Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/09/27/welcome_to_the_machine.php
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Hey, normatives. Welcome to another magical year at Hogwarts. Me, I’ve got two more years in this miserable place before I can make my chosen vocation—shaping minds for a better future—into a full-time job. Still, Dartmouth has a lot of potential. I emphasize: gobs of potential, though approximately 0% of it has been realized.
Some of you, I understand, are new to this place. And you’re new to me, too. My work speaks for itself, but let me just say that as its progressive columnist, I try to keep the Review on an even keel. Now, first-years, I know you’ve been told that Dartmouth is some sort of conga line of diversity, kind of like the World Showcase at Epcot Center or a twenty-four-hour international food-tasting bazaar set to the music of the Gypsy Kings and Yanni. Well, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” I’m not going to pull any punches (have I ever?) but you’ve been lied to. It’s like that line from Macbeth, “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” Seriously, those campus tour guides lied to your face, even as they flashed those stale grins and yapped about affinity housing and fro-yo. (Most of them are being blackmailed over financial aid, very effective leverage.) It’s a hard world out there. I know. It hurts. Shh, hush, my babies. The best consolation I can offer is: You got screwed. Sorry.
And now you’re here at Dartmouth, and you’re starting to wake up to the fact that this is probably the most normative place on earth. It starts with little things. You see fratboys drinking beer and exchanging high fives. Some blacked-out ignoramus drops a perfectly recyclable bottle into a trashcan and just walks away. Then, that seemingly intelligent girl in your seminar says she’s interested in going into business. It’s like a living nightmare, and you wish you could wake up. You run to your room and clutch your temples, rocking back and forth. But soon your brave little mental dam is overcome by the sheer normativity of it all, and in sluices the undiluted horror.
When I arrived at Dartmouth, I already had a bit of the activist spirit under my belt, having written the critically acclaimed Self-Actualization for Tweens, which was compared favorably in Mother Jones to the Analects of Confucius. I had fought poverty in the developing world the summer before my First Year and spent years in New York calling people out for objectionable T-shirts, but nothing could have prepared for the sheer apathy of Dartmouth. One comes up with a fantastic idea, like, “Let’s implement a just order right now.” And then, silence, inertia. Sorry, but that’s evil. That’s not a word I use very often because it is so often co-opted by the right, but yeah. Evil. There’s no other word for it. Here is just the most recent example of justice on a silver platter treated as if it were a mere mouthful of Cheese Whiz.
I was reading a little about this trustee business. Voting this, alumni that: I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I knew I was on the side of the angels. I saw that the board had voted to strengthen, synergize, reinvigorate, and flush out the bowels of the whole process. My initial reaction: “Cool beans, and keep up the good work.” But then something struck me. They had “packed” the board, according to neoconservative plutocrats. But why stop there? After all, the board is a fairly small (though influential) body. And they are not the “root cause” of what makes Dartmouth hell on earth. Neither is it the faculty, the staff, or the buildings. It’s the student body. So why are we busy with the board when we ought to be packing the student body? It would be simple: along with asking for SAT scores, just administer a lie detector test during the interview. Ask them questions about what they think of gender norms or “Are you a racist?” It would work like a vaccine against normativity.
Now, I expected to be met with resistance from some quarters, such as the student body, when I suggested this. The plan on paper sounds harsh if (a) you’re sexist, racist, heteronormative, or Eurocentric or (b) the admissions brochure doesn’t jazz it up with expressions that Republicans salivate over, like “strengthen,” “traditional,” plus gratuitous non sequiter shout-outs to the military. To get my dog to take his medicine, I usually stick the pill in a dollop of peanut butter: same principle at work here. But my five-hour meeting at the admissions office yielded nothing. It was originally supposed to be an hour long. An arrogant person would have just expected people to recognize a good idea when they saw one, but I stayed up all night making a PowerPoint, complete with sound effects (boing-oing-oing! when each slide comes up) and Doonesbury cartoons. I wore this beige power-suit that made me look like a complete tool, if that were possible. But, towards the end, I was seriously losing it, asking them if a conservative alumnus had kidnapped their children or what.
And the admissions staff were hemming and hawing, saying they loved the idea, but their hands were tied, look at what happened to Karl, and all that indecisiveness that makes me sick. I threw my coffee in an intern’s face and stormed out. Maybe a year ago I would have delivered a message of hope to you on the occasion of your matriculation. But you’re reading an activist on her last legs. Two more years to go. I might not make it.