The Undergraduate Chair
As Dartmouth finishes a year in which major efforts were made to seek new leadership in the Presidency and the Dean's Office, and as the realization of that new leadership becomes increasingly imminent, curiosity is turning more strongly than ever toward the directions the new leadership will take and the style in which it will approach its inevitable problems.
The new President will face the task of completely refashioning the relationship between his office and the student body. He will face students who have viewed the President's Office with increasing cynicism in recent years and who have grown to think of it as something that rarely impinges in any personal way on their four years in Hanover.
Yet, even if this is not a period of student-proclaimed establishment heroes, we all have a private hope that the man who will become President of Dartmouth will understand our concerns and in the context of that understanding, challenge us to be better than we are. As the Presidential Analysis Committee has phrased it, "Whatever the president's age, he must be able to understand and communicate with the college students of the 1970's." No one can be sure just what that will entail but the new man can reasonably expect that students will ask that he be willing to expose his mind to them. They will not require that he necessarily agree with them but that he be honest with them. The new President can establish an effective working relationship with his students only if they know where he stands and just as importantly if they know he will be willing to put his ideas on the line.
The new President would be wise to take a lesson from the Shockley incident. The College has lost an important intermediary instrument, the Judicial Advisory Committee for black students, and deeply alienated many blacks as well as some whites as the result of the CCSC's handling of the Shockley case.
When the 17 blacks involved in the hand-clapping incident which prevented William Shockley from delivering his paper were charged with violation of the Policy on Freedom of Expression and Dissent, the case was sent before the JAC. The JAC spent about five weeks considering the evidence, hearing testimony and writing a 29-page report recommending dismissal of the charges, which was then forwarded to Carroll Brewster, Dean of the College.
Dean Brewster in turn passed the report on to the CCSC. The CCSC rejected the arguments of the Judicial Advisory Committee and imposed one term of college discipline, the equivalent of probation, on the 17 students. Within 24 hours of the CCSC's decision the entire Judicial Advisory Committee had resigned, not because of the actual decision but because of the insensitivity displayed by the CCSC in making and announcing its decision.
In reversing the recommendations of the Judicial Advisory Committee the CCSC apparently made no attempt to deal with the substance of what the CCSC had itself recognized as a "serious" report. The CCSC reversed the detailed arguments of the JAC with no rebuttal of any kind. The one-page decision by the CCSC merely mentioned that the report of the JAC had expressed some of the "extenuating circumstances" inherent in the case.
In addition, the CCSC never offered to discuss the arguments in the report with the JAC, it did not inform the JAC in advance that its decision was contrary to the JAC recommendations and, in essence, by its actions the CCSC did not extend common courtesy or respect to an effort made in good faith by fellow members of the academic com- munity. Academic freedom and freedom of speech are only redefined as their limits are tested. At Dartmouth we had a test of limits and some thoughtful reflection by the JAC on the meaning of that test. The CCSC did not contribute to the public discussion of the basic issues involved and in so doing failed to fulfill its responsibilities to the academic community. In this case, the decision itself was far less important than the process by which it was made. Whether or not it was consciously intended, the procedures of the CCSC in this case have had the result of convincing the black community at Dartmouth that their most careful consideration is not worth more than a one- line response, that the intellectual effort represented in their report is unimportant, and that they as members of this community cannot expect to be treated, with consideration.
No new President will hold respect if he allows this kind of insensitivity to prevail. He will have to understand that if the College wishes to make a commitment to educate blacks it must also make a commitment to respect them.
The new President will also have to deal with a student body that has learned to operate in an essentially leaderless fashion. The absence of any kind of pressure from above has contributed to an increasing individual independence and confidence among the students. Students seem to be more comfortable being themselves. They seem to be more confident of their interests and feeling less pressure to conform to any given standard either in their social behavior, the way they use their time outside of academic work, or the image they project to their fellow students. The inward turning that has been going on in recent years is continuing and there is less interest in causes for the sake of causes. (Vietnam still does not draw large crowds of public protesters here.) In sum, there is a general and increasing concentration on the self, not to the exclusion of everything else but to the exclusion of a good many things that students feel are of little basic importance.
Student government has been rejected as having little importance primarily because it was ineffective and self-serving. There has been an increasing unwillingness to designate campuswide student leaders. There are no campus heroes. There seems to be a fracturing of large common interests in terms of campus activity. Students don't turn out in large numbers for anything except football games. There are few, if any, things which are particularly "stylish" demanding adherence by large numbers. The mood of the campus seems to be more serious.
In place of ongoing, self-perpetuating organizations dealing with student issues and campus issues, ad hoc groups of students have sprung up to deal with specific needs or specific issues. The Afro-American Society fulfills one need, the Dartmouth Course Guide and TheDartmouth Review, a kind of in-depth supplement to The D, fill another need; an informal student committee on coeducation dealt with that issue last year; numerous short-lived groups sprang up around the ROTC issue last spring; a group has been formed to organize the Vietnam Moratoria. None of these has been the sole province of any existing campus-wide organization. Instead, students have organized and worked to- gether where their interests coincide.
There has been a steady increase in participation in departments and standing committees of the faculty, but that participation has not been for the sake of participation but primarily to accomplish some specific purpose. There is still some question whether students will want to take on the long-term, routine work in departments and standing committees.
The organization around specific needs and issues is much healthier than the kind of sterile organization which past student governments have offered. Faculty and administrators would like some sort of campus-wide representative system from which they could "legitimately" draw students for various tasks of a representative nature. One of the reasons student government died here was because it was used far too much as a legitimizing instrument by the administration when legitimacy itself was in serious question. If the students do not want a student government, then it is ridiculous to reestablish it merely to serve as a manpower pool or a legitimizing instrument for the College. In its last years, when the student government said something was right or good, that did not necessarily mean that the majority of the students agreed. When such a situation exists, everyone is better off without student government.
What is needed is some kind of forum which can deal with the issues which the College is having to face. These issues need to be discussed publicly and all sectors of the community, including students, faculty, administration, and graduate schools, should be included.
Perhaps one of the measures of the success of a liberal arts institution or for that matter any institution is its ability to run itself with sensitivity... to its various human components, to the outside world, to the law, and to whatever its purpose may be.
1970 Football Schedule
The University of Massachusetts returns to the Dartmouth football schedule in 1970 and opens the Indians' nine-game schedule at Memorial Field on September 26. Massachusetts, the 1969 Yankee Conference champion, replaces the University of New Hampshire as Dartmouth's initial opponent.
The 1970 schedule:
Sept. 26, Massachusetts; Oct. 3, at Holy Cross; 10, Princeton; 17, Brown; 24, at Harvard; 31, at Yale; Nov. 7, Columbia; 14, at Cornell; 21, at Pennsylvania.
