"You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world." These words blared out of my Walkman at me while I was in the gym the other day. If you're a Beatles fan, you probably caught the reference. If not, you've got the gist of the sentiment of the song by those lyrics.
So is revolution what's happening at Dartmouth these days? I think it's fair to say that we can extrapolate from the Residential and Social Life Initiative that the Board of Trustees and senior-level administrators want to produce a revolution of sorts in the way things happen around here. Tens of millions of dollars? Yeah, that probably qualifies as revolutionary.
Here's a radical thought, though: maybe there are aspects of Dartmouth that can be drastically changed without that sort of resource allocation. Maybe some changes don't require major capital expenditures. I suggest that in the midst of our dreaming about how to make Dartmouth better for the future, we stop for a few minutes now and think about who and what we are as an institution. Not just what you as an individual want us to be about, but what we truly want to represent and sell to the world outside Hanover.
Let's reconcile a common mission that allows us to grow and change and be flexible, but that also is a guiding principle for our actions. Convinced as I am of how integral money is to change (no pun intended, I promise) at Dartmouth, I also believe that many of our intricacies extend beyond the reach of and are more complex than simple dollars. And I think we are asking for trouble when we think money is the answer.
A good friend of mine who is a '99 banged his fist on President Wright's table and declared that the Undergraduate Finance Committee (UFC) needs $1 million. A bold proposition, certainly, but not all that unusual. The idea wasn't realized, but remains part of the discourse. The Student Assembly asked for $20,000 from President Wright to go to student activities. They got $25,000. But along with all this money, where is a sense of accountability for students? Who is challenging us to prove that we cannot operate without these resources? If the message that Dartmouth wants to send its students is that money will solve any problem and that we are entitled to having it, then the College has succeeded. I wonder what would have happened if we were asked to submit reports about how the money was spent and how to demonstrate that it's needed again. I worry that we are creating a class of people (myself certainly included) who identify a problem and then propose to fix it by spending more money. What happens when the money runs out?
Let's look at a more contemporary example: the Education Department. Their struggle for freedom and autonomy must be about more than faculty and institutional politics and resource allocation. What are the deeper questions here? We are presented with an opportunity to debate the definition of a liberal arts education. The College is reluctant " and perhaps altogether unwilling " to offer any sort of vocation training as part of the undergraduate curriculum. Fair enough. As my dad reminded me recently, the problem-solving, organization, and teaching style components of being in the classroom are things that we should perhaps be picking up in our daily experience. A liberal arts education gives us a breadth of knowledge and training in thinking that is perhaps exactly what we would need to be excellent teachers. I understand that there are intense emotions and a complicated history surrounding the Education Department; maybe the 1999 review will be an chance for us to harness those emotions and channel them into a productive dialogue about what we stand for as a college and where we want to move in the future.
It's not hard to see that the Residential and Social Life Initiative is revolutionary. It's explicitly about changing student culture; it's explicitly about devoting resources to our residential and social experiences to increase their caliber and make them more complementary to our very strong academics. But instead of thinking about how to spend money, maybe it would benefit our community even more now to think about our culture and what sorts of things it represents and permits. We are an incredible group of people " I wonder what would happen if we challenge each other and raise the bar of our expectations.
I didn't grow up in a particularly wealthy household. I was taught that if I wanted to do or get something, I had to make a choice about what I would sacrifice. Money, to me, was more of a last resort option in problem-solving. Please don't get me wrong here: I have a tremendous amount of respect for how Dartmouth cultivates and allocates its resources, and I don't envy the positions of those who have to make the tough decisions. One of my mentors commented to me that money in itself isn't bad. And I think she's right. I think money provides meaningful, well-intentioned, and successful solutions and possibilities across campus. Perhaps now is a time when we can stop for a second, though, and think about what we're about as an institution before we pay to fix ourself. The real revolution here is not about tens of millions of dollars. The real revolution at Dartmouth will be a change in attitude and culture.
