Anticipation can be a strange thing. Soon the Board of Trustees will vote on the Moving Dartmouth Forward steering committee recommendations. For some, I suspect these feel like the last days of freedom to continue the harmless fun they have always enjoyed. For others, perhaps, this feels something like the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah. The committee and its recommendations, like the Greek system it will surely seek to reform, are divisive. It will be tempting for some to reject any sort of proposed policy changes, while others may be inclined to ignore the very real deficiencies of the committee’s methods. We must avoid the tendency to see the situation solely in terms of right and wrong. Instead, what we can do — and what we must do — is work harder to understand the experiences of those with whom we disagree.
All too often we limit ourselves to the immediate circumstances of our lives when we consider reforms to systems that affect us. This is, in many ways, very understandable. We have to use some metric to make judgments. We need to consider how change will affect people, and we do not know anyone as well as we know ourselves. This happens all the time in hot-button discussions — someone makes a point, and we disagree because we have had contradictory experiences. “I’ve never felt uncomfortable in that situation,” or, “Every time I’ve spoken with those people, we’ve gotten along.” “I’m a part of one of those organizations, and it’s never been a problem for me,” the thinking goes. How can someone disagree with me, when my lived experience proves the truth of my position?
Our individual experiences, however, can differ vastly. Does Greek life need reform? It can be easy to say “no,” if Greek life has been nothing but a safe space that has given you a warm welcome and access to an ever-flowing stash of cold, cheap, American light beer. It can also be easy to say “yes,” I suspect, if Greek life never caught your interest — if you have never felt that this side of campus was for you. It is much harder to find an unbiased answer that holds true regardless of your own experience. Hard as it may be, we owe it to the College to accept Greek life as the complex, nuanced issue that it is — and most importantly we owe it to each other.
It would, of course, be silly and problematic to pretend that my own experiences do not affect this very column. I am a fraternity brother and a beneficiary of many of the ingrained social traditions at Dartmouth. When I think about the issues that face Dartmouth today, I cannot help but do so through the lens of my own experiences. To ignore this would be to ignore a fundamental reality of my own opinion.
I say this not to hold myself up as the final arbiter of what is fair and unfair. Rather, I want to express the limits of my own experience. It is not easy to think beyond myself, but it is necessary. That means, though nearly every time I go into a fraternity I feel comfortable and safe, I must understand that there are those who don’t. Conversely, I hope this means that those who don’t feel safe, who feel singled out in fraternities, try to understand that there are many reasons — some admittedly more valid than others — why so many affiliated students fight to keep their organizations alive.
If we keep talking past one another then we will never reach a consensus on what to do. After the trustees decide on what happens to the steering committee’s recommendations, we, the students — who best understand student social life — may just end up bickering about them. No good will come of that. Only if we are willing to think beyond ourselves — to consider and accept the experiences of those who are different than we are — can we progress. When you finally read the steering committee’s recommendations, take a moment. Think about how they might affect the person directly opposite from you. Then, perhaps, we’ll actually be moving Dartmouth forward.
