On Our Culture of Apathy 

It is no secret that we at The Review loathe the diminished state of our tra­ditions. We routinely republish historical accounts of Old Dartmouth not simply as an exercise in nostalgia, but to show our readers that change haunts our College on the Hill in ways that are both grandiose and miniscule. The large-scale threat is much more obvious to the naked eye: it takes its form in watered-down versions of our three Big Weekends, one of which we are about to celebrate in the form of Winter Carnival. The small-scale assault requires more vigilance to notice, but it can be seen in more quotidian changes to the Dartmouth vernacular. Both require our attention.

A student doesn’t have to attend Dart­mouth for long to realize that Winter Carnival is not what it used to be. I reached this conclusion as a freshman in an article I wrote in The Review. But it’s not as if I’m expecting a Carnival so spectacular that F. Scott Fitzgerald rises from the dead to re­make the 1939 film for modern audiences. Nostalgia is a valuable weapon in the crusade for tradition, but we can get carried away in its stupor. It has come even more appar­ent to me, however, that we long not for Prohibition-era Winter Carnival (unrea­sonable as that would be), but simply for anything better than what we have now. The photograph on the front page of this issue is of a keg-jumping contest from the late 1980s, hosted by the brothers of Psi Upsilon. We have nothing, anywhere on campus, that inspires the enthusiastic mischief depicted in this photograph. 

Winter Carnival is the most obvious victim of cultural crumbling, but, as we saw last fall, Homecoming is not safe from its reach. It slipped into a mere shell of itself, with a poorly-attended light show performed in the bonfire’s stead. Green Key remains more resilient, with certain factors (such as the weather and concert) playing to its advantage. All, however, are a fabricated emergency or hardcore ad­ministrator away from extinction.

This brings us to the smaller-scale changes to our culture. They manifest themselves in shifts in attitudes about what a Dartmouth education means for academic and social development. While comparing Harvard to Dartmouth, H.H. Horne, a professor of English in the ear­ly twentieth century, said, “one is the thoughtful observer of life, the other the vigorous liver of life.” A Dartmouth student is practical, hard-working, and, above all, not too caught up in abstraction to revel in the moment. One notices the loss of this ideal with scant invocations of “Vox Clamantis in Deserto” or, my personal favorite, “Lest the old traditions fail.” We no longer care about what makes us unique.

It is very easy to place the blame on a hostile College administration which seeks (with mixed results) to impose its puritanical vision upon the student body in the name of safety and security. Of course, these el­ements are very real and should be ex­posed when neces­sary. The more dan­gerous assault on our traditions, I believe, comes from the stu­dents themselves. It comes from a mood of complacency, from a numb reluctance to care about Dartmouth beyond what its name can offer in the job market.

This culture of apathy, I might add, ap­pears to get worse each year. Younger stu­dents who matriculate aren’t necessarily bellicose leftists with a mission, though those surely exist, but rather have neither the initiative to learn about what came before them nor the impetus to revere it when asked to. It goes over their heads. As long as this mindset exists in the ma­jority of students, the idea of Old Dart­mouth is constantly vulnerable to assault and defeat. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, as they say.

I have no good solution to offer, because it requires change on an individual level. No policy can mandate a return to the less tangible yet certainly essential char­acteristics of Dartmouth. It is less about the events and more about the spirit. I can only implore those with whom this editorial resonates to be “vigorous livers of life.” Step one: Gather your friends, get rowdy, and do some keg-jumping this Winter Carnival.