On a Return to Normalcy

2022 could not have brought with it a sharper contrast between Dartmouth’s current Covid response and the policies implemented this time last year. Last winter, Dartmouth brought a small portion of students back to campus only to lock them down, confining them to their solitary dorm rooms for weeks on end, projecting abject terror over an “outbreak” on campus amongst a few dozen students. This was all in addition to the fact that all classes and student activities were already entirely virtual and students were required to test multiple times a week. This winter, however, active cases on campus consistently hover in the mid 500s, but disturbances to students’ lives are minimal. Classes began in the first week of January as scheduled and have remained in person. Additionally, the gym  and library never closed, and, after a brief two-week period, indoor dining and in-person student events have resumed at full capacity.  

This is a notable departure not only from Dartmouth’s own policies last year but also from those being currently implemented by our peer institutions. As one of the articles in this issue details, the Ivies have varied widely in their return to academic operations since the emergence of the Omicron variant in December. Though that article discusses this topic in greater detail, I’m very happy to report that Dartmouth has been quite clearly one of the most reasonable in its new covid policies. Unlike others in the Ivy League, Dartmouth has returned to the principal goals that these schools critically neglected last year: providing a high-quality education and promoting the well-being of their students. 

The utter necessity for the College to educate its students and the myriad difficulties that an online format poses to that end are self-explanatory, but they nevertheless have been explained many times over in this paper. With that in mind, I would like to address the goal of promoting student well-being, a necessary precursor to academic and personal success. Well-being is obviously a holistic term, often to the point of being clichéd. It encompasses physical health from severe disease to sleep habits as well as mental health and life balance. Within this quite large umbrella, there are numerous hurdles for Dartmouth students as fledgling adults, altogether too fond of bibulous basement activities and procrastination-induced all-nighters. Despite this proliferation of issues ripe for resolution, Dartmouth chose to focus on a single one to the exclusion of all others: the supposed danger of a Covid infection for students.

Last year, every missive from the Administration contained tacit postulations that Dartmouth students—e.g., nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one-year-olds who are, by every available metric, significantly healthier than average even for Americans in our age group—were at grave risk of serious illness and even death from the coronavirus.  I will note here though not in detail for the sake of others’ privacy, that my life has been touched by loss as a result of the coronavirus quite recently.  I’m well aware of the risks the virus poses to the unvaccinated, especially those of middle and advanced age and with other comorbid conditions. However, the relentless drumbeat of emails last year and especially last winter justifying the College’s draconian actions saying that they were necessary to protect the student body was unscrupulous. 

The College’s actions were unscrupulous in the rather definitional sense that they showed no concern for and were certainly not guided by what was right. The right or correct goals to guide the College are certainly the aforementioned ones pertaining to education and well-being, with education being paramount. I would even go so far as to say that this is the education of their undergraduate students exclusively. Not that graduate students are in some way less valuable, though I have heard many arguments to that effect—none of which have deterred me from sending in graduate applications of my own. But Dartmouth is certainly first and foremost an undergraduate institution; we refer to it as Dartmouth College, thumbing our noses at the fact that it is quite clearly a university, for a reason. The undergraduates are the beating heart of Dartmouth, and thus their education is of the utmost importance. 

This is not to say that, had the undergraduates and their education been Dartmouth’s top priority last year, as opposed to merely an obligatory footnote at the end of every chastising email from a then-failing and corrupt Administration, the Covid policies would not still have been different last year then they are this year. In the intervening year, we have had a blanket roll-out of vaccines which are tremendously effective at preventing severe illness and death across all demographics groups. The advent of these medical miracles, as I see them, should certainly dramatically change the way that we go about our daily lives as college students—now at the very tail end of a pandemic, transitioning into an endemic virus. We should go forward with confidence and with gratitude that we have been able to get a hold of this disease. Moreover, as sons and daughters of Dartmouth we can now go forward with confidence that the College seems to have rediscovered its grounding principles. It is regrettable that they were lost in the first place, but nevertheless remarkable that they have been found while our peer schools are still aimlessly digging in the sand.