n a recent article in the Dartmouth Review, Alexis Jhamb ‘03 describes a prospective student who, while visiting Dartmouth last spring, stumbled across a Sexual Assault Awareness Week rally. The student, "Olivia", decided that the protesters were "crazy fools", and, Jhamb tells us, chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania as a result of her experience. Jhamb concludes that such displays are not only ineffective, but harmful, in that they deter interested students from attending the College.
From an educational standpoint, was Olivia’s tragic absence from the class of 2004 a loss or a gain for Dartmouth College? Faced with the choice of hearing people voice their opinions or seeing people minding their own business, Olivia chose the latter, undoubtedly less educational experience. Her described behavior showed a complete lack of respect for people whose opinions differed from her own.
The Review’s presentation of this girl as the ideal would-be Dartmouth student is insulting. If the rally had commemorated the Holocaust, a student would never consider describing the participants as "noisy", so why should the same scathing attack of this memorial to rape be admired?
Sexual Assault Week is a memorial to the victims of rape. The "rowdiness" of this crowd of mostly women demonstrates that many students have been strongly affected by issues of rape and sexual harassment.
Perhaps it was an ugly side of Dartmouth for a high school senior, naive to the dangers of rape, to see on her college visit, but Olivia must learn eventually that education does not always take place in classrooms. To allow this prospective ‘04 to continue to indulge in the dangerous fantasy that she lives in a different world from those who are raped is far more harmful.
Only a short while after Olivia’s decision to attend the University of Pennsylvania, Tabard hosted Sister Spit, an all-lesbian female performance group. Jhamb says that Hillary Miller ‘02 described the event as providing "an education that is not easily found in the Upper Valley area, and certainly not on this campus."
Pricking up her ears at the word education, Alexis Jhamb attended, likely expecting to see professors, degrees, equations, literary formulas, and such, but was disappointed to find only a bunch of women engaging in spontaneous poetry.
She then picked out a few compromising lines and jotted them down, using this information to write the event off as both cliche and confused. Most notably, Jhamb received mixed messages on whether illegal drugs were a good or bad thing.
If Alexis Jhamb feels that an explicit anti-drug message is something lacking in her education, I encourage her to attend my 6th grade health class on drug abuse. If Sister Spit had promulgated a clearly pro or anti drug message, it would have been compromising its artistic integrity in order to promote an agenda. Dartmouth students may potentially learn more from the true experiences of people than they ever could from hackneyed 6th grade pedantics.
Part of what education is about is extending one’s boundaries of experience and understanding. While drugs can be harmful to one’s health, and thus not advisable (because often the danger is greater than the education provided), one can at least learn from the experience of others free of harm. The apparent miscommunication between Miller and Jhamb is that Jhamb does not view personal experience as a source of education.
This view contradicts every tenet of the liberal arts education system that the Review so ardently supports. The literary value of a book is rarely its message alone. Psychology picks at contradictions within the mind. Even mathematics, though often seen as a grudging process of memorization, is, in its highest form, an effort to think along new lines.
All forms of education are an effort to expose things in their true form; Jhamb has presented education as a continuous struggle to hide behind predefined rules and one-sided stories.
This approach to education is ugliest in its tendency toward prejudice. Jhamb states, "Their tattoos (covering almost all available space on their visible flesh) and multiple nose rings (in a single nose) made me more than reluctant to affiliate myself with their group."
Although Jhamb does make more substantial criticism of the message of Sister Spit, she admits here that appearance alone is enough reason to avoid all association with these women. Such a statement reflects the closed-mindedness with which Jhamb has approached this performance: she is prepared to dismiss activists at Dartmouth merely on the basis of appearance.
The way to make Dartmouth the best school possible is not to turn the student body into a docile and homogeneous entity that does not offend mainstream sensibilities. Instead, students must acquire the enlightenment to look upon the experiences of others respectfully, especially if these experiences are vastly different from their own.
