Training Big Brother

by Mother Hale

So, I'm sitting there, waiting for the next exercise in futility. The ORL flakes who run Undergraduate Advisor (UGA) training tell you to say “Ouch” if someone else says something that offends you and “Oops” if you said something you regret.

We're talking about common stereotypes at Dartmouth and someone says there's a stereotype that “only anorexic girls eat at Homeplate.”

So this girl in my group says, “I don't know, I've seen a lot of fat girls at Homeplate.”

Then she sees this big fat girl sitting there, looking at her.

“Oops.”

Nine days of touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo about “feelings” and “understanding” and “diversity” go pretty slowly. ORL takes life like it was constructed by a committee — `mediation' and `valuing differences' and meaningless jargon like that.

The theory behind UGA training is to take a week before the freshmen come to give UGAs some sort of grounding in the relevant skills (even when I try to explain the UGA program I slip into jargon). Problem is, we've all learned the relevant skills by being alive for nineteen years. So the ORL session dissolves into a big cliched wuss-fest.

Don't get me wrong: there were a couple of useful moments in the training. For example, they taught us how to deal with signs of alcohol and drug abuse. Sexual assault, too. But almost no time was spent on these issues. In the training manual, before Sexual Assault, before alcohol, before roommate conflicts, before fraternities, before just about everything, comes “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Life at Dartmouth.” This should tell you a bit about UGA training.

Some things that sounded like they could be useful - like “mediation training” - ended up being worthless. We sat around and listened to a racially diverse panel talk about how people should interact. They ignored issues like class and background, and focused exclusively on race. Then we had to make lists of prominent minorities and women. Why, I don't know. I learned nothing about mediation. If two of my freshmen are about to kill each other, I'm going to have to say, “Maybe you should read Maya Angelou. Then you'll know why the caged bird sings.”

I really don't have the heart to go through all of the indoctrination, through all of the petty incidents, through all of the tree-hugging Birkenstock hippie garbage. They didn't teach us very much about academic advising, but I sure know where the Women's Resource Center is. The most useful part of the orientation was when we went around to various campus resources, such as the dean's office, the Tucker Foundation, and the Academic Skills Center, and got fed around twenty minutes of information at each stop. Twenty minutes! Compared to the wasted hours on getting along.

We were talking about affinity housing and someone mentioned that it wouldn't be accepted if white males had their own affinity housing. The Unsinkable Shauna Brown '99, who kept popping up, stood up and yelled, “They do. They're called fraternities.” Well, thanks Shauna. I was expecting her to do a little dance of victory afterwards. At another point, right after we had been encouraged to use Cutter-Shabazz to play pool and to hang out there, she jumped right up and said, “Well, I don't want people to just come there and play pool.” Thanks, Shauna, you call me when the shuttle lands.

All we ever talked about was diversity. Diversity, Diversity, Diversity. It wasn't a little bit of diversity. It was A LOT OF DIVERSITY.

On Friday, we had a diversity panel over lunch. It nearly made me lose my lunch. This guy from the NAD house kept telling us how Dartmouth Native Americans should be able to use the house for them to come together and explore their culture, and that they have lots of food at events.

Then he kept telling us how we shouldn't make generalizations about Native Americans because they come from everywhere and have all these different cultures.

I raise my hand and ask, “So if you're all so different, what do you come together on besides food?” He stopped. “Well, it's difficult, because we're all so different.”

The horror wasn't over. Saturday was “Diversity Day.” In the afternoon, we had a marathon session on “Learning to Live Together.” First we had to list our fears of the diversity training, and our hopes for the diversity training. Then we had to come up with a “Personal Identity Molecule.” Our name was in the middle of the page, and we had to draw circles around it filling in categories we thought we belonged to. Then we had to shade in the categories that made us privileged. Examples:, Caucasian, middle-class, male, able-bodied, heterosexual. We had to share a time when we felt proud to be a member of a certain group, and share a time when it felt painful to be a member of a group.

The fun began. Clutching our “Personal Identity Molecules,” we had to cross the floor if we had identified with various groups. “How many of you identified with religion?” Not even half of us crossed the floor. “How many of you identified with gender?”

Some girls didn't cross the floor on this one, and were later chastised in discussion by Janelle Ruley '00, who told us all she was ashamed of the women who didn't cross the line to identify with their gender.

I really wish you could all read the book from this training session. This book is important because it provided the template for a program a program, “A World of Difference,” which Student Assembly President Josh Green wants to expand to more general portions of the student population — if he has his way, the whole student population will have to take in drivel like this: “A person of Spanish heritage might prefer to be asked about family history or political experiences rather than fiestas.”

Drivel like the difference between homophobia and heterosexism. Homophobia is the fear of gay people, while heterosexism is prejudice against gay people. Just thought I'd clear that up.

Drivel like “Identifying with Others: A Panel Presentation.” This program, scheduled to be one hour long, went seventy-five minutes over schedule so we could listen to everyone's story about “what it's like to be a minority at Dartmouth.” Which meant that a series of aggrieved students got up to chat about their own lives and the abuses and bias they suffered.

Drivel like that spouted by Aaron Akamu '01. Gesticulating wildly, he used his time to chastise those three or four people in the room who admitted wearing Indians t-shirts. No more aggressively aggrieved minorities, please.

No one was even remotely paying attention. I was zoned out and half-asleep. And then, after everyone finished their spiel, it was time for the audience to ask questions. More self-congratulatory drivel from the panel.

So this is what you have to do to be a UGA. Being a UGA is great, but the training sucked. All of the residence halls are now minority-friendly, homosexual-friendly, everything friendly. However, if you're poor, we don't know what to do. If you're Jewish, you'd better go to the Roth Center. And if Josh Green's plan goes through, this is the same drivel all of Dartmouth will be subjected to. Watch out.