The Dartmouth Review: February 12, 2001

The Dartmouth Review

Dartmouth's Racial Separatism
by Alexander Talcott and Darren Thomas
Last April, Dean of the College James Larimore distributed a memo to the entire campus detailing changes to be expected in the next phase of the Student Life Initiative. Among the changes, Larimore explained that “The advisory positions for African-American students, Latino/Hispanic students, Asian Pacific American students, and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered students will be expanded from half-time to full-time.” Apparently, the advice provided by class deans is inadequate, or culturally indecipherable, for students with minority backgrounds (or alternate sexual orientations). As such, Dartmouth is providing special advisors just for them. Despite Dartmouth’s stated faith in multicultural integration—the College’s “Principle of Community” states that diversity provides “an opportunity for learning and moral growth”—the administration continually creates group distinctions among students, and separates them along racial and sexual lines.

Courts Confront "Diversity"
by Thomas White
“A racially diverse and ethnically diverse student body produces significant educational benefits such that diversity, in the context of higher education, constitutes a compelling government interest,” wrote Judge Patrick Duggan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Consequently, Duggan ruled in December, the University of Michigan may justifiably employ racial preferences in its admissions policies. In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas at Austin Law School as unconstitutional, holding that diversity is not a compelling government interest and cannot justify racial discrimination in university admissions. Just last month, however, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Washington University Law School was legally justified in using tactics similar to that of the University of Texas in order to engineer a more racially diverse class. Thus, the nations’ penultimate courts have articulated two distinct opinions over the same issue, setting the stage for an opinion by the highest court.

Spinning Their Wheels
by Andrew Grossman
A potpourri of miscreants, seated irregularly, filled Filene Auditorium in the newish Moore Hall on Friday night: an assortment of piercings, hooded sweatshirts, and uneven topologies of facial hair. The occasion for the congregation of the visually motley if otherwise subdued crowd: Dr. Francis E. Kendall’s keynote address to the Beyond the Box 4 Conference, hosted at Dartmouth College from February 23 to 25. This year’s conference was subtitled “CommUnity Partnerships: Changing Apathy to Activism,” and the attendees certainly seemed ready to move beyond rhetoric to action. In fact, Kendall’s speech was given the unwieldy title “How Do We Create Meaningful Institutional Change Rather than Just Spinning Our Wheels?”

Because You're a Racist!
by Benjamin Flickinger
I’m sure that many of us have pondered the question at some point in our lives, most likely in high school but even here at Dartmouth College. You’ll walk into the cafeteria, and notice that it’s divided into sections. Black students at one group of tables, white students at another. Why do we self-segregate in such a fashion? Dr. Beverly Tatum aims to discover the reason for this occurrence in her book, fittingly titled Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? But Tatum’s book focuses more on race as a whole and only uses the cafeteria question to open the door to all of society’s ills regarding racism. In the end, the book comes down to black against white, in which whites are the cause of all hardships for everyone else, but especially blacks, due to racism. In fact, according to her definition of racism, all whites are racist whether they are truly bigots or ardent Jesse Jackson supporters like Bill and Hillary.

THE VIEW FROM DARTMOUTH:
Suspects Arrested in Zantop Case by Andrew Grossman
The Terrible New Hazing Policy by Alexander Wilson
Randy Testa Hates You by Nilanjan Banerjee
A Drag Oddity by J. Lawrence Scholer and Darren Thomas

POLITICS AND CULTURE:
Transformation in Israel by Jeffrey Hart
To Have and to Hold by Stella Baer
Perfect Sound Forever by Stefan Beck

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