The social scene at Dartmouth is antiquated. Indeed, it is almost farcical, and there is no getting around this fact. For most students, there is no place to go on a Friday night except for fraternities or sometimes sororities, and the latter opportunity rarely presents itself to most people on campus. It is unfair to the women at this school that in order to socialize they must enter male-dominated social spaces. Moreover, it is unfair to every student at Dartmouth that in 2014, there simply are not legitimate gender-neutral spaces on campus where students can drink beer together. It is difficult to see the degree of absurdity of the situation from within the “Dartmouth bubble,” but from an outsider’s perspective it must seem as if Dartmouth students are still partying in 1975. Much of the negative press the College has received in the past few years has been unwarranted. But, as the saying goes, where there is smoke, there is fire: few other schools in the nation have a social scene which begins and ends with their Greek system, and surely none are as prestigious as the College on the Hill.
The Greek system at Dartmouth is not to blame for this; rather, administrators are to blame for ultimately failing to provide any sort of viable alternative to what is already available. The College’s error is more than one of omission; it often seems as if the administration is waging active war against non-Greek life. Even as Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson is doling out preposterous sentences to fraternities for the minorest of infractions — think Theta Delta Chi fraternity’s five-term suspension for Social Environment Management Policy violations and hosting a “water party”(…the horror) — Safety and Security is literally funneling freshmen out of harmless dorm parties into the Greek system. The College has with one hand placed far too large of a social responsibility on the back of the Greek system, and has with the other tried to strangle it into quasi-submission. This contradiction in policy is emblematic of an administration that has proven it has no vision or plan regarding what it wants in terms of student life.
Something that gets lost in all of the political hullabaloo is that there is no reason this should be a polarizing issue. Instead of wasting time and energy pondering the abolishment of the Greek system, both administrators and students should focus on providing a legitimate, viable, fun alternative to the system in place. Instead of eliminating all of the good that comes from the Greek system — unfathomable amounts of community service, a sense of place at Dartmouth for many here that is impossible to recreate, and an unquantifiable air of nostalgia and tradition that many other great schools lack — the administration could simply neutralize many of the undeniable social ills that stem from its unrivaled monopoly on all social activity at the College.
It is more than possible to introduce gender-neutral social spaces to Dartmouth without “stepping on the toes” of the entrenched system. Would anybody complain about a more diverse social scene? Would anybody complain about new places to drink on the weekend?
The new neighborhood, cluster initiative provides a perfect opportunity for the administration to prove that it is not completely blind to this issue, or worse, so utterly incompetent that it does not know what to do about it. There is no reason that some of the new clusters shouldn’t be designated “social spaces” where real parties can be thrown — parties where students can drink with the same type of limited supervision that the College imposes on fraternities. And if the administration can’t figure out how to do this on its own, it should look to emulate other schools that have similar systems in place.
I believe it is imperative for the College to address the structural inequity of our social scene. (How could one possibly attempt to “solve” the issue of sexual violence in the current environment?) I also believe it is possible to do this in fun and creative ways — indeed, accomplishing this in fun and creative ways has to be one of the most important parts of the project. A “bottom-up” approach is essential to tackling almost any issue on a college campus, but especially one that has such widespread implications for student life. There is no reason the administration shouldn’t be able to garner widespread student and alumni support for new places for students to socialize.
Hank Balaban '16 is a guest columnist.
