'Radical' with a Cause
A CURRENT television commercial for a brokerage firm uses for its closing line: "When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen." At Dartmouth, an appropriate adaptation of that phrase might be: "When Paula Sharp talks, people jeer." The mere mention of her name is enough to send a fraternity member into paroxysms of malediction against anyone so anti-male, anti-Dartmouth, anti-American, and antifun. Her popular image pegs her as an unsmiling, intolerant, self-righteous, firebreathing, feminist guerrilla. Even her more s.ober-minded critics will sadly shake their heads and hint at her responsibility for all manner of unutterable abominations. But the malice doesn't always stop with private words: Sharp occasionally finds derisive notes left in her mail box, she's been treated unkindly on the pages of The Dartmouth, and it is not uncommon for her to be abused verbally in the streets. There is even an organization called STEPS Society to Eliminate Paula Sharp which, though organized in good-natured jest, has had a number of serious inquiries.
It may seem curious that amidst such seemingly universal ill-will exists a different segment of students who can be equally enthusiastic in their admiration for Sharp. Check with the group in Foley House, or the regulars at the Collis Center, or someone in comparative literature, and you're likely to hear adjectives like "intelligent," "witty" and "responsible."
The stimulus for both the invective and the praise is Sharp's out-spoken involvement over the last few years with a number of volatile campus issues. A member of the Class of '79, she has since her sophomore year campaigned for equal access in admissions, though her rise to notoriety began only last fall after her statements at the faculty meeting considering the abolition of fraternities. More recently, her name has been correctly associated with the protests against sexism and racism during the winter and spring terms, and incorrectly associated with almost every other radical cause on campus. Most people assume she is a driving force being the Dartmouth Women's Alliance, which she is not, and one student insisted she was among those arrested at the site of the Seabrook nuclear power station, which she was not.
In private, Sharp is not quite so frightening. She lives in relative peace on the first floor of Foley House, in a book and paper cluttered room with a huge felt-tipped pen mural over the fire place. Besides currently completing a comparative literature thesis on Latin American author Cesar Vallejó she also works as a biological illustrator ("I once had a caterpillar published"), helps edit the College literary magazine, and writes poems — work for which she won the $400 Sidney Cox Memorial Prize in poetry. Despite her image, Sharp smiles often, tells self-deprecatory jokes, and has a habit of emitting a quiet chuckle as she describes what she calls the rumored Paula Sharp — a person she insists has no relation to the real Paula Sharp. She takes great delight in explaining that for a scapegoat, the best response to criticism is a full admission to everything charged: "I just agree with everyone that I'm an unspeakably horrible person. You see, it's really much more effective to join the ranks of the people who are against you, because they're going to win anyway" (quiet chuckle).
If reports of Sharp's ferocity are exaggerated, they also bear some truth. She speaks seriously on the troubles she sees at Dartmouth, and does not soften her words in deference to other students or, for that matter, to alumni. Some see her as an oversensitive critic harping on minor or irrelevant points. Sharp sees herself as an individual who cares enough about her school to speak out on some very real and serious problems.
Sharp grew up traveling about the country, never staying in one place for more than a few years. Her mother, an anthropologist specializing in Latin America, moved the family about among various universities, at one time or another residing in San Diego. New Orleans, New Haven, Washington D.C., and Chapel Hill, as well as Wisconsin, Michigan, New Mexico, and Mexico. Like many students, Paula Sharp was initially attracted to Dartmouth for its rural setting, the small class sizes, accessibility to professors, and a generous financial aid offer. Before she arrived, Sharp's experience with Dartmouth was limited to an interviewer who discouraged her with statistics on the female application/acceptance ratio, a coworker who was very much against coeducation, and school counselors who warned that she might find many of the students wealthy and insensitive. At the time, she felt their descriptions had to be too exaggerated — like Dickensian caricatures. Later, she was to discover that, as applied to some students, the predictions were depressingly accurate.
When Sharp arrived at Dartmouth, she found, like most students, that many of her preconceptions were incorrect. The intellectual atmosphere was less intense than she had feared — she expected interminable conversations on James Joyce at The dining hall — though the social atmosphere, dominated by fraternities, was more limited than she had hoped. But what most disturbed her then, as it does now, is the contrast between the economic and social "reality" of most Dartmouth students and the reality she knows from say, the small towns in New Mexico; towns where her friends must worry about needed medical care they can't afford, or a brother in jail, or a father laid-off, or a pregnant sister in high school with no husband. Sharp considers that those cushioned by money see such "run-of-the-mill" hardships as somehow bizarre. "I feel as if where I come from," Sharp adds, "eightyear-old children have a lot more common sense and 'wisdom' and experience than these people do when they come here and they're 20 years old."
Sharp feels it is not only the disproportionate amount of wealth at Dartmouth that creates these barriers, it is also the homogeneity of the student body. Sharp's experience in the Southwest and Mexico and her major in Latin American literature make her particularly sensitive to Chicano culture and its under-representation at Dartmouth. Recently, she and a small group of students — foreigners and Puerto Ricans as well as whites — founded the Latino Forum, an organization serving the social function of bringing Latin culture to Dartmouth' (through poetry readings, music, films, and dinners) and the political function of pushing the College to recruit more Latinos.
According to Sharp, a greater awareness of black and Latino culture at the College is not only important — for those minorities, it is also essential to an adequate preparation for white students - students who must deal with a country that is one fifth Spanish-speaking, a country that is dominated less and less by its white Anglo population. She finds it disturbing that typical Dartmouth graduates, as lawyers, judges, or heads of corporations, are making decisions affecting a large body of people about whom they know little: "The fact that someone could leave Dartmouth after four years and know nothing of Latino culture means they're just not educated."
This isolation of most of the undergraduate body from the concerns of minorities — and here Sharp includes women — results in more than just passive insensitivity; she feels it often creates active hostility toward anyone trying to bridge that gap, sometimes breaking out into ugly acts of racism and sexism. But Sharp is also concerned with those acts of racial and sexual hostility that masquerade as humor. The example on which she concentrates is spring Hums, a function which serves for her as a symbol of just how "mean" the humor can be. If women dislike songs whose lyrics protest against coeducation, or if Native Americans take offense at lines lampooning the recent furor over the Indian symbol, they are accused of lacking a sense of humor. Sharp becomes particularly insistent when she criticizes this type of reasoning: "They can make sexist and racist jokes and it's funny, but when you're on the other side, it's a dead serious issue. Racism isn't funny, it's dangerous. It's cruel. It's nasty. And maybe one of the problems is the things they laugh about they can afford to laugh about."
When asked about her own image as a radical feminist who can't take a joke, she explains, with her usual chuckle: "Chances are if who you're talking with is terribly racist and sexist to begin with, you probably sound pretty upset. But they have to realize that there are people you talk with who you enjoy and who make you laugh." As for the "radical" label, Sharp denies she would be considered a radical at all in the outside world. It is just the relative conservatism that makes a moderate stand seem fanatic: "If you express even the faintest interest here in women's rights — I mean something as basic as giving female students the same opportunity when they apply to Dartmouth as men — you're labeled a radical feminist, and everything is blown out of proportion."
Not surprisingly, it is often suggested to Sharp — sometimes none too subtly — that given her views on Dartmouth, she should just simply leave. Apparently, part of the reason she stays is to spite those who would like to see her go. But despite her seemingly unrelenting criticism of the school, Sharp actually retains a great deal of confidence that as the country changes, so will Dartmouth, sooner or later: "After all, Dartmouth can only remain a bastion of white male elitism for so long." She points to the recent change in admissions policy for women and the decision to continue and expand the Black Studies program as "real gains, not token gestures," and characterizes both David Weber '65 and Robert Kilmarx '50 as progressive Trustees. However, Sharp does admit to at least one ulterior motive for remaining at Dartmouth. Since she hopes eventually to practice law within the Chicano community somewhere in the Southwest, she sees her time in Hanover as a type of domestic study program within the white upper-middle-class: "It's like a training ground for learning what the people I am going to be up against for the rest of my life are like. I now know how to fight these people, I know how to stand efficiently in their way when I feel like they're doing things that will hurt people I care about." And then, with a mischievous smile, she quietly murmurs to herself: "That all sounds terribly radical."
