Having been away from Dartmouth and in the "real world" for the past year, I've had to make the awkward transition back into this skewed landscape of wasted privilege, lockstep anti-intellectualism and rapacious yearning to at any cost to ourselves and each other become or remain upper class. I was at once intrigued and excited to learn that President Kim was continuing his "Leading Voices" presidential lecture series. In recent years, Dartmouth has heard from some of society's great thinkers, including Judith Butler, Homi Bhaba and Galway Kinnell, thinkers whose voices speak directly to the best within us as human beings. Thinkers who have the courage to question convention and create art and arguments expressing truths about nature. Thinkers whose lectures, depressingly, were sparsely attended by the undergraduate population.
I can't say I'm surprised by Dartmouth students' eagerness to see speakers like Henry Paulson and Jeffrey Immelt. In my last guest column, I expostulated with the College's corporate recruiting culture, a trauma of conforming minds drawn to the financial services sector whose curiosity was aborted by an illusive promise of permanent membership in the capital class. This culture demands disregard for nearly all elements of social responsibility and breeds a certain disdain for the working class Americans whose efforts have always been and will always be the driving force of our nation's prosperity. It is on the backs of these citizens hurt most in the recession while the rich become more prosperous that Congress attempts to balance our budget deficit.
At Dartmouth, this disdain translates into student apathy for our unions and workers community members merely asking for fair wages and benefits who have been talked down to, insulted and demeaned by the very students they work to keep safe, well fed and comfortable. These are the same students who, without question or balanced academic criticism, drink Paulson and Immelt's shameful Kool-Aid in a thinly-veiled but perhaps subconscious act of class-based calculus because, of course, the "Leading Voices" lecture series manufactures a sense of allegiance to, and ambition to become, the wealthy white men (because women and people of color did not speak in the series) whose vacuous words have graced the stages of the Hopkins Center.
We reward Paulson for fueling the subprime mortgage crisis during his time at Goldman Sachs and then claiming both ignorance and the need for special powers to ameloriate it as he served in the Treasury. We cite Immelt as a shrewd leader for cutting American jobs or moving them abroad, suing our state to prevent regulatory oversight and presiding over tax evasion schemes that have denied the public coffers billions of dollars in owed taxes on windfall profits. In doing so, what kind of claim could we ever honestly lay on the shred of a belief in social accountability? Labeling these men as "Leading Voices" begs two questions: For whom do they speak? Whom do they lead?
It's ironic that President Kim relishes the chance to repeat President Dickey's call that the men and women of Dartmouth ought to "make the world's troubles their own," but, when given the opportunity, calls in a crew of ne'er-do-wells in crisp white collars to take the stage and detail their roles in the avaricious policies behind one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history. I don't doubt President Kim's intellect, but either his priorities are deranged or his intentions do not cohere with his responsibilities to his community. Many of the men in this "Leading Voices" series have done just the opposite of Dickey's charge: They have profited from making their troubles the world's own, causing misery for the middle class.
As the door of prosperity closes firmly on average Americans, Dartmouth students clamor more rapaciously than ever for the few remaining golden tickets into the pillaging class. With a deleterious mindset guiding our view of the world and each other, and with a distinct lack of understanding of critical inquiry, it may seem to some that Immelt and Paulson are, in a perverse reversal, noble men. That brutal judgement is for history to make. For now, it's enough to say that President Kim and the Rockefeller Center have taken us in as much bad faith as Immelt and Paulson have treated the ideas of social responsibility and civics. Our College should be embarrassed that President Kim's "Leading Voices" have led us astray, disrespected our humanity and eviscerated higher education's core values.
