Dartmouth's Leviathan

by Alexander Nazaryan and J. Patrick Leo

As inveterate a student of power as there ever was, Thomas Hobbes hated universities as hotbeds of “rubbish and radicalism” incapable of producing good citizens—that is, subjects unhesitant in their fealty to the crown. As Puritan militants at Oxford burned copies of the Leviathan in the midst of the English Civil War, Hobbes declared himself fed up with the lot of them and insisted that, should Royalists ever get the rule of England back, the king should make sure to keep the country's students on a taut choke chain.

In the late 1960's, a leader of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley suggested that Hobbes would have been a terrific college administrator: aged, vindictive, and of deep fascist sympathies. The overblown analogy aside, this particular student radical missed the essential and inextricable ingredient of any good player in campus politics. He must possess that rare capacity to mistake the utterly trivial for the deeply profound. He must believe the proper positioning of “attractive non-salty food” at a fraternity party to be of eminent concern.

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: when, where, how and why parties may be held, who may live in the house, who may join, when they may join, with whom members must associate, with whom members must not associate, that their Greek houses must have a “mission statement,” what that statement should contain, what volunteer services must be performed, for whom those services must be performed, who may use the house, when they may use the house, and what floor must be put to what use.

To those now suspicious that all this is simply a ploy to eliminate the Greek system by attrition, the Committee spells it out for you on page 28: “It is unlikely that all current CFS organizations will be able to meet the higher standards, and that the number of organizations will probably be reduced. This reduction is desirable in order to eliminate the historical dominance by the CFS organizations of Dartmouth social life. A reduction in the number of selective CFS organizations would also complement the enhanced cluster system and the other recommendations of this report. The selective social organizations of the future will constitute a very different, higher quality but secondary component of the overall Dartmouth social system.” In other words, the pettiness has a point. These regulations Greek houses are not intended to meet, the ensuing failure a pretext to dispose of them. The report stipulates, however, that extra leeway should be afforded co-ed houses in meeting new regulations such as membership requirements. From any standpoint, there is something disturbing about this selective targeting of student groups and, if implemented, nearly all of the regulations would likely fail a court challenge. The Constitution supersedes Dartmouth's Principle of Community.

Of course, Dartmouth's President, its Trustees, and the members of the CSLI now deny that the elimination of the Greek system is their intent. On January 11, Trustee and CSLI member Peter Fahey'68, President Wright, and Dean of the College James Larimore presided over the first of weekly “fireside chats” at the Hopkins Center, in which students are to ask questions and submit suggestions. In his brief opening statement, Wright waxed blandly, “I have a vision of a place with true sense of community...with real continuity...a place of learning” as Larimore declared the winter term to be a time for student input on the Committee's report.

Yet students are distinctly unhappy with the recommendations as currently constituted. The Dartmouth Review solicited opinions on the Committee's recommendations via e-mail, resulting in the following data: 84.3% of respondents were dissatisfied with the Committee's recommendations, saying they would not improve social life at the College, and the remainder generally supported the proposals. Most students recognize what the College believes them incapable of: that the aim of the Student Life Initiative is to restrict not enhance their choices. Were it otherwise, the College would not have isolated the Greek system in the first place but simply constructed the wonderful new social options that the administration assures students are forthcoming. Only when the Greek system is crippled can the administration have any hope of attracting students to its centralized system of social control.

The rationale behind this unprecedented assertion of administrative control is largely justified on the basis of “diversity.” “Diversity” may be a laudable ideal but it is one about which the College has long ceased thinking critically. The idea pervades the report but it is neither defended nor explained. It is a fetish whose remarkable powers are promised but never demonstrated. Clearly the institution has an obligation not to discriminate. Yet the report is far more wide-ranging in its effort to enshrine diversity. The real value of racial diversity, however, is that it helps instill the notion that most ethnic distinctions are not meaningful in any real way other than aesthetic. Most of the racial minorities Dartmouth enrolls have far more in common with non-minority Dartmouth students than with many other members of their ethnic groups. A mature understanding of race acknowledges the continuing importance of race but recognizes how clumsy and inept a concept it is when applied to actual persons. This does not simply extend to white students. As one black Dartmouth junior recalls, “I came to Dartmouth from a mostly black high school. At my school, all the white kids got along and so I thought all white people were basically the same. It was something of a shock to me when I came to Dartmouth and discovered that all the white students didn't always get along.”

Echoing the claims of Dartmouth's Trustees, the Committee advances the contention that the world is co-educational, therefore the College should ensure suitable gender mingling, or else it “may not be the best preparation for the pronouncedly `co-ed' personal and professional worlds that Dartmouth students will inhabit after college.” Logical perhaps, but based on one of the utter falsities of the academy: that the “real world” in any way resembles the ideologically-regulated environment of the university. Dartmouth's students, coddled by the administration, will be in for quite a shock when they enter the world, where the “Principle of Community” does not operate, nor do the unconditionally egalitarian sensibilities of the Committee dominate.

The non-existence of single-sex social environments and events in the real world is a laughable notion, surely, but the Committee also conflates its ideological preferences with good pedagogy. The report papers over the educational and developmental benefits of single-sex environments relying simply on the notion that Dartmouth is a fake world—totally inconsistent with reality—where sometimes people choose to live with others of the same gender. The Committee leaves its pity for the poor graduate of Mount Holyoke or Sweet Briar unspoken.

“There is ample evidence to not only support the acceptance of single-sex fraternal organizations and their exemption from Title IX from a legal perspective,” says Brad Beacham of Sigma Nu Fraternity's national organization, “but also the fact that from a student developmental and pedagogical standpoint, a single-sex environment can provide unique opportunities for its participants that you don't always find in a co-ed situation.” Some of the College's own offices, like the Women's Resource Center, establish single-sex groups for developmental and educational purposes.

Much of the report's rationale seems absurdly superficial or self-contradictory on its face. Many laughs have been had, for example, at Dartmouth's—an institution that annually rejects over 8,000 applicants—railing against exclusivity and elitism.

“On the surface its recommendations seem to be good-intentioned,” says Chad Silverman '02 who was optimistic about the report before its release, “but upon deeper inspection the report is a costume for a plan to eviscerate, if not completely eliminate, the Greek System at Dartmouth.” Silverman was especially disappointed that the report contained seven pages of new regulations for Greek houses but offered only four short paragraphs on new art and recreational space.

The report also contains plenty of the pretentious rhetoric and gaudy platitudes of which Dartmouth administrators are so fond—all with the trifling aim of displacing fraternities from students' social lives. The report of the Committee on the Student Life Initiative is a document worthy of today's academy: overblown, ideologically-driven, and utterly obsessed with trivial nonsense. Some Greek houses are “poorly furnished,” laments the Committee. Others hold meetings that are “uselessly time consuming.” Still others have “low memberships,” or even lack “a designated Tucker Foundation liaison.”

Last year, Dartmouth launched a heated and exhausting battle with its students over the social organizations they join, when and where they socialize, and, most vigorously, over the existence of “large open refrigerator units” in off-campus residences.

“University politics are vicious,” Henry Kissinger once observed, “precisely because the stakes are so small.”