To many of my fellow seniors, the "G-word" stands for an imminent truth that we fight to reconcile with every day, while the other "G-word" is a biased measurement of our success here at Dartmouth. It's no coincidence that grades and graduation begin with the same letter. You can't graduate without passable grades, and you can't get good grades without listening to Kanye's "Graduation." The two are in a mutualistic holy matrimony. However, I believe that another G-word serves as the perfect allegory to the principles and ethos behind this elite institution we have grown to love and revere Greenprint.
On the surface, Greenprint is a costly system by which we are able to view on paper what we gaze at on the screen. But, alas, dear students! If we have learned anything during our liberal arts education here at Dartmouth, it must be the insight to avoid taking anything at its word!
Greenprint is not simply another device in our student toolbox. It embodies all that is Dartmouth. Greenprint is the symbol of Dartmouth's adherence to the way of neo-luddism. Don't go scanning your shelves for that leather bound Britannica that was bequeathed to you. I already read mine. It's full of errors and misnomers. Neo-luddism is not simply technophobia, but a doctrinal and holy distrust of technology in the hope of salvaging our humanity.
Throughout history, symbols have been ascribed to a collective cause or goal. The Communists had the hammer and sickle, Rock-A-Fella has the Diamond Cutter, the Black Panthers have their...panther, Dane Cook has the Su-Fi. The Dartmouth chapter of neo-luddism has the Greenprint.
This article is not an attempt to undermine the authority of the men and women who sit atop Mt. Parkhurst. As a messenger and educator, I feel obliged to reveal to my fellow students that the feelings of anger and impatience with which they grapple at each Greenprint station are undeserved, misdirected and unappreciative of a way of life and an ideology first institutionalized in 1769.
I am in no way a neo-luddite. In fact, while I write this article on my Blackberry I am pre-heating my lunch in a microwave and watching Battlebots and an infomercial about "the bullet" simultaneously through my picture-in-picture application on my new flatscreen television. However, as the following true story will attempt to show, Greenprint has given me reprieve from my simplex way of life.
The culminating deadline for my independent study just minutes away, I raced to the Greenprint station on first floor Berry. Typed my username and password then clicked print.' My heart pounding. My palms sweating. I had mere minutes before this 30 pager was due or else I would receive a failing grade. Then it happened.
First, the green light turned orange. Then, a paper jam appeared in sector C. A popup on the computer screen alerted me to a "Diebold System Error." The simple task of printing was turning into a nightmare.
"Broken again?"
She said with an angelic intonation. Her voice was an intoxicating sedative, slowing my racing heart rate to one reluctant to even beat. I didn't even need to turn. I knew she was beautiful. I had heard what she said, but I responded like a nave child:
"What?"
"Broken again?" She repeated as if the words had just been plucked off Apollo's lyre.
Stepping outside of myself for the first time, I forgot about my silly paper and silly deadline. Her name was Cheryl and she was a fifth year at Thayer. We're currently living in a two bedroom in Pittsburgh and are planning a road trip to Burning Man this August.
Sure my transcript read "FAIL." Sure it's almost impossible to print anything at Dartmouth without a problem. But the paper jam I got that day opened my eyes to the paper jam in my life.
When you have to walk all over campus in the freezing winter just to find a Greenprint station that actually prints, angry at the world and unsure why Dartmouth spoiled herself with a new grill at the HOP and not a new printing system, just remember, while you brave the cold winter night to print that JSTOR article, there are other voices crying out in this wilderness, searching for that same printing station.
And that, dear students, is the "Ecstasy of Communication" that neo-luddites all over the world enjoy every day. Theodore Kaczynski, practicing neo-luddite, wrote in his manifesto:
"The isolation of man from nature are consequences of technological progress."
Communication is the foundation of any liberal arts education and for that reason Dartmouth has resisted modernization for the past 240 years. Not with the intention of making our lives as students extremely difficult and annoying, but rather as a means to make the bonds in our Dartmouth family ever stronger.
