Encouraging growth, affirming the educational process
A Trustee talk on the "winter of discontent"
I want to discuss some very important student affairs developments this winter in the context of the special education that goes on at Dartmouth. That involves interaction between students and faculty in and outside the classroom, between men and women, between whites, blacks, Native Americans, Chicanos, and Northeastern poor, between administrators, Trustees, and alumni to a degree that I feel has not occurred at Dartmouth College ever. These are personal comments, I am going to make — and some may disagree with me — but I think the educational process that is going on at this college now, particularly over the last few months, is of a level and type that should give every one of us great satisfaction and optimism for the present and the future of Dartmouth.
The first area of this educational process I want to mention is the Collis Center — the College Center — Common Ground, which is located in the renovated Commons area of College Hall. To the extent that any building, any physical facility, can coalesce and represent the new spirit that I think pervades this campus, that building not only will do it but is doing it right now in only its fifth month of existence.
Three years ago, when the germination of the idea for a student center first began to take real form (a student center has been talked about on this campus ever since the early 19205), two students, Lennie Sitomer and Sean McLaughlin,, voiced the need for a unifying facility on a Dartmouth College campus with a diverse and sometimes fragmented student body. It's hard to maintain cohesiveness on a pluralistic campus, a campus of men, women, and minorities, without social facilities to meet diverse needs. Those two students particularly voiced the need for something, some building that could bring all members of the community together, some place that could be everybody's — a "common ground," which was the term they used from the very beginning. When they first voiced that concept three years ago, there wasn't anybody who felt that any such reality could possibly come into existence short of seven to ten years. Less than three years later, there it is.
It's a place for everybody to come and interact. Not just students, but also faculty, alumni, and visitors. It's a place where you can feel comfortable to go and hear music, to go up on the balcony to sit and read your mail, play cards, talk — but be part of the scene. It's an ebb and flow kind of place. There can be talks, dances, concerts, small music groups, small theater groups. You don't have to belong. It belongs to everybody. It's Common Ground. That was the concept, and the excitement to me is how it came into being.
We all recognized that Dartmouth needed something like this, but students made it happen. Lennie Sitomer and Sean McLaughlin had an idea and they didn't give up. They talked to people and found out how the process works around here. They learned how things get done. They realized they don't get done by disruptive rallies or sit-ins or worse; they get done by articulating a good idea, developing it, and working with the people who have the authority to make decisions. Lennie and Sean worked with the administration. They worked with the Trustees. They worked with those administrators who are responsible for physical change on the campus and financial commitments, and in a period of two years, through a unique partnership of students, Trustees, and administrators, that building came into reality. Now it's doing what it's supposed to do and what Dartmouth absolutely had to have in order to move ahead with the kind of student body and kinds of purposes we now have at this college.
AT the same time that the Collis Center was being dedicated, another issue was ebbing and flowing on the cam- pus, and that was the whole question of the quality of student life. This was an issue that the Trustees had been concerned about actively for some three years. We had put in place a new constitution for the fraternity system, including a Fraternity Board of Overseers that would provide a kind of self-government and supportive supervision that had always been lacking in the fraternities. In that same context, others — including, I think, most importantly the faculty — were increasingly concerned about many aspects of the social life on the campus. The faculty's concern happened to take the form of a vote recommending to the Board of Trustees that the fraternity system, as not sufficiently civilized and as antithetical to the purposes of the College, be abolished. That was purposely a very dramatic vote, and purposely it was a recommendation too narrowly drawn. But it was done that way, I believe, in order to achieve the objective that was achieved — to start discussion, to underline priorities, to shake some complacency, to achieve some introspection and some acceptance of the need for re-evaluation by not only the fraternity system but by everybody. The Trustees' response to that vote was an endorsement of the concerns that led to it and a statement that the fraternity system would be under close surveillance for one year and, moreover, that the fraternities must demonstrate tangibly a willingness to make the kind of required changes that the faculty vote and the initiatives of the Trustees and the administration had started.
The heartening aspect of that whole process was the participation of those who were contributing to the results. The faculty made a very important contribution, and I think I am correct in saying that for the first time in the modern history of the College the faculty took an important concerted stand on a moral issue on the campus. I am convinced that is going to happen more and more frequently from now on, and I think it is an absolutely essential function of the faculty of this institution.
The students themselves were integral to the whole issue. I can't emphasize enough the quality of the testimony that we received from the student leadership that emerged in response to the faculty vote. The students voiced a recognition of the concerns that led to that vote and convincingly testified to us that change was in order to bring the fraternity system constructively into the mainstream of the College. That to me was a very important educational process for all of us. I hope and trust the students themselves recognized that when organized effectively and presenting their positions rationally and persuasively, their valid positions would be listened to and accepted, as in this case they were.
One of the perhaps little noted results of that whole process was a second Trustee vote in response to testimony we heard from every element on the campus: the need for a campus-wide assessment of the quality of student life at Dartmouth. The President was authorized to appoint a group of students, administrators, faculty, and alumni to do just that. It parallels a similar study going on in the academic area, and the issue - the quality of student life - is no less vital.
One other related aspect of this whole issue — again, little noted but terribly important — was the appointment this winter of a Committee on Alcohol Concerns. This is a student-administration-faculty action group charged with the responsibility for studying and implementing various programs dealing with what we must all recognize is a very serious problem on this campus. We are not alone. Brown University has for several years had such a committee and such a program. They are way ahead of us, and they would testify that they do nothing at Brown that is more important than their various programs in the area of alcohol abuse. It's a major problem here. It has to be addressed intensely and professionally and with total involvement, and I am glad to be able to report that it now is happening.
Another almost unnoticed development occurred the same weekend in which the Trustees voted in regard to fraternities. In many ways one of the most gratifying developments of the whole year, because it represents the curing of a ten-year hiatus, was the approval and endorsement of an Undergraduate Council at Dartmouth. That doesn't seem like much to all of us who lived with Undergraduate Councils. But student government was abandoned at Dartmouth in the late 19605, a time of revolutionary, activist, anti-elitist philosophies, and for ten years students at this college have not had an effective representative organization for governing themselves or for communicating with others about the governance of this institution. Starting about two years ago, several students developed on their own — totally without involvement of the administration, which did not want to take any part in what should be a student effort — an imaginative concept for student government. Earlier this year, the specifics of the student proposal received the overwhelming signed-petition support of 2,000 undergraduates, and in February the Trustees and the administration approved them. The result was that in late April a new Undergraduate Council was elected, and it is now in place to move forward. That is very much a part of the kind of educational process-. that has been going on these last few months.
IMMEDIATELY after the February meeting of the Trustees, some very unhappy things happened on this campus which received a lot of very bad national publicity and which, on the other hand, led to some of the most positive actions that we could possibly report. I want to describe why I think that those developments were so positive. Two days after the Trustee meeting was the incident at the hockey game involving the "Indian skaters." That event triggered the anger of minority students and others that could have gone totally out of control but did not. The reasons it happened are bizarre in many ways, but the minority situation in society is a tension-ridden situation. We are no different at Dartmouth from anywhere else, and we have to cope with it as everybody else in society has to cope with it. But as far as I'm concerned, it was handled beautifully at the College — again, largely due to the responsibility of the students.
The blacks were probably as exercised about the hockey incident as the Native Americans, but, in any event, there were great concerns. A number of unsettling incidents flared up, and what came out of them was a day of discussion.. It wasn't a day of discussion such as was had at Harvard or Amherst, which weren't days of discussion at all. Those were occupations of the Amherst administration building and an unauthorized walk-out on classes at Harvard. What happened here was not as the Boston headlines read: "Students Force Cancellation of Classes." What happened here was that some very responsible students came to the administration first and then to the faculty and said, "There are some tensions on this campus which we think need to be defused. We know how to defuse them. We need to do some talking, and we suggest that classes be rescheduled for one day. We request that that happen, and here's'why we think it would be healthy if it did happen."
The Executive Committee of the Faculty took all the considerations into account, discussed the matter for two hours one day, determined the plan could and should be accomplished and that classes would be rescheduled. Such a day of discussion was held, and it was one of the most educational and constructive days that has ever occurred at this campus, from all the testimony that I have heard. That's real education. I don't know how many problems were solved on that day, but at least the process was followed properly and effectively, and I am convinced that great progress was made among a very diverse — properly diverse — body of students, who are educating themselves and each other.
One concerned alumnus called the College in great ire the next day because, as he said, "I'm paying $50 a day to have my son educated, and I'm not going to sit still and let you all cancel classes one day and waste my $50." I think that's a sad commentary, because the education that young man received that day, if he participated, was worth many times more than $50.
THOSE are the kinds of things that have been happening on this campus, as I say, between men, women, blacks, Indians, all sorts of people. It is a different college. It's a different campus than many of us remember. But it is basically the same place. All the good that we remember is still here, and it has been built on, become better, more relevant to society. It is the kind of place where we now can properly say that the purposes of Dartmouth College are to educate men and women for positive impact on society and feel that we mean what we are saying, and that we have the material, the facilities, and the students that will make that happen.
That realization is what led the Trustees, without debate, without any concern that there was any other alternative, to vote in April that a prior Trustee decision that women should somehow be treated differently at Dartmouth in our admissions process was not only no longer wise but was destructive — that it would, if permitted to continue, seriously undermine the fiber of this place and make those words of philosophy and purpose hollow and hypocritical. For that reason, through a process which I am terribly excited and optimistic about, we took an action which we are totally convinced, as I hope we can convey to all alumni, was absolutely essential to the achievement of the purposes of this institution.
Robert Kilmarx '50 has been a Trusteesince 1972 and currently chairs theTrustees' Committee on Student Affairs Thisarticle is adapted from a talk to thealumni class officers in May.
