So the "moral elite" on campus agrees again -- shit is offensive. Let me be the first to congratulate certain members of the Dartmouth community -- the ones who are willing to blindly condemn the group responsible for delivering manure to Alpha Chi Alpha's and Beta Theta Pi's respective doorsteps, the group purportedly responsible for the flyer, "The Shit You Don't Hear About," that appeared outside many students' doors Monday morning. It is, of course, much easier to recoil and judge without thought than to seriously reflect on the implications of these recent "revolutionary" actions.
Perhaps dumping manure on two fraternities' lawns is not, ahem, Ivy League. It is definitely not white-collar. It is definitely lacking in propriety. It is certainly neither an intellectual nor a traditional way of dealing with adversity. Perhaps it even carries an uncomfortable implication of anarchy, and perhaps it can be said that people who soil their hands with manure demean themselves -- even to the level of the fraternity brothers who wrote Beta's disgustingly racist and sexist poem and Alpha Chi's racist, sexist Pledge Banquet script. But, no matter what your critique of the anonymous group, you must admit it certainly was a straightforward and dramatic way to notify the campus community and put both the fraternities and the school administration on notice that these issues would not go away.
In getting mired in the manure, the critics are distracting our attention from the real dirt: Why is it that when women combine to combat racism and sexism, they must be anonymous? What does it say about the Dartmouth campus that months of administrative inaction about the Alpha Chi script and Beta poem provoked two events designed to contravene our apathy?
There is something terribly wrong at Dartmouth. As the school gears up to celebrate 25 years of coeducation and publicizes its "multicultural environment" to prospective students, as photographs of happy keg-jumpers are published in The Dartmouth, the Aegis and the Alumni Magazine, many people do not seem to want to admit that the luminescence of the Emerald City is cover for some deep problems, problems that mirror society at large. These problems are not exclusively Dartmouth's, but they are Dartmouth's to deal with.
There are a lot of angry people on this campus right now. The women are sick of being either categorized as "aggressive," or treated as powerless. The African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and Latinos are sick of being labeled and feeling marginalized. The homosexual students are sick of being pushed into the closet or having their rainbows stared at by an unaccepting campus. And the white, straight men, the heirs to the dead-white-male legacy, are just plain tired of being blamed for it all.
So what should we do about it? The recent rally in front of Parkhurst and the OutRAGEous Party in Webster Hall did something remarkable -- they brought many people out of their sectors of campus and into a neutral territory of communication. But then midterms arrived, and the hoopla over racial slurs written on doors began to blow over, and the Beta poem, discovered during summer term, was starting to become part of an elusive history of rumor and speculation. And the students of Dartmouth had, for the most part, settled into comfortable complacency and were going to let it all be forgotten.
But apparently on a campus often characterized by its fraternity-based drinking culture, its social and physical violence against women, and its racial intolerance, there is at least one group of vigilantes who would not let it be so. Moderate thinker that I can be, I cannot help but feel it is about time.
Dumping manure on a lawn and brandishing the word "shit" is probably not the most constructive way to confront racism and sexism. But it did serve as an emblematic reminder to the campus community. The group that donated the manure probably did Beta and Alpha Chi a favor -- I am sure both their lawns will look better now that the grass has gotten a little fertilizer to counteract all that beer.
