The Absolute and the Ambiguous

The other night a bunch of seniors in Kappa Alpha Theta were talking about graduation over dinner at Raphael's, a popular pizza joint 14 miles from campus. Our conversation led us back to freshman week. Ilze Padegs remembered vividly what Dean of the Tucker Foundation Warner Traynham had said to us in September of 1980: "Look to your left. Look to your right. Some of these people will not be graduating with you in 1984." Ilze said, "The person who would have sat beside me at Commencement won't be there." That student, Andrea Packer, committed suicide in the fall of 1982 by hanging herself in Center Theater in the Hopkins Center.

I hadn't known Andrea well, but I was intrigued by her death. I had a great desire to know more, not just out of curiosity but out of need. I asked around, gathered fragments of information, and heard a ghost story. It was told to me almost as a secret, something not to be repeated for common knowledge. A friend explained to me the theater superstition which holds that every theater has a ghost. And Center Theater didn't. In light of that story, Andrea's death in the theater seemed to me more violent and consciously dramatic than I had realized.

People who are unhappy here tend to keep the reasons to themselves; when they leave, not that many people know. Even fewer know why. Also, with people constantly coming and going because of the Dartmouth Plan, it is harder to notice than it might be otherwise. I didn't know that one former acquaintance had withdrawn and transferred elsewhere until he wrote Debbie Schupack in response to her February "Undergraduate Chair" on conformity. In the letter, which he told her to feel free to share, he wrote about an attitude, both academic and social, that sent him away. "There was no real feeling in the learning people were doing," he wrote. "It was tests, grades, and eventually jobs." A member of a fraternity, he had disliked "the common fraternity behavior where we drink, think, act, and treat other people as our peers do, rather than as we feel inside." He thought there was too much emphasis on the corporate world and not enough on world problems.

He raises some important issues. I happen to disagree with him on a few points and would like to have talked with him before he withdrew. For instance, I think there is more personal choice involved than he acknowledges. There are students here who care very much about their coursework because they love learning-obvious examples include senior fellows who devote nine months to the study of their choice, and students who do independent projects or write theses. He seems to share the absolutist view a friend of mine had about fraternity parties: that everyone there hated them but put up with them because everyone else did. Nonsense, I said. If people found it that unbearable they wouldn't be there.

Granted, Dartmouth is not for every-body, even everybody accepted to Dartmouth. Dean Traynham was right: though Dartmouth has a very low attrition rate-about two percent-still a small number of individuals who matriculate each year don't graduate. But being unhappy with Dartmouth is nothing new. My father, a '55, remembers a frustrated California classmate from his undergraduate days who hated the New Hampshire winter. The Californian used to hit golf balls out the window of his Streeter Hall room into the cemetery every day-until he withdrew. Not that those who are unhappy always withdraw. I knew of a Dartmouth student raised in Paris who found Hanover quite dull and took consecutive quarters relentlessly until he had enough credits to graduate.

Some students won't be graduating this year because they have been suspended-"given a two year walk," students call it-for academic or disciplinary reasons. Some students have transferred elsewhere or simply withdrawn. Two have died. The other was Mark Geller, who died last summer of cancer and was posthumously elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

At a school that stresses the concept of family, those who leave the fold voluntarily are viewed, I think, as disloyal. There is no denying the emphasis on family and groups here. Alumni fundraisers refer to alumni who try to form special interest networks as "splinter groups." Even the Aegis reflects our proclivity for groups. There is page after page of fraternity and sorority activity. There are up to 42 senior pictures per page in the back. I never thought anything about that until a friend told me she had expected to have a quarter-page picture and space for comments because that was the format

in the Princeton and Yale yearbooks. Certainly there is some conformity and groupiness to this place, and, like anything else, it has its good aspects and bad. I think it is wrong and silly to think that problems here are unique to this neck of the woods. The question is how to react or respond to them.

When I think of those of us who will be graduating, I picture characters in a novel, who live with ambiguity, who may find problems in the surrounding community but not ones unbearable enough to lead to leaving altogether. Some, like Andrea and the letter writer, might call that complacency. Others, like me, refer to it as realism.

I simply don't buy the argument that this place is so awful. Or so great. It's in the middle, a place of opportunity set in a beautiful location. Most of all, I think it's what individuals make of it.

"Look to your left. Lookto your right. Some ofthese people will not begraduating with you in1984."

Dartmouth is in the middle, a place of opportunity set in a beautiful location.