GREAT article

As someone who supported Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama, this article wreaks of hippie.

“the unexplained departures of three faculty women of color seems much more problematic than an undemocratic change to buffet-style eating.”

really? that’s a foolish statement. the DDS changes are something that will affect all students on a daily basis, while the “departures of three faculty women of color” are rather irrelevant.

This is just plain stupid. He made no argument and drew no conclusions. Don’t publish something for the sake of filling space in the paper.

This can not even be considered a newspaper article. It’s an incoherent rant of loosely strung together topics that Osserman felt self-important enough to get off his chest in a public forum.

Brilliant that Osserman would prove his point by regurgitating the bashing of Lott that is done by all other Dartmouth students, and then go on to dismiss him as an “irrelevant hack.” He’s just proven himself right about “greenwashing.”

Uh oh. Freedom rears it’s ugly, ugly head at Dartmouth College. Fount of all that is good and great, Jordan Osserman weighs in firmly opposed to it and ranting. Why no mention of the man who says he killed Bin Laden? The man who says he picked the team, who directed the mission, who ordered them to kill him, not capture him? Why an attack on the size of a flag (unimaginably large), are you kidding me? Celebrating the death of a mass murderer. “What is this, the south?” “Here in the educated north, we attempt to understand what it is "we” did wrong to provoke the mass murderer, we mourn the death of our executioner.“ Not one word about President Barack H. Obama. Another attack on Roger Lott, business, a former president of a different party, other Dartmouth students, non-retention of faculty women of color. Also, why is it that socialists hide behind the French word for free markets when they want to discredit the basis for the rise of the greatest progress mankind has ever made and will ever make on this earth? Because it is code for the opposite, which is what Osserman supports, socialist enslavement.

You’re Lott on the other side of the spectrum.

This is perhaps the most idiotic article I’ve ever read in the D. Osserman tries to give the impression that he has some unified argument, but it is so wrought through with contradictions and so poorly put together that it really just reads as a list of things the author wishes to complain about. Which was probably the underlying reason for writing this article anyway.

“Lott’s Tea Party rhetoric distracts us from the dangerous political ideology that actually dominates campus: unregulated free-market capitalism, which the College endorses through its promotion of Wall Street recruiting and the prominence of our right-wing economics faculty. The laissez-faire dogmatism at Dartmouth spawns alumni responsible for the corrupt Wall Street practices that led to the global financial crisis. When we direct all of our anger towards an irrelevant hack like Lott, we evade fighting our complicity in larger injustices.”

Finally, someone who has effectively demonstrated why the past financial crisis occurred. While there are entire university courses and 700 page books by Andrew Ross Sorkin dedicated to this subject, Osserman is able to effectively link Dartmouth’s corporate recruiting as causing the financial crisis in only three sentences. Surely, Stockholm will be contacting Mr. Osserman any day now so that he can receive his award. Thank you Jordan, for your clarity and brevity. Your voice is truly crying out from the wilderness.

Osserman is an easy target — in our haste to criticize him, we forget how his arguments are so irrelevant to the mainstream campus discourse. Nobody is seriously considering indicting George H.W. Bush for war crimes or abolishing the Greek system. Osserman’s “progressive” rhetoric distracts us from the dangerous political ideology that actually dominates campus: centralization of power in the hands of an ignorant, drunk (figuratively and literally) elite, be it left or right wing, which the College endorses through its promotion of the white man’s burden (Teach for America, DREAM, the Peace Corps, “the world’s problems are your problems” etc – as if an Ivy League diploma magically makes you more qualified to solve the problems of the world) and the prominence of our economically-illiterate power-aggrandizing alumni, Republican or Democrat (Republican Paulson was an English major, Democrats Geithner and Gillibrand majored in Asian studies). The snobbish “I have the magic bullet” dogmatism at Dartmouth spawns alumni who think everything can be fine and dandy if only everyone else would listen to our pet initiative (save the Greek system! abolish the Greek system! same things to me). When we direct all of our anger towards an irrelevant hack like Osserman, we evade fighting our complicity in larger injustices.

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If the above seemed incoherent, I hope it wasn’t more so than the preceding mess of an op-ed.

The DDS protests are important. What’s funny is that a certain group called Students Stand with Staff also appropriated such messages of the Civil Rights movement when Dartmouth, a non-profit EDUCATIONAL institution tried to implement cost-cutting measures in wake of the financial crisis. The money for the staff and for the new DDS facilities have to come from somewhere (our pockets), so of course it’s an important issue that they’re so radically changing the meal plan. The reason we care more about that than the departure of those faculty members (I’m pretty sure that they themselves want to reveal why they left) is because it actually affects us directly.

*they themselves do NOT want to reveal why they left

On the one hand, the College administration is very concerned with providing students with non-alcohol-oriented social spaces. On the other hand, the College is taking away the primary non-alcohol-oriented space on campus–Food Court. Requiring people swipe a meal to sit at a table with friends kills the space as a common hangout spot. People don’t all eat on the same schedule. Maybe someone wants to drop by for 10 minutes on the way to class. Maybe someone isn’t hungry but wants to drink a soda and hang out. Maybe it’s a large group of some people eating, some people socializing. In the old system, this was fine and it was the main means of non-alcohol based socialization. Under the new system, it requires a meal swipe. So where will people go to hang out? It probably won’t be a dorm room common area.

Congratulations, Dartmouth Administration, for driving even more students into the waiting arms of the alcohol-fueled Greek system.

This is literally the worst thing that I have ever read in the D. I even agree with some of your points; its your paranoia of “greenwashed” groupthink that gets me. Relax. Maybe Bush Sr is getting the tip because he deserves it. At any rate, I find it hard to believe that the College would go out of its way to get Conan as keynote, and then draft a former President of the United States to placate the big-bad old guard alumni. Not everything has a sinister basis; quit inventing them whenever you see something you don’t like.

Osserman, I found your overt elitism (“Had we been somewhere in the Deep South…”) and tasteless ad hominem attacks against your peers (“an irrelevant hack like Lott”) far more offensive than anything Lott has published.

I have heard from a number of people that despite submitting comments on this article, none of them have been approved by the editor. I don’t know what the content of these comments were, but most of them were made by people whom I doubt would intentionally run afoul of the Dartmouth’s commenting policy. Given some of the ludicrous comments often approved on some other articles, I am bewildered by what seems to be unwarranted (as opposed to justified) censorship. Is the Dartmouth applying a different standard for comments in this case? I find it unlikely that a column as wide-rangingly critical as this would elicit a grand total of one reaction inoffensive enough to publish.

Moving on to Mr. Osserman’s article itself, I think his criticism of Mr. Lott is amazingly inconsistent. In the same breath, he urges to ignore the ravings of someone well outside the mainstream of campus discourse, while admitting that his own views are equally outside the mainstream of a campus discourse allegedly dominated by free market capitalism.

I am also quite curious about this complaint that our ostensibly right-wing economics faculty is too prominent. If our faculty publish excellent research, is that something they do not deserve praise or prominence for? Who exactly on the faculty does Osserman regard as too prominent or right-wing? How can he level such a snarling accusation against one of the largest, most prominent, most popular academic departments on campus without substantiation?

As an economics major I have gotten to know many of our econ professors and read quite a bit of their research — our professors span the political spectrum. True, none of them are anywhere as left-wing as Prof. Rickford in the History department (where I am also a double major), but that is not a function of Dartmouth culture and far more a function of the field of economics, where the nature of the analysis makes it difficult to fully embrace radical left-wing politics.

For all the faults of economic theory, it remains difficult to justify things like rent control or far-ranging restrictions on trade and offshoring if you think about it logically in the way economics espouses (Paul Krugman, probably the most famous leftist economist in the US today, did a fair bit of work on trade and wrote a number of columns in the ‘90s arguing against protectionism). No matter how much you care about the homeless or the working class, both theory and evidence suggest that rent control and punitive tariffs keep homes and jobs off the market. Few economists, regardless of how left wing their politics are, would abide by tougher rent controls in American cities or a new Taft-Hartley Act.

And yet, many economists, including Krugman and many of our faculty, are far from laissez-faire maniacs. Profs. Sacerdote and Feyrer authored a study on the recent stimulus suggesting that it did create many jobs, just not as many as anticipated. If you take some of our economics courses, you won’t find any nonsensical rhetoric about the magic of markets, and often thoughtful discussion of how markets can work but also fail. Our faculty is not unthinking or blind to the problems with the field. Prof. Kohn, who I suspect is the most laissez-faire man in the economics department, is probably the most critical in our faculty of the way economists think about the economy, because he thinks economics does not put enough weight on the community and the importance of human interaction in society. (He just has a starkly different conclusion about the implications of community and society for economics than many progressives do.)

So I would really like to know what basis Mr. Osserman has in dropping a throw-away accusation about the economics department here. Is this just a cheap ideological shot? I would be the first to agree that not enough people question basic assumptions we have about the economy and its workings, but I would strongly disagree that our economics faculty promote some blind adherence to laissez-faire ideology. My experience in working with them both in and outside the classroom has been the complete opposite.

That said, I think we should ignore neither Mr. Lott nor Mr. Osserman. They are on the fringes of campus discourse, and I disagree with much of what they have to say, but both of them are pushing the envelope in campus debate in a way few other columnists have dared to. As honestly stupid as some of their ideas may appear, I would much rather have a discussion about the issues they raise than most of the insipid material published in the pages of the D. Both men urge us to question fundamental assumptions we have about our campus and community, and that is something we could use more of at Dartmouth.

Lot of strong points in this article.