of prepared mud.” You still had your God, you see.
You were a Bostonian and you had been brought up to worship the cod. To you the cod was sacred and her eggs precious. You were confronted with facts of waste in nature. One cod egg is all that survives of a million. And you said—what did you say? You found something to say, surely. You said, “Perhaps those other eggs were necessary in order to make the ocean a proper broth for the one to grow up in. Not waste; just expense.” And so on….
Then one more that I’d just like to speak of—you run on to these things all the time. I live on them. I’m going to tell you that every single one of my poems is probably one of these adaptations that I’ve made. I’ve taken whatever you give me and made it what I want it to be. That’s what every one of the poems is. I look over them. They are not arguments. I’ve never contradicted anybody. My object in life has been to hold my own with whatever’s going—not against, but with—to hold my own. To come through college holding my own so that I won’t be made over beyond my recognition by my family and my home town, if I ever go back to it. It’s a poor sort of person, it seems to me, that delights in thinking, “I have had four years that have transformed me into somebody my own mother won’t know.” Saint Paul had one conversion. Let’s leave it to Saint Paul. Don’t get converted. Stay.
This one turns up, too—another expression. They say, “If eventually, why not now?” I say, “Yeah,” but also, “If eventually, why now?”
You’ve got to handle these things. You’ve got to have something to say to the Sphinx. You see, that’s all. And you’ve been, I’m pretty sure—you’ve come more and more to value yourself on being able to handle whatever turns up.
What would you say to this one? (You probably haven’t encountered it. I have lately.) We hired a Swede to come over here and pass an expert’s opinion on our form of government. And after he passed his judgment on it, we invited him back and gave him another honorary degree, just like this. (Never mind his name—we won’t go into names—maybe I’ve forgotten it.) But anyway, did you hear what his judgment was? That our form of government is a conspiracy against the common man.
You’ve been enlarged and broadened to where you can listen to anything without getting mad. So have I. But I have to have something to say to that, sooner or later—on the spur of the moment, to show my wit, or at leisure, you know, to show my ability at reasoning, my reasoning powers. Well, the answer to that is that that’s what it was intended to be. It was intended to be a conspiracy against the common man. Let him make himself uncommon. He wasn’t to be put in the saddle. And so on. Now I conclude that.
More recently, on November 20, 2006, President Wright in an e-mail message to all of Dartmouth held forth on the Indian symbol. In one of the sections, he wrote:
As Calvin Trillin wrote in a New Yorker article on this subject in the 1970s, the symbol itself became emblematic for those who were disenchanted with the changes that marked the College in those early years of coeducation and of renewed commitment to diversity. We moved on, even if some individuals did not.
The article mention appeared in The New Yorker on May 7, 1979, and while it does at length relate the arguments put forth by anti-symbol activists, it also contains several passages that must cast doubt on President Wright’s sly implication that Trillin’s article simply asserts that the symbol is a Trojan horse, stuffed with pig-headed bigotries. Here are some of those passages:
Indians had never found themselves unwelcome at Dartmouth. In the thirties, in fact, it seemed customary for many classes to have one for a while—often a Seneca, from upstate New York. Although it was never true, as undergraduate legend had it, that any Indian who showed up in Hanover would automatically be presented with a free Dartmouth education, money was usually found to help out a deserving Indian student….
A lot of alumni, though, seemed honestly perplexed. They assured Indian students that they had always seen the Indian symbol as representing strength and dignity. They pointed out that the Indian head used on Dartmouth uniforms showed a proud warrior rather than some Injun Joe caricature. They brought up examples like the Washington Redskins and the Quakers of Penn. They pointed out that some of the Indian cheers had actually been invented by real Indians attending Dartmouth—Indians who took pride in appearing at football games or reunions in Indian regalia. They quoted letters from earlier Indian graduates who expressed pride in the symbol—and who insisted that “wah-hoo-wah” meant “snow, ah, snow” in Sioux rather than the act of sodomy. [A definition of the phrase in Sioux, according to Alumni Council’s Indian Symbol Committee.] They suggested that some offensive spin-offs—Indian-head diapers or crude cartoons—could be eliminated without abolishing the symbol itself….
Defense of the Indian symbol may have been a symbol of resistance to change in general, but it never seemed to become a symbol of resistance to the Native American Program in particular. A lot of alumni, in fact, emphasized that, however bitterly they resented attempts to abolish the Indian symbol, they were pleased by Dartmouth’s new commitment to Indians….
At times, the college administration found itself in a role that was difficult to distinguish from censorship—calling attention to an “Injun-Ear” newsletter from the Dartmouth society of Engineers here, pointing out an Indian head in a cleaner’s advertisement there. It was also a role not unlike that of a boarding-school master who, having once demonstrated how angry some rude old nickname can make him, presents an enormous temptation to boys in the back row everytime he turns toward the blackboard.
Trillin’s ironical closing has accrued more irony since:
The hockey season was extended when the Dartmouth team qualified for the national championships in Detroit, where it was defeated by the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
This is the very team for whose name the College’s Athletic Director recently apologized. And don’t these Wright quotables read better with notes?
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