Randy Testa Hates You

by Nilanjan Banerjee

There is an elementary school in Vermont with only one tenet of playground etiquette: “you can’t say you can’t play.” If one child approaches another on the playground, wanting to play, say, cowboys and Amerindians, his peer cannot refuse. And, by virtue of “you can’t say you can’t play,” both students learn, well, something. That’s the baffling part: what’s the point? Still, the policy persists.

Think back to elementary school. Remember the young man who spent his recesses picking his nose and poking at the ground with a stick? You didn’t want to play with him for what were, and still are, perfectly legitimate reasons. Imagine that a young man so scorned grew up and entered academe. Imagine that this man, now older, took a professorship at a small New England college. Imagine that he wanted to make you play with him and his cretinous ilk.

Dartmouth Education professor Randy-Michael Testa took a slap at student life that made the Student Life Initiative seem like a mere paper-cut. Perhaps he’d been rebuffed one too many times by his colleagues. Perhaps his Friday nights just got too lonely to bear. Maybe he just wanted to really earn the enmity of the entire student body, some of whom were still unaware of Testa even after he had called them drunks and unintellectual louts. For whatever reason, Testa made it his mission to make Dartmouth “you can’t say you can’t play,” and set himself up on the Greek Life Steering Committee to do just that.

Note, however, the use of past tense. Having found the campus unreceptive to his utopian engineering, Testa’s taking his ball and going home.

Testa made waves on campus in early January, when he resigned from the Greek Life Steering Committee, with harsh words for his fellow committee members. “The kind of change that needs to happen goes far beyond what any committee at Dartmouth will be able to do,” he announced.

He accused student committee members of being unwilling to acquiesce to his demands. “You can’t have a reasoned discussion as to why certain behaviors are stupid and dangerous because it’s lost on [students] who argue on behalf of their entitlement.” He found the committee so unbearable that his only recourse was to give up: “denial cannot be resolved by discussion.”

Testa didn’t want a committee. He wanted a dictatorship.

First on his agenda: banning of the popular Pong drinking game, in which students target cups of beer in a modified game of ping-pong. Testa notes that “Pong is a binge drinking game; students play it in order to get drunk.” Asked by a student if Pong could be played reasonably, Testa replied that “you can only play reasonably by playing with diet soda. Then you won’t be hammered in a matter of minutes.”

A website describing the variations of pong played at different houses—quelle horreur!—sparked a dramatic monologue before the Greek Life Steering Committee.

But, why stop with banning Pong? Why not ban alcohol entirely? Testa cites recent studies, such as one undertaken by Harvard University’s School of Public Health (and dispelled as the rubbish it is in TDR, 11/5/1999), as evidence that college campuses are awash in a sea of “binge drinking.” He advocates serious consequences for binge drinking—whatever that is. If Testa finds himself “hammered” within “minutes” of drinking beer, the threshold for binge drinking he wished to establish must be quite low.

Student committee members were understandably joyed by Testa’s resignation. Ryan Clark, president of The Dartmouth Review and a committee member, wrote in a letter to the Daily Dartmouth that “from his rudeness to other members of the committee to his melodramatic soliloquies, Professor Testa served as an impediment to the progress of the committee….When the utopian agenda he brought to the committee was legitimately critiqued, he quit.”

Other committee members echoed Clark’s sentiments. “His views were incompatible with those of most committee members,” said Dean Krishna ’01. Regarding the education professor’s crusading, Krishna expressed doubts “whether [Testa] understands the social culture here. We’re not stupid.”

Of course, Testa’s indignation wandered far beyond alcohol consumption. He repeatedly condemned the Greek system for its exclusivity, obviously ignorant that most Dartmouth Greek parties, unlike counterparts at other schools, are open to the entire community, free of charge.

He criticized Greek houses for maintaining selective memberships (at least one house has an open-admissions policy), perhaps overlooking the College’s own selective policies that assemble both the faculty and the student body.

Such differences in opinion notwithstanding, Testa’s vivid imagination conjures a vision of Dartmouth Greek life wholly apart from reality. An average night is chaos. Students binge drink as a prelude to seemingly scheduled, alcohol-fueled sexual assaults. If these brutes make it out of bed the next morning, they attend class hung-over and hazy. It’s a wonder that Dick’s House hasn’t yet set up a ward for acute liver failure.

Of course, anyone who has actually attended a Greek party (perhaps too traumatic or distasteful for the effete Testa) could dispel such nonsense with actual experience. Do students drink? Certainly. Do students drink to abandon? The truth is that some do, most do not, and those who do usually suffer the consequences of ill-considered behavior.

A quick perusal of Dartmouth’s published statistics on sexual assault dispels Testa’s charges of rampant abuse: even if fewer than half of assaults are reported, the number, though still unacceptable, is far fewer than at similar colleges and universities.

But Testa disdains discussion of such unimportant points, instead playing the aggressor in exchanges. He reduced a young lady to tears at a forum on Greek life held last year at Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority, so pointed were his personal and verbal attacks. Greek Life Steering Committee members recount having been interrupted, shouted down, or otherwise overpowered by Testa.

To the relief of all who have or would have clashed with Testa, the professor announced to his Education 34 class his intention to leave Dartmouth. He cited frustrations with the administration and the student body. As a parting shot, Testa deemed the student body apathetic, presumably for its resistance to embrace his half-baked totalitarian sermonizing.

It must be said: Randy-Michael Testa, we never liked you much, either.