We have too many forums at this school.
Every time a big, sensitive or seemingly difficult-to-tackle problem arises, the preferred response, it would appear, is for Student Assembly (or maybe a random dean) to hold an open discussion in Collis Commonground to "start a campus dialogue" about the issue at hand. Perhaps you'll even be treated to free Orient (you lucky dog) as you listen to your fellow students air their campus grievances.
Starting a campus dialogue over chicken with broccoli, however, is not tantamount to solving a campus problem.
I'm from the Washington, D.C.. area, and have spent two terms working in our nation's questionably glorious capital. To me, the forum situation at Dartmouth seems analogous to a similar situation I've encountered back at home; namely, the proliferation of random executive branch task forces that never seem to accomplish anything but nonetheless persist, all the while sucking away time and resources in the interest of producing an eventual 50-page white paper documents that no one will ever read.
Trust me: the government gets off on task forces. This is evidenced by the fact that they are a dime a dozen and it's not immediately clear what oh-so-pressing function any of them serve.
The same holds true at Dartmouth. Too many kids getting Good Sam'ed? Hold a forum. Too many people complaining about the gender divide? What to do, what to do; why, hold a forum, of course!
Government task forces and Dartmouth forums have two key things in common: they both sound legit, and they both give the appearance that something's getting done. In reality, however, the opposite is true task forces and forums both involve a kind of implicit and yet inexorable forestalling of whatever important decision making will presumably come next. There's a reason why forums relating to drinking are practically an annual occurrence. If we could solve this problem with a forum, it would have happened back in 1986.
I understand the appeal of the forum. Forums are cathartic and democratic; people can get everything out on the table and present their ideas about how best to move forward. Will these ideas be acted upon? Well, maybe the Assembly will draft a proposal to the administration and maybe the proposal will be read by the powers that be. Maybe The D will even be able to get a few choice quotes from some dean somewhere about how steps are being taken and conversations are being held. But will there be any tangible results that represent a paradigm shift in our day-to-day campus experience? Quite frankly, it's unclear.
I don't mean to overly belittle the act of talking about things. Often times, sharing experiences with a group of people is an important, respectable and extremely profound process sexual assault, as a campus problem, comes to mind here. I merely lament the fact that things such assexual assault remains an issue for many at Dartmouth, despite all of the productive and moving conversations that have occurred in the interest of eradicating it.
More and more, I find that many of the Big Problems we face at Dartmouth are problems that are deeply fundamental to the greater experience of a 18-20-something college student living in America in 2010. Sexual assault included. That's where the real problem with forums lies.
Take drinking, for example an issue which many a campus forum has been known to address. If you think about your experience with excessive drinking for a moment why you do it, where you do it and when you do it you'll come to realize that pounding 10 cans of Keystone is not so much an unhealthy activity with a finite, Diversions-related solution as it is a shared attitude. It's an entire conflated way of thinking about alcohol and fun that has been shaped and reinforced by cultural factors exposed to us at every turn. We're not a generation of alcoholics. We're more like a generation of group-thinkers, looking at Facebook albums of ragey friends at other schools and thinking smugly to ourselves how we still have more "fun" here.
In short, the kinds of problems we try to solve (or at least address) by holding forums are ingrained; we've been conditioned to drink too much, to hook up with people we might not want to hook up with because we've been drinking too much, to feel alienated on occasion because we're all still at an age where our lives are governed by hormones and emotional impulses. We then attribute these feelings of exclusion, rejection or regret to the errors of institutions here on campus; to problems between Dartmouth men and Dartmouth women, to the Greek system, to the oft-maligned hookup culture, which most of us have probably bought into at one point or another (for better or for worse).
Then, we hold a forum.
But these problems aren't unique to Dartmouth, or to the culture at Dartmouth; they're something endemic to a much wider swath of the population. So the mere notion of adequately dealing with these issues by just talking about them or, in some cases, by talking about talking about them is laughable at best; these problems are much larger than our ability to hold forth to our peers.
I don't have a viable solution to the forum issue, and perhaps I'm even being hypocritical by writing to criticize the act of talking about things. Because in essence, that's all I'm doing here talking about talking about things. I do believe that we need to radically reassess the way we address campus problems to better reflect their sticky and entrenched nature, but again I'm just talking.
But maybe the best way to reassess our problem-solving ability (or lack thereof) is to start a dialogue about it. God knows I love to talk. So maybe I'll see you at the next campus forum but only if we're ordering Ramunto's.
