Dartmouth Undying: We Know Your Head Hurts, Just Trust Us

Us thinking about you.

I’ve commented before how John Mathias, Jr. ’69, nominee for AoA president, doesn’t have a high opinion of his fellow alumni’s intellectual caliber. He’s commented multiple times over at the AoA’s blog about how his poor fellow alumni get duped by the forces of evil (this paper and others) into thinking preposterous thoughts. You know what? He’s right. Honestly, it’s obvious to all of us in the know (like Mr. Mathias and myself) that the proposed constitution didn’t hurt the chances of petition trustees. Can’t you all see? Making the petition candidates hand in their petitions before the official candidates are announced actually works in their favor! We (Mr. Mathias and myself) can’t believe you would actually think that petition candidates decide whether or not to run based on who the official nominees are! Obviously they’ve been planning to run for years—ever since women were admitted actually (which just goes to show how extreme they are in the cases of Messrs. Robinson, Zywicki, and Smith). Also, there’s all this talk about Dartmouth becoming Harvard-lite; a sort of Pepsi to their Coke. Well, we love Pepsi! Sure, when we were younger we liked Coke. We really wanted to ‘drink’ Coke after high school graduation, but sometimes—even when you put in your best effort—life hands you a pile of rocks and you have to end up drinking Pepsi. But you know what? Pepsi starts to grow on you, and pretty soon you become a Pepsi partisan. In fact, the only thing not to like about Pepsi is that it doesn’t taste like Coke, if you catch our drift. So all of this Harvard-lite talk is nonsense—once we have more world class research institutions set up in Hanover the rest of the world will be calling Harvard Dartmouth-lite. Who will be laughing then? But this beautiful dream will never be realized if we, as alumni, keep getting bogged down in details of votes instead of just voting how our representatives at the Alumni Council vote. Now there’s a smart group of folks; only one of them voted against the constitution. You know what that tells us? They know what’s best for everyone: petition candidates and real candidates alike. Unfortunately, the alumni of Dartmouth get duped all the time into thinking that we want to change Dartmouth. Preposterous! You know what brings more change? More elections! That’s right, we’re fighting for the forces of good folks, Mr. Mathias and me, we’re doing it; we’re walking the walk. We know this stuff “seems really complicated” and is “all very confusing.” We know you all have been tricked before, but we’re here to tell you ‘Don’t get tricked again!’ It’s easy. Just vote for who we tell you to. Is it really that hard to understand?

Hat Tip: Jake Baron ’10