When I arrived on campus my freshman fall, one of the most shocking elements of Dartmouth culture was the complete lack of interest in reading and in books on campus. Perhaps this surprise was due to an unfair expectation that people who were academically inclined enough to be accepted into the College would be interested in reading, but it soon became clear that the necessary checkbox for acceptance was merely the ability to read and not actually taking an affinity for the tax. I remember many a time when I would ask my fellow classmates what books they were reading or interested in and then would simply stare back at me as if all the serotonin was sucked out of their brain, just a blank, confused stare.
Among Dartmouth’s peers, the College is known for having an anti-intellectual bent, and while I would love to defend my college and I would love to defend the value of proper anti-intellectualism, I have come to the conclusion that as a whole Dartmouth does have a certain degree of anti-intellectualism that is off-putting. Most students realize the game they are playing and engage with that game, not with the pursuit of knowledge or fully utilizing their intellect. Perhaps there might even be something noble about seeing the game, of playing it properly into a high-paying job, and accepting it as it is, but Dartmouth and other elite institutions, while they might simply be pumping out certified, high-achieving employable people, still comport themselves as places where people gain knowledge and make discoveries, places where people exercise the full capacity of their intellect, places where people might read.
Beyond discovering the lack of reading on campus during my freshman year, I also discovered the joke of illiteracy. For a campus filled with as many smart people as this one, one might find it surprising how often the moniker “illiterate” is bandied about. “This person is illiterate,” “That Greek house is illiterate,” etc. The joke is rather simple and quite effective, and it is used enough on campus that it must strike at some level of truth. For example, where this article is laid out in the physical issue to the left of it will be our masthead. Underneath Business Staff, there is a list of people who when I ask them to write an article, simply respond that they are illiterate. (When they do write, they produce some of the paper’s best articles, but those are few and far between.)
This plague of illiteracy is normal on campus. Outside of the humanities, students rarely grow to have an affinity for literature, and the College only seeks that they have a basic writing ability, developed across two courses in their freshman year. No love or affinity for literature, or rather no knowledge is even required of great works of literature for the Dartmouth man. These comments and goals might be seen as pretentious, but the point of an elite university is to produce elite people, who have elite understandings and cultural tastes. Perhaps these elite markers have passed, but if as a society, our elite are no longer familiar with or have an interest in great literature or great works of art, our society has lost a certain quality about it.There are two sides to this predicament. In order to read a text, it has to have been written by someone, and judging by the large number of books which very few people will read that are produced by Dartmouth faculty and Dartmouth people more generally, one has to wonder if there is a correlation between the two. In the past weeks, I have tried to scour the web looking for all books somehow related to Dartmouth that have been published in the last year, and I can say that the selections are a tad underwhelming. Perhaps in their respective fields, they are respectable, but I doubt the appeal and importance of Diaspora and Transcultural Capital in Latinx Caribbean Fiction and Theater and God is a Black Woman (two Dartmouth books that I failed to find writers who would review them). Production of meaningless and wasteful books from elite institutions goes hand in hand with a campus of illiteracy. Truthfully, I doubt if the modern campus can still produce books that inspire large swathes to enjoy books once again; however, if they keep retreating to pages of navel-gazing and unimportance, we cannot be surprised when no one wants to read.
Take that, whomever! Now, let’s see what new thing may arise.