Copyright©2000
The Hanover Review, Inc.

Editorial: Never Trust Anyone Under 30

The Systematic Division of Dartmouth
by Kirstin Appelt and Kathryn Malinick
The recommendations proposed this week by the Committee on the Student Life Initiative are nominally rooted in the spirit of “The Dartmouth Way,” defined by the Committee as the basic guiding principles of the Dartmouth educational enterprise. It would have been more honest and accurate of the Committee to acknowledge that the new Dartmouth they are advocating has little in common with that of the past 231 years other than location. The residential and social life plan that the recommendations present amounts to a total alteration of the face of the Dartmouth experience, and indeed one that is in line neither with the College’s past, nor with the principles that were supposed to guide its future.

James Wright is Watching You
by Steven Menashi
Last Winter, Dartmouth President James Wright urged the Board of Trustees to adopt a comprehensive approach to social and residential life at the College. So the Board appointed a committee of social planners to design a community “based on Dartmouth's Principle of Community and on adherence to norms of civil behavior.” The Report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative, from which that line is taken, became public January 10 and includes a blueprint for the way students are to conduct themselves outside the classroom. If students fail to abide by Dartmouth's prescribed community values, students and student groups “must expect to see their freedoms restricted, for the good of the community as a whole.”

The College's Bankrupt Policy
by Andrew Grossman
If it is enacted, the Student Life Initiative Committee's report to the Trustees will destroy the Greek system, not “as we know it,” but entirely. Many students reading the report have been struck that its conclusions are not immediately apparent. Some believe that, regarding Greek houses, the recommendations are merely a strengthening of minimum standards, the rules that govern the upkeep and operation of Greek houses, an annoyance at best. This is not the case.

Dartmouth's Leviathan
by Alexander Nazaryan and J. Patrick Leo
The report of Committee on the Student Life Initiative is, in this respect, a peculiarly academic document, not that it is scholarly but in its overbearing sense of self-importance. The Committee's advice, ten months in preparation, is that the College should not ban the Greek system but henpeck it into submission through regulation. Included in the 40-plus page document are proposals to carefully regulate every aspect of fraternity and sorority life.

Letters to the Editor
The Report in Review

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt