Has Lohse Accomplished What He Set Out to Do?

Behold, a Dartmouth man who the campus wishes wasn’t.

Well folks, the reaction from the Rolling Stone article on Andrew Lohse and SAE is pretty clear at this point.

People from the outside world are horrified at what they must think is an accurate portrayal of the College on the Hill. People on campus are furious. There’s even a “Remorseful Douchebag” meme as seen on the left of this post, courtesy of Bored@Baker (a fair warning: much of the language there is not safe for work). For what it’s worth, Andrew B. Lohse ’12 is a pariah on campus, and I would lay even money on him never returning. His name is mud.

However, I can’t shake the feeling that he isn’t bothered by any of this. I keep being reminded of children in grade school who are disobedient just to get attention. The other kids in class might find them annoying or dangerous, but the delinquent doesn’t care so long as the spotlight is on him.

Rather than make his case and transfer, the whole experience is scarred him so much that he’s planning on writing a memoir that is:

…part Bright Lights, Big City, part The Sun Also Rises and part This Side of Paradise,” that will give “a one-way ticket to the secret violence at the heart of the baptismal rites of the new elite.” At which point he stops himself. “I bet that sounds incredibly douche and brash and stupid.”

Well, yes, it does. I guess he thinks that people want to hear the life story of someone who is not yet old enough to rent a car from Avis without penalties. I know I do.

This is the same guy who thought the best way to deal with alleged problems in his fraternity, a house he joined because he thought it was the quickest way to achieving notoriety, was to write an inflammatory opinion column in which he accused his brothers of criminal acts (which the college just cleared all of them of, by the way, including Lohse himself it would seem). To top it all off, when he first came to campus, he wrote for The Dartmouth Review for about a quarter, maybe less than that, hoping to make a name for himself until he realized that our then editor-in-chief, Emily Smith ’09, wouldn’t indulge his ego by publishing a review of a 9/11 truther book.

He came into Dartmouth climbing social ladders, or at least attempting to. It seems he wants to go out the same way he came in.

I don’t think he cares what people think of him. In many people this is an admirable quality, but in this particular case, it is an enabling quality because they’ll put doing the right thing above being popular. In this case, he doesn’t care what people think of his personal integrity. He wants celebrity, not a good reputation, and apparently doesn’t care if he broadcasts his chronic backstabbing disorder far and wide, let alone his criminal record. It’s like if Terrell Owens was an English major.

Ordinarily I’d be tempted to not give him any more air time, but he has managed to stage at least a partially successful assault on the good name of this institution, no doubt devaluing everyone’s degrees. I doubt he cares. As near as I can tell, he’s having the time of his life with all this.

—Sterling C. Beard