The Pragmatist
By Nicholas Desai | Tuesday, March 4, 2008
James Wright’s presidency unfolded differently than could have been extrapolated from its first few years. The faculty have long hated the fraternities, and many had hoped that this would be the man to tear them down.
In 1987, Wright chaired an ad hoc committee on residential life, whose findings, known as the “Wright Report,” laid, we can see in retrospect, the foundations of the Student Life Initiative. Both the Report and the Initiative blamed alcohol and fraternities for fostering anti–intellectual behavior.
Students who are not familiar with the events of 1999 must wonder what the fuss had been about. Wright took the presidency as a Dartmouth insider, having been a member of the faculty since the 1960s and occupying various administrative positions, including Dean of the Faculty and Provost, during the 80s and 90s. On February 9, 1999, students received a letter from the President and Trustees, couched in that banal administrative style with which we’re all familiar, which said that the Dartmouth residential system did not “contribute significantly to each student’s intellectual and personal growth and well-being.” The new system, the letter said, would be “substantially coeducational” and would eliminate “the abuse and unsafe use of alcohol.”
“This is not a referendum,” Wright said. “We are committed to doing this.” Students decided to cancel Winter Carnival that year, and, in lieu of the keg jump, held at rally on Psi U’s lawn.
“This cannot be over. And if it is, then I’m going to go down fighting,” said Psi U president Teddy Rice in his speech.
In an interview with the Daily Dartmouth, Wright used a phrase that would become associated with the SLI for years to come: “the end of the Greek system as we know it.”
As so often with Wright’s statements, this was not emphatic enough to be really falsifiable. We did indeed see “the end of the Greek system as we know it,” since we did not “know” a system that included SEMP before that time. But houses did not go co-ed, or disappear. Every house that has been derecognized since 1996 is returning or has plans to return. The alcohol policies, while irritating, allow for a lively basement experience while making sure the College is not legally liable. The SLI was responsible mostly for the idiotic dance club Fuel (née Poison Ivy), as well as other lame traveling acts such moon-bounces, petting zoos, mind-readers, and the Regurgitator, whose feats can anyway be seen for free on any given evening if you know where to look.
Did Wright depart voluntarily? The standard length of a presidential term at Dartmouth seems a decade or less, at least since the McLaughlin presidency, and the Wright presidency seem to fit that mold. The fact that his letter renouncing his retirement came on the same day that the College’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit was rejected made a bad impression. And several other public utterances might lead one to believe that his decision to step down was determined by events and not personal preference.
On February 28, 2007, in his community letter, Wright had this to say about the trustee elections as it relates to his career:
Some people have claimed that one of the new trustee’s assignments will be to elect the next president. This statement will likely prove to be correct — someday. For now though, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of my retirement are premature. While I may look my age, I am not yet ready to act it. In my thirty-eighth year at Dartmouth, I have things yet to do and I enjoy immensely doing them. So let us hold off on the transition planning.
His February 4, 2008 letter announcing his retirement put it this way:
And, as much as I enjoy serving Dartmouth in my current role, I believe that every institution can benefit from periodic new leadership and fresh ideas. I am announcing my decision now in order to provide the Board with ample time to organize and pursue a search for my successor. I will not be part of the search process but I stand ready to do whatever the Board requests to assist with recruiting Dartmouth’s 17th President.
Yet, in his interview with the Alumni magazine about his retirement, he said, “You know, the interesting thing is that we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about what we’re going to do next,” and “I’m not running away from anything, I’m reluctantly stepping back.”
So why call Wright, after all, a pragmatist, in a way that his predecessor was not? Though he bandied around some of the same catchphrases as Freedman, especially as they related to diversity, his approach was different. Write-in candidate T. J. Rodgers was elected in 2004 on a platform that included free speech. Watchdog groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights for Education assigned Dartmouth a low free-speech rating. Wright changed the Freedman-esque tone in his 2004 Convocation Speech, in which he said that Dartmouth students should be free to express themselves. Whether he would have taken such steps without suggestion from T. J. Rodgers and FIRE, we will never know, but the most important thing is that he did, pragmatically, chance course. Freedman, one feels, would have continued whistling the same old tune, confident that his “intellectualism” would save him.
Instead of whooping and waving his hat as he rode a thermonuclear weapon onto Webster Avenue, as perhaps he wanted to, he did what he could against the fraternities, which finally was little. For many students, the Greek houses embodied the independent spirit of Dartmouth; for a president attentive to alumni donations, to attack these social institutions seriously would have been disastrous. Fine: In America, we don’t expect our leaders to be well-intentioned, just well-behaved.
Wright will be remembered primarily for the overseeing the expansion of Dartmouth’s campus northward; recommitment of the school’s official organs to free speech, even when the speech is deemed offensive; the Student Life Initiative, which ultimately went nowhere; and the controversy over alumni elections, which cast doubt on the Wright Administration’s ability to put conservative mavericks in their place. n
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