My Biggest Mistake Was Loving You Too Much

By Nicholas Desai | Thursday, September 27, 2007

There certainly is a lot of love around these days. Something may have to be done about it —and it pops up in the oddest places. For instance, the governance committee recently changed the rules to ensure that alumni-elected trustees would no longer constitute, irritatingly, half of the board. A sort of pre-emptive apology blitz zipped out to alumni a few days before this decision was announced. “There are strongly held views on all sides of this issue,” it observed, “We believe a shared love for and dedication to Dartmouth drive these passionate views. Indeed we approach this task with a deep commitment and love for Dartmouth ourselves.”

On September 8, Chairman of the Board of Trustees Ed Haldeman announced the decision and purred, “As President Wright has said, there is far more that unites us—as friends, faculty, students, and loyal alumni of the College on the Hill—than divides us. Above all, we have a shared love of and dedication to Dartmouth.”

The sorry letter trundled on, and the schmaltz was dribbling all over the place: “I love Dartmouth. I honestly believe there is nowhere else in the world quite like this great College. We need to protect Dartmouth and ensure it continues to prosper for future generations of students.”

“These changes,” Alumni Association President William Hutchinson told the Concord Monitor, “should result in elections that are fairer, less costly and less politicized, to the benefit of all candidates but most essentially, to the benefit of Dartmouth, the college we all love with great passion.” Love, love, love. All you need is love. Love is a many-splendored thing.

Here’s another one: love will tear us apart, for the tough lovey-dovey that Haldeman, Hutchinson, Wright, and company have in mind reminds me less of Tristan and Isolde than of Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. The love-in that occurred the weekend of September 8 came after an extended effort to stop alumni-nominated petition candidates from winning seats on the board. They tried to convince alumni to vote away their own representation, which strangely failed. But just when things looked pretty bleak for our star-crossed lovers—wouldn’t you know it—love conquered all. Read the whole saga on page eighteen.

That politicians abuse rhetoric is not news, but it’s always useful to study the specific instance. Why do these dissemblers believe that they can pull off the “loving Dartmouth” conceit? How did “I love” come to mean “I manage” or “I see an opportunity for improvement”? Sadly, this solecism has a brilliant career ahead of it, and not just in the swivel-chaired boardrooms.

“The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching,” the sorely underappreciated novelist Dawn Powell wrote in her diary, “Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism.’” (The poor girl, she was reeling from a string of bad reviews written probably by some hack reviewer and opponent of the ‘divisiveness’ her satire might engender.)

Then she brought into being one of my favorite lines as she riffed on the old saw that romanticism says how people ought to be, and realism says how people are. Powell’s correction was this: “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.”

“Insides left out”: it’s a quietly arresting phrase. The gooey guts and viscera of Dartmouth, the mysterious, almost chthonic tides, the uncontrived twists are precisely the aspects of Dartmouth that the Powellian realists on the board of trustees would prefer not to love. They’d do anything for love, but they won’t do that. The reason, simply, is that they worship power. Ply them with appletinis for a few hours, and they’ll probably tell you that, hey, sure, we like control. So do you; so do we all; some are more successful than others.

Elevens, don’t believe it. You’ve barely arrived, but already you’ve been encouraged to see Dartmouth as a stepping stone to the stratosphere, where you’ll exercise your will and become the well-heeled squire of your own private Idaho. The admissions process demanded a peculiarly demeaning kind of egotism from you, and disturbingly you did well enough to matriculate here. Next, you began to hear about the “Dartmouth experience,” somehow in contrast to unadorned Dartmouth. The image I have is of elementary schooler sucking an orange slice before chucking the rind into a plastic trashcan. Dartmouth is something to be experienced, masticated, used. “The Dartmouth experience” renders everything subjective, so that you become the pièce de résistance of your own four-year feast. And sometimes students abet this horrible worldview: A few years ago, Kabir Sehgal ’05 and Brent Reidy ’05 founded the BuzzFlood, an organization “dedicated to celebrating Dartmouth’s excellence.” Excellence, you see, can’t be excellent unless it is celebrated. The goal was to put Dartmouth on level with Harvard-Yale-Princeton in terms of capacity to wow the proletariat.

The group died a slow and painful death because Dartmouth is relatively fallow of the nutrients that feed full-flower narcissism. Beneath Official Dartmouth’s neon-colored peacock feathers is a world of genuinely fascinating professors and students who simply want to hang out without bossing others around or holding forth on how sweet they are. There are myriad ways to partake of this world. One is to quietly go about your business. Another is to consider working for this newspaper. Here, we go about deflating Official Dartmouth’s self-serious blimps in a cheerful manner because we consider the “love” bestowed so insistently by the magnates of collegiate government to be a baleful, withering influence on education, good living, and certainly the imagination. Suspicious of received wisdom and curious about the past, The Dartmouth Review is an ideal redoubt in which to take your last stand against the massing forces of boredom. And whether or not you decide to contribute to these pages, be sure to spend your time in a relatively shady place, out of the sunshine of Parkhurst’s love.

My Biggest Mistake Was Loving You Too Much

Article Tools

Related Articles