In Monday night’s town hall meeting, hosted by Palaeopitus senior society, Student Assembly and the Office of the President, administrators — including College President Phil Hanlon, Interim Dean of the College Inge-Lise Ameer and Provost Carolyn Dever — answered questions about “Moving Dartmouth Forward.” I was surprised by the relatively low turnout at the event, since these top administrators were instrumental in devising policies that will affect all students.
There seems to be this growing sentiment among students that banning hard alcohol and increasing academic rigor will result in an increase in mental health issues. As I heard one student say, “Banning hard alcohol while also increasing the academic rigor? Why do you think I need to drink hard alcohol in the first place?” The question implies that he had to drink in order to deal with academic stress. To a limited degree, I also bought into the idea that banning alcohol and increasing academic rigor might cause higher levels of stress. After attending this meeting, however, I feel that this is not a sound argument.
Hanlon brought up an excellent point at the meeting, which warrants further consideration. He mentioned that moving classes to earlier times might shift the time a student sleeps from say 3-10:30 a.m. to 1-8:30 a.m. It is likely, he said, that healthier and more productive work and lifestyle choices would occur between 8:30-10:30 a.m. than between 1-3 a.m. This argument is difficult to refute. Many students who are awake in the early morning on a Thursday are probably not diligently studying — the current schedule makes heavy Tuesday-Thursday course loads relatively uncommon — and I likewise doubt late nights on Fridays and Saturdays are peak study hours. With this in mind, I commend the goal of attempting to shift student sleep schedules forward. I think the old axiom of “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” does hold some credence.
Dean of the Faculty Mike Mastanduno raised another good point — strengthening academic rigor should encourage academic engagement and intellectual curiosity, which would benefit students’ mental health. Engaging with new and challenging material can cause frustration, but the end result — finally putting all of the pieces together and solving a problem or finding some insight — can provide an unparalleled sense of accomplishment.
Convincing as these points may be, we must also consider that the College’s academic departments and programs do not all deliver the same level of rigor and intellectual challenge. There is a large discrepancy in time required by students to complete work and grades across departments, with lower medians more common in certain departments, like biology or economics. To make a blanket statement about increasing academic rigor at the College is to ignore these key differences.
A potential metric for this phenomenon is the distribution of majors among students reserving study spaces in the library. In data I requested from College library staff, the most frequently indicated majors of students reserving library study rooms this past fall term were as follows — economics majors at 21 percent, biology majors at 11 percent and computer science majors at eight percent. Only about three percent of those reserving study space did not enter a major, and seven percent responded as undeclared. Six other majors each counted for at least three percent of total study room bookings, but the remaining 35 majors collectively made up only 23 percent of reservations requested by students.
In other words, there are 35 majors that each individually account for less than two percent of study space requests. Although some majors have many more students than others, these numbers are telling. Curiously, many of the students with a major that frequently reserve the most spaces on campus are also in the majors with the lowest medians. Despite these students apparently using library study spaces more than their peers, they continue to receive the lowest grades.
So let’s increase academic rigor at Dartmouth — but let’s also not forget that not all departments seem to have the same standards for what “rigor” entails.
