Over Spring break, I went to Ghana on behalf of WomensTrust, a microfinance institution, to help fix their operations. Yet, I didn’t go as a white knight. I was not the savior for a poor, ignorant people, nor were the local people on the staff supplicants to my “developed world knowledge.” I was a partner, someone who had a few specialized skills that could help them and at the same time learn from them. I did not sweep in to grandly dictate to them how things should be. To do so would be to disregard the fact that they were intelligent human beings who knew the situation best—they were, after all, the ones living in it.

Although affording respect to these local people seems obvious, it has not traditionally been the way that Westerners have approached any type of “aid” when they visited upon Africa. The old model involved broad, context-less decisions made by detached overseers from the developed world sitting in temperature-controlled, wood-paneled rooms, sipping tea or coffee.

It was believed that just because something worked in the developed world, it would work anywhere. Pronouncements from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their precursors created monoculture cash cropping, paradropped aid, and numerous other disastrous policies that numerous critics (including Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, who recently visited Dartmouth) charge as having done nothing to truly help African countries. If anything, this sort of “aid” held them back. These so-called solutions imposed “growth” from the outside without truly developing the foundation for a healthy economy.

But in recent years, the sentiments of the development community have radically shifted. Microfinance and other “sustainable” forms of aid have been embraced as a market solution to poverty. While sustainable aid is not an end-all solution, ever since Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank demonstrated that the poor could and would repay small loans, international aid has been eagerly embracing this new form of development.

But there is still something in this new attitude towards aid that does not address a fundamental criticism of the old regime. While microfinance attempts to spur economic development through loans, which in turn create small businesses and build those local economies that were lacking before, its administration is still largely unilateral. While the intended target of growth is now bottom-up, the policies themselves are still very much top-down.

There may be some local staff. There may even be some representation in the leadership of these institutions by (rich) local people. But essentially, they are still too many of the same people from the old aid regime, making decisions from the developed world that affect people thousands of miles away.

This isn’t to say that most microfinance organizations trying to help Africa have bad intentions. In fact, I’d be highly skeptical if someone tried to claim that they have done no good at all.

The problem, however, with unilateralism, making decisions on high without local context, is that you ignore valuable knowledge that only people who live there know. The rationale before, which still lingers, is that this knowledge is of limited use—the reason that these people are in the state they’re in is because all they have is this knowledge! Although not stated outright, many aid organizations start with the premise that they are helping the helpless and the ignorant. Part of why microfinance was originally slow to catch on was because aid organizations believed that the poor were uneducated and too “unsophisticated” to put loans to any good use.

A recent book called Portfolios of the Poor reveals the folly of that belief. The researchers who wrote the book followed the lives of various families in developing countries below the World Bank defined poverty line of $2 a day. These families recorded their financial transactions in financial diaries, which the authors then analyzed. With these diaries, the researchers discovered that contrary to popular belief, the finances of the poor are not simple at all. The financial life of below-poverty-line families is actually more complicated than the finances of many rich-world families.

Smoothing consumption and “forced savings” are concepts that we learn in economics classes, and use to some degree in our daily lives—but we do so without the urgency that those in the developing world have. For them, money received tomorrow might mean there isn’t anything to eat today—or until next growing season. For them, finance is a matter of having food on the table or not. It is, in some cases, a matter of life or death.

In the developed world, we can have the best intentions but still not know how to best help. Many microfinance institutions give loans only for “business development” purposes. It’s a rational thing to do, academically—after all, if the poor develop a business that can provide them with income, they’ll have the cash flow necessary to repay the loan and raise themselves up.

Food on the table or other types of “consumption loans” don’t necessarily pass this intellectual muster. But oftentimes, in reality, having enough to eat and thus enough strength to work—or being able to send one’s children in school, or being able to pay for transportation to work, or scores of other “consumption” purposes—would do more for generating cash flow and “raising them up” than buying space for a stand.

WomensTrust is a microfinance institution (MFI) run on the ground by locals who also contribute concretely to the strategic direction of the institution in collaboration with a U.S.-based board of directors. The ultimate goal is to eventually make WomensTrust an entirely Ghanaian institution, a project that led me there in order to help finish implementing a management information system (MIS)—something I had chosen during a project that I headed through SEEDS Consulting (Social Enterprise and Economic Development Society) at Dartmouth. Essentially, an MIS is the combination of the IT systems and human procedures that capture, track, and process information in an institution. In this case, the MIS needed to track active clients, loans outstanding, loans needing repaying etc.—basic information for financial institutions, no matter how big or small.
In accordance with the mission of WomensTrust, however, I did not go to Ghana to just arbitrarily remake their loan processes and change how they did things. Before I could do anything, I had to first learn, observe, and understand why they did what they did—and only then offer changes that I believed would best benefit them. I wasn’t arbitrarily telling the Ghanaian staff how to do its job, nor was I blindly surrendering to how things were currently run. I assessed their needs and offered recommendations, just as a consultant in the U.S. offers his or her recommendations to a company’s management team. I wasn’t dealing with children. I was dealing with people worthy of respect—equal partners at the table who were fully capable of both giving and taking criticism.

I sat with them. I asked questions. I observed. While on the surface their processes looked like an irrational mess, the reality was much more subtle and complicated—which I would have never discovered had I waltzed in and assumed that I knew everything that I needed to know. I learned that they used a seemingly inefficient and chaotic agglomeration of paper and Excel for rational reasons. For instance, when I asked why they gave paper booklets to their clients with a mess of stapled receipts instead of formal statements like a bank, I learned that otherwise floating bits of paper could easily get lost in people’s busy lives. In a rural village, one can hardly expect something like online banking. On top of that, many of their clients were illiterate and the simplicity of a receipt per transaction, although messy, could be understood far more easily than lines of text on a bank statement. At the same time, the system truly was messier and more chaotic than it had to be, even with these considerations. Thus, after I understood these factors, I engaged the staff to create a new system that would preserve these elements of understandability while improving internal tracking. Although this is a simplified example, it illustrates the two-way nature of the process.

Engaging the local staff in this way, I quickly found that even though they were “unsophisticated people from Africa” who in many cases had little to no formal education, they most certainly knew what they were doing and were more than capable of this type of dialogue. One staff member, for instance, had only a sixth grade education but a sharp enough intellect to immediately grasp the fundamentals of why such data tracking was necessary—and, I might add, point out some omissions that I had made. Many of these concepts are ones that I’ve had trouble explaining to Dartmouth graduate students. The point here goes beyond mere respect for or deference to local context—instead, it emphasizes the need to understand, in situations like these, that outsiders like me deal with rational human beings, not children or “underprivileged people” to be understood in the abstract. It is this type of feedback and response from both sides that makes institutions like WomensTrust a bottom-up solution to the unilateralism that has previously created developing-world dependence on the charity of the West.

Ultimately, exactly what I did was less important than the way I approached what I did. Dialogue, the philosophy that drives WomensTrust and intitutions like it, is the key to successful aid. Even now, after acknowledging the failures of past development efforts, we often make the mistake of underestimating those we are trying to help. The importance of dialogue is slowly catching on as microfinance and other more “economy-building” types of aid mature, and as we discover their flaws when practiced unilaterally. But beyond the practicalities of the situation and whatever economic and psychological incentives underlie it, understanding this principle is a matter of basic respect. We must recognize that thosewe are trying to help are not merely some alien “other”—they are people like us. Far from wallowing in ignorance, these people are making their way in logical, rational ways though constrained by various challenges inherent in impoverished nations. It is these challenges that we should work together in overcoming. But in doing so, we must remember basic respect for these people as people. To do otherwise is not only patronizing on our part—it is crippling our efforts to truly make an impact.

Seeing as they were during V-Week and near the performance of the Vagina Monologues, you can’t say they weren’t timely. Whether you feel that they were “cowardly,” as one D opinion writer seemed to believe, or that they addressed a dark underbelly of campus that everyone knows about but rarely acknowledges, you certainly can’t say that they failed to elicit a reaction.

Because no matter what, we don’t seem to talk about it enough. As you may have guessed, “They,” refers to those who put up the signs at a number of fraternities, sororities, and Parkhurst. And  “it,” of course, is sexism and sexual assault on Dartmouth’s campus.

As a male student, it’s hard for me to say what it is really like to be a woman on campus. I don’t get the same looks, the same reactions, and the same sexual norms and expectations imposed on me like females do at Dartmouth. Some of it is endemic in society, if not all over the world. Some of it stems from American culture, from our troubling media fascination with sexualized women and violence against them.

But some it also falls on us, Dartmouth students and community members, the inheritors of a College that just a few decades ago was dead-set against co-education and is still trying to cope with its consequences.

Anyone who has tried to change a culture, whether within a company, a bureaucracy, or a community, can tell you that the process requires more than a few months or even a few years. Even in a college environment, whose student body is entirely different every sixteen years, institutions persist. Whether it is the sports teams, or fraternities, or traditionally male-dominated social activities, power structures don’t just disappear. MAV (Mentors Against Violence) facilitations target sports teams, who mostly scoff and laugh at their message.

“Alternative social spaces” has become generic codeword for social spaces, mostly nonexistent, outside of the fraternities. The administration and endless committees perennially attempt to reduce sexual assault. It’s not to say we haven’t gotten better over time, but it certainly sounds like the hot-button issues remain the same, year after year.

But many rail against this description—specifically, “we,” the seniors. The intuitive reaction to these issues by many men is “I don’t do this. My friends don’t do this. This doesn’t concern us.”

And to not misrepresent campus sentiment, even many women dismiss the seriousness of the problem at Dartmouth.

Even those who pay lip service to how “bad” things are at Dartmouth often seem to feel that it’s an issue to trumpet, like poverty and world hunger—and not something that truly would ever affect them; it isn’t a problem for “us” anymore, they argue, and the attempt to describe it as such is just as misguided as trying to pin the blame for past discrimination on us.

What, after all, does the oppression of Native Americans have to do with today’s students? We were not the slave owners, the lynchers or the ones who passed Jim Crow. If those sins, traced down to our generation through blood, shouldn’t be pinned on us, then how can the sins of past classes, with whom few of us have a relationship, be passed to our shoulders?

Of course, as is true of racial discrimination, today’s harms are more subtle than the literal guns, germs, and steel of yesterday. They are more subtle than outright hatred and prejudice. Instead, harm lives on as the small accumulation of small advantages that we cannot see and we cannot feel.

For those who feel that these mean nothing, I would highly recommend Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who is far from a radical ethnic-theory apologist. The reason is the same as why children who start out younger in schools radically underperform their slightly more physically mature peers by a considerable order of magnitude. It’s the same reason why all of Canada’s elite hockey players are born, almost unfailingly, in the first three months of the year.

Our tiny advantages accumulate, giving us further advantages, which lead us to even further advantages.
It seems obvious in the case of a sports player who happens to perform better in tryouts because he feels particularly good one day—and gets further training, experience, and finally becomes far better than those who he pulled ahead of originally for no reason other than luck.

Why isn’t it the case in issues of racial discrimination? Why isn’t it the case in issues of sexual discrimination?
My own heritage precludes the “blood” argument. My parents came from Taiwan. Their parents came from China, though they moved to China when the Nationalist Army fled the Communists. Despite my roots on the other side of the world, I still reap the benefits of where I am at Dartmouth and where I am perceived in society. My own small advantages—having parents who, although they arrived on American shores with little more than $200, were well-educated and became computer engineers—added up to an Ivy League education and its perceived signal of my talent and ability.

If I were born in a Chicago slum and attended the city’s public schools, with their poor resources, and was without parents whose background enabled them to help me, would I have had achieved the same results? My own effort factored into it, no doubt—but the largest difference was nothing but blind luck.

I’ve wandered a long ways from the issue of sexism at Dartmouth. Perhaps that’s because it’s hardest to see what is closest to us—and it may be easier to recognize what sexism does with us here, and how we perpetrate it without meaning to, by first seeing a similar principle in action elsewhere. But another part of the issue is that, no matter what, I don’t know what means to be a woman at Dartmouth.

Being a racial minority—there I have a bit of experience. Economically disadvantaged—I have a bit of that too. But I don’t know what it is like to write a reasoned blitz to a professor and receive a response that essentially calls me an aggressive bitch. I don’t know what it’s like to have guys ogle at me and then tell me that I should be flattered. I don’t know what it is like to feel helpless against an assaulter bigger and stronger than me. I have seen all of it, at Dartmouth and outside of Dartmouth, but I don’t know what it is to experience it.

The reality is that it isn’t usually so blatant. Sexual assault is a serious issue. Overt sexism is a serious issue. But what is most virulent and corrosive in our community is the small uncertainty, the slightly imbalanced perception of “aggressiveness,” and the small feeling of expectation that women face.

These small things affect how a woman perceives her capabilities, which in turn affect her social standing—which change how she is treated. And on it goes, with small problems contributing to the larger problems, ones that still dog us nearly forty years after the first female Dartmouth students stepped onto campus.

It may seem hopeless. It may seem like a lost cause. The behaviors are so small and undetectable that we presume nothing but their gradual erosion through time will take away the problems that we inherit and become part of at Dartmouth. But time doesn’t seem to have done much in the case of our small behaviors and those small advantages and disadvantages.

I wish I could propose a solution that would solve everything, but I can’t. It isn’t as simple as moral platitudes. It isn’t just a matter of “thinking about what we do” or “speaking up.”

Such acts are inherently too fleeting and too contrived to maintain, making those who do maintain them seem banal or sanctimonious in our eyes.

All I do know is that we must first recognize these things as the problems they are, and take ownership of them as our own in all their ugly glory. Last week’s signs have done little to advance this particular goal, ultimately.
They painted with too broad a brush and highlighted only our most overt issues, issues their target audience has mostly shrugged off with righteous indignation. The signs fail to strike at core issues, and in so doing further perpetuated a feeling that our problems lie in intractably “big issues” rather than small ones.

Despite all of this, even without signs, we still do not talk about the issues. We do not think that they’re everyone’s problem. Although my own conversations with seniors have left me to think that many of us often come to the conclusion that great problems do exist on campus, they believe that it’s too late for us to spearhead a cultural shift. But that’s as far as it goes, just as it was for the seniors before them.

Much of our campus has taken a defensive stance towards the now infamous signs, and believes that they are an affront and a form of hatred themselves. I may not feel that these signs were our most prudent way of conveying a message, but I wouldn’t dismiss them.

They represent something that has happened year after year, as seniors attempt to convey to underclassmen the lessons that we have learned. It is a last cry to younger students to recognize and somehow break the cycle. Judging by our campus’ reaction, although the seniors may feel that these are our issues, there is clearly still work to be done before the rest of campus considers them their issues.

So far, we have been living blindly to the truth. In our comfortable lives, we have ignored the global holocaust occurring today—backed by the same motivations and underpinnings behind the first holocaust of the Nazis. In fact, it’s also Communist, of the Marx and Engels brand. It’s a global conspiracy.

It’s something that leads us to deny the worldwide eradication of humanity, also known as abortion. Yes, abortion. Did you know that abortionists drag babies—fully viable babies—and drown them in distilled water, crush their heads, and chop them up for parts to use in cosmetic surgery for women? This neo-Communist plot to destroy the world is known as radical feminism. This new world order is known as the Global Gynarchia. See the evil upon the unnaturally youthful faces of women, powered by baby guts.

Or at least that’s what FathersForLife.org would have us believe. Loading this website is like stepping into an alternate universe. Though obviously a pro-life website, it goes beyond simply talking about abortion (which is apparently thinning humanity and will eventually lead to our destruction, as the Communists wanted). It details a world where men are actually oppressed by the new elite, the feminist conspiracy. Children are beaten to death with impunity by their capricious overlord mothers.

And fathers are the last line of hope for humanity but the tendrils of the feminist movement are slowly leeching their vitality. In this world, it is a battle of good against evil—the patriarchy against the evil arachnid-like Gynarchia. Sadly, it is a battle we have already lost. Fathers For Life is meant as a time capsule for future generations. The Gynarchia has already won. Like a black widow spider, it has gobbled up good ‘ol patriarchy and fatherhood, with mayonnaise on the side.
Its absurdity makes this story told by Fathers For Life rather entertaining.

Uncharacteristically (though part of the narrative), the website also details the plight of the Jews and how the feminist and euthanasia movements are an extension of Nazism and Communism (putting aside, for a moment, that those philosophies aren’t on the best of terms with one another). Euthanasia and assisted suicide has, according to Fathers For Life, had a far more nefarious goal—to eradicate the Jews, since half of the 12 million individuals put down have been Jews. As much skepticism as these types of stories must instill in casual, mainstream readers, there is something that this website shares in common with many websites and books on any radical fringe, especially modern radical conservatism—a clever weave of truth and half-truth.

Within a strange mix of factually dubious article citations, we read the puzzling assertion that two-thirds of child abuse is committed by women. Men have an instinct to protect women and children, thus leaving the destructive abuse suffered by children to be committed by women. We also read that Margaret Sanger, one of the early champions of birth control, was actually a proponent of eugenics who drew the admiration of Hitler—damning, according to Fathers For Life, since her organization eventually became Planned Parenthood, which is perpetrating her legacy to this day.

Is Fathers For Life right? According to Medicine Net, a site referred by the National Institute of Health, women do commit 61% of child abuse. A quick historical check reveals that Margaret Sanger really was a proponent of eugenics!

Of course, the truth is always a bit more complicated than a short series of “gotchas.”

While 61% of recorded child abuse is in fact committed by women, the vast majority of that abuse is actually neglect (which is also technically classified under abuse). Most violent, physical abuse is still committed by men. And although neglect can easily be deadly in the case of children, it doesn’t quite paint the same picture of vindictive, violent mothers that Fathers for Life tries to convey.

Additionally, while Margaret Sanger was indeed a proponent of eugenics, there are more than a few differences between her and Hitler. Besides the fact that most Americans and Europeans at the time were actually in favor of eugenics to some extent, Sanger was quite vocal against violent extermination of individuals and was horrified by news of Nazi Germany’s actions—quite different from Sanger and Hitler supposedly becoming the best of friends and creating a strange lovechild of nazi-feminism. Sanger, despite having widely inappropriate views by today’s standards, actually had a somewhat compassionate vision in mind, considering that she saw birth control as helping poor women out of poverty—even if it was alongside a view that it might be able to prevent the mixing of the white race with inferior Asian and “other” races.

The truth behind Fathers For Life’s half-truths becomes quite apparent with the full context, but the danger is in an incomplete picture that incorporates a few germs of truth within a wider net of wild-eyed conspiracy. Although I doubt that more than a few would fully accept everything that the site proposes, I can see it as all-too-likely that some will. Upon realizing that these previously outlandish-sounding factoids are “true,” they will begin thinking about the validity of other assertions that the site also makes.

Maybe not the blip about feminists with baby guts as cosmetic injections, but perhaps some of the assertions that legal abortion is twenty-five times more dangerous than illegal abortion have some truth to them. Maybe there is something to the claim that abortion causes breast cancer. And maybe there is something to this view that we should stop abortions because they are morally reprehensible. But that slant shifts the issue away from the woman, even if the casual reader rejects the evil “redfem” picture the site paints.

Fathers For Life may not gain many converts anytime soon, but it does illustrate an increasing tendency of these sorts of websites and books to mix surprising true facts within their untruths, which may lead the uncritical observer to lend credence to a far wider body of twisted facts and straight up lies. And that ultimately is the danger, either with these extreme-fringe anti-feminist sites, or more commonly, the anti-evolution movement.

By seizing upon personal flaws of the founders of feminism, birth control, or evolution, these groups cast a sinister shadow on everything else these individuals touched. This includes a few cherrypicked shock factoids that may be construed as true, slowly breaking down readers’ skepticism and wedging a foot in the door for more radical sentiments.

Ultimately, these types of tactics have brought many of the myths about abortion (and again, the other popular target, evolution) from the minds of raving extremists into the mouths of the mainstream. And that, in the end, is what is terrifying about sites like Fathers For Life.

So how long has it been since Dartmouth first began to admit women to the student body? With the first full-time female students in 1972, we’re nearing four decades of coeducation. But despite Dartmouth going co-ed well before the first memories of current students, many of the persistent themes on our campus would seem to suggest coeducation arrived to our snowy New Hampshire grounds much later. Gender inequality, sexual assault, campus spaces and fraternity dominance—these issues continue to haunt our discourse and maintain a lingering presence regardless of how many panels and task forces we create to investigate them.

While sex-based discrimination and inequality certainly isn’t exclusive to Dartmouth, our campus seems to move at a painstakingly slow pace compared to the outside world and other colleges. As a transfer student from UC Berkeley, I felt the difference the moment I stepped onto campus. Beneath the friendliness of each student, the excitement of DOC trips, and the breathtaking wonder of the Green and our historical buildings, there was something else. It was an undercurrent of proud athleticism, rugged outdoorsmanship… and…what was it? Privilege. I could almost taste it in my mouth through the cool autumn air.
Not privilege as material wealth, or class division—though I would find it in abundance later—but instead a lofty inaccessibility. Not elitism, but elite. It was evident in the physical structure of the campus. I was used to precise, ADA-compliant angled ramps abundantly positioned throughout campus and handicap signs dotting campus. Cultural relics in Berkeley challenged authority on the faded face of Bob Marley. Here, I was greeted with wide fields and majestic entrances and steps, daunting and proud. When I arrived, Berry Library’s Orozco murals stood out to me as a half-amused study of a primitive “other.”

But besides these physical hallmarks, these differences created a certain feeling that gnawed at me, like a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite name and still can’t to this day. It is a feeling that there is a “correct order,” one distinctly Dartmouth and not the of the powerful institutions that create class, race, and gender divisions in society. In the case of gender, this “correct order” wasn’t something as obvious as meeting housewives-to-be or even seeing women as more “subdued.” But when I thought about gender and gender discrimination here at Dartmouth, there was something that made me think of polo shirts, golf sweaters, neat haircuts, and smiling rows of white men.

In my time here, I’ve met others who have shared that feeling. One said that she felt it was the male-centrism still present in the administration and alumni. Another has said that she actually thought the women were more subordinate here to the men. In her opinion, the fraternity environment forced women to become subservient, even if they didn’t start out that way. I don’t know if I can really echo those claims in my own experience, but I do know that I am not entirely alone in my sentiments.

After all of this, readers of this editorial may think that my reaction was obviously revulsion, that I made a horrible mistaking coming here. Some readers who agree with me are probably nodding in emphatic acknowledgement, thinking about their own experiences. Those who disagree might be thinking that this “Berkeley liberal” must have had some sort of culture shock after coming into a “normal” environment.
Well, I have a guilty confession to make—I didn’t greet this feeling with anger, revulsion, or even distaste when I first began walking across the Green. I welcomed it.

I didn’t hate Berkeley and I left many friends when I transferred across the country to Dartmouth. However, I hated the rat race that had overtaken it by the time I was there. Whether it was always there, I can’t say, but when I was there, it wasn’t a place of grand rebellion or anti-establishment sentiment—and that wasn’t my thing anyway.

What it was though was a place where introductory classes tried to “weed” students out of the department’s majors. It was a place where those interested in economics and business engaged in climbing over one another to gain a place in these coveted majors. Those progressive values that were normally associated with Berkeley were well in the background, whispering, if not simply rasping, almost imperceptibly. Instead there were endless meetings and hundreds of business clubs, with some students more often in suits than casual clothes, and not for interviews. The competition, anxious bustle, and above all, insecurity that radiated from the organizations and its students left a sour taste in my mouth.

So when I arrived here, this proud Sparta of colleges, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged-utopia, I savored its proud, traditional smugness as I breathed deep the New Hampshire chill. I celebrated the change, I admit, even though I have personal reason to passionately hate the subordination of those in a weaker position, especially women.

Slowly, through seeing Dartmouth’s deeply entrenched institutions, especially the sports and fraternity power centers, I have been repulsed by this Dartmouth facet. I have become more and more convinced that there is something wrong, even if I can only approximate causes and its symptoms because the true reasons inscribed in the social interactions are often invisible and difficult to grasp.

There are many reasons to be proud of being a son or daughter (or other) of Dartmouth, and I have not regretted my decision to come here. But others, ghosts of our past, deserve to be firmly put to rest. I myself know the allure of some of the mythos and have heard much more now about the darker side of Dartmouth from those who have been hurt by it most.

For our own sake—and Dartmouth’s—we need to bring out the best in our college, and ruthlessly stamp out the worst. It is why we had to bring back Untamed, one of the strongest feminist voices on campus, and why we still must strive to cover these issues. And we will continue to do so, not as detractors or bomb-throwers against this place that has become our sanctuary and our home, but as those who love it and hate the weeds that choke and diminish it.

Homecoming. It’s a special time. Teary-eyed alumni are coming back to their old alma mater. Frat boys are even more drunk than usual. And freshmen are about to run many circles around a tower of flaming deadwood. Ah, traditions at Dartmouth.

Putting aside for now the rich commentary we could have on all of these festivities, we’ll be bringing you coverage of issues that you won’t find anytime soon in other campus publications or even many national publications. Next issue, we will debut the return of Untamed, the feminist publication at Dartmouth, as a section of the DFP. Our coverage of feminist issues will increase with this addition, and also help give more focus for our articles on feminism and society. It’s a trend that we’ve been following. Even this issue, we covered the recent talk by one of the most prominent feminist legal theorists alive, Catharine MacKinnon.

Now is a special time for many movements. The Franken Amendment is finally casting light on a part of the war effort that has been hidden for far too long. The National Equality March, even if mostly ineffectual, demonstrates the growing political significance
of the LGBT community in the American social landscape.

This is an exciting time, and with the changes at the DFP, we will continue to work to bring you coverage of these issues. Feel free to give us feedback on how things are going and what you want to see in this paper.

Class Divide at Dartmouth

Class divide is something that we don’t like to talk about at Dartmouth. It works invisibly, dividing our campus into categories we didn’t even know we fell into. Over half of our fellows here at Dartmouth pay full fare for their tuition. The rest receive anything from a few loans to fully covered financial aid.

I’m not making a judgment call. This isn’t meant to be a populist rant of the haves against the have-nots. Being affluent enough to afford a Dartmouth education is not something these students have chosen. In fact, their tuition money helps pay for so many of the great programs here—and, in part, the financial aid of the rest. But these aren’t even the main reasons why we shouldn’t judge in this regard, favorably or unfavorably. The main reason is that they are fellow students. They are not “they.” They are part of us—part of the Dartmouth community.

We all go to class. All of us pretty much eat the same grease-filled food at FoCo and at the Hop. We all walk across the Green, and in the spring, we all wade across the melted snow. These are things that bind us together. They help define us as members of the Dartmouth community. We dwell on a college campus that grants all of us the opportunity to have our voices heard in the classroom and community as students—as peers.

But despite all of this, our Dartmouth experiences are not all the same. Who exactly are the ones normally participating in Greek life or SA? And who normally mans the DDS stations, or the library help desks? You can always point to exceptions to the rule, but these questions retain their importance.

“But our house has this person who isn’t able to pay but gets scholarships from alumni and our house fund and…” say some fraternity and sorority chairs. I’m sure every house has some sort of system that attempts to make Greek life more inclusive, to a greater or lesser extent, but it doesn’t counter the systemic problems in our social life derived from these types of organizations.

Social and house dues will always deter the potential low-income rushee to some extent. Even though there are many “scholarships” or “extra duties” that can cover these social dues and house dues, how many students want to be second-class citizens in their own house? Maybe we don’t feel that a few extra duties during parties or a few more cleaning rounds in the dingy frat bathroom separates us. Do we really pass no judgment on those forced to do it? And do the students who perform these “extra duties” in order to participate in Greek life really feel no different?

Even if we believe we are somehow beyond judging along those lines, that still doesn’t solve the fact that there are still many low-income students who decide not to rush in the first place. They’re busy in the library, FoCo, Topside, Alumni Gym, or wherever they work to pay for Dartmouth. Many balance their jobs, their classes, and pong very well.

Others are not so lucky. One of my friends worked at both FoCo and the Hood Museum Shop, moving from one job to another to another all day long. While sitting in that store that no one goes into, he did his homework or played with the trinkets no one bought. And for the rest of the day, he gave students their “chicken,” “dinner special,” or “that,” behind the glass at FoCo, slopping our wet, oily meals onto plastic containers and dinner plates. Even if he wanted to participate in Greek life, would he have been able to find the time?

Maybe his case is rare. But it’s far more common than we acknowledge.

So after all of this, you’re probably asking, “Now what?” Well, now that we see this problem, this issue, this thing that we loathe to speak about, what’s my grand solution?

How do I propose that we ameliorate the situation so that this division disappears and Dartmouth truly becomes an idyllic community?

Outreach, perhaps. More alternative social spaces. Maybe one of the half-dozen solutions that have been bouncing around for so long. But they’re also the point and the problem. We have potential alleviations, if not solutions to our divisions here at Dartmouth. The problem is they have gained little to no ground.

It isn’t the incompetence of SA or the hostility of the fraternities or even the glacial pace of the college administration. These may contribute in part to the lack of a solution, but these are certainly not the biggest obstacles. The greatest enemy is our silence on the issue.

We aren’t going to eliminate income differences, or for that matter, the greater hardships faced by some less affluent students. We aren’t going to make us all the same. And, at least for diversity on our campus, we shouldn’t become mirror images of each other.

However, there are still divisions between haves and have-nots—the elites and the non-elites. It’s more than the groups we choose to be with. The tragedy is that these groups are chosen for us. In a college where we are supposed to learn and work without class, race, gender, or wealth barriers, we should strive to close these gaps and make us a community instead.

The Masthead

Editor-in-Chief: James Wang

Read this issue’s articles!

Leave a Legacy

Change. It started out with change. The yearning for something different is what drove this former UC Berkeley student to transfer out here to our dear college in the woods. Change was the theme of my personal transition to Dartmouth. And change has quickly become the special theme of the ‘13s.

My change was a personal change, the result of being uprooted and transplanted to a place far away from what I knew well. For some of you, home is much closer than mine is. For others, the move has been even more of a geographical displacement. No matter where you come from, however, what you’ll find here will be very different from what you knew before.

Read the full story

xcited for the new Terminator movie? You may be surprised to learn that the self-aware killing machines that define this franchise loom far closer than most would think.

Traditionally, science fiction has imagined artificial intelligence as it was first set out by author Isaac Asimov. Anything but killing machines, robots appeared in his novels as pseudo-life forms created to serve man peacefully, bound by a duty to help humans, never to harm them. Asimov’s interest lay in exploring how these rules could become contradictory, and how strict adherence to them might force robots to abandon them altogether. In reality, such philosophical worries about how machines might “self-contradict” are moot. Today’s robots have no “golden rules.” Far from it, the very point of our most advanced creations has thus far been to kill humans; A.I. has shied far from such an angsty, soliptic vision. Really, Terminator is far closer to reality than Asimov’s vision of what the future might look like.

The media has been fastidious in its coverage of the Predator drones being used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where they are deployed to kill suspected terrorists. What has received less attention, however, is the extent to which all three branches of the military have become more reliant on robots and artificial intelligence.

Take the Air Force for instance. Despite much resistance from its old guard, this branch of the service is quickly becoming unmanned. Even as they defend the instincts and judgment of human pilots, Air Force officials have been forced to defend the Air Force’s relevance by highlighting its heavy reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). And with the advent of the unheralded “Predator B” fighters (also known as “Reapers”), the Air Force has moved beyond deploying simple reconnaissance craft towards a reliance on full-blown robotic fighters. One study published in IEEE (a trade publication for engineers) has even detailed how robotic fighters can now fly as reliable wingmen to human pilots. It won’t be too long until we have fighters that can operate without a human counterpart.

Beyond the robotization of current weaponry, there has been a dramatic paradigm shift in how we understand and create weapons. Take, for example, the U.S. Marine Corps’ tests of a space-plane “mothership”—originally conceived as a huge, always-flying plane capable of launching spacecraft into orbit. The original concept never worked because the resulting blob of a plane could not be flown by any trained pilot.

Now, however, the concept has been revisited, and the result is a drone mothership capable of launching smaller drone fighters or robotic ground forces (unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs) from the air. Similar concepts are being adopted by the U.S. and British Navies, both of which are now developing similar water-based motherships that carry unmanned vehicles—basically, small, deadly robotic submarines and surface ships. Many defense analysts argue that carrier technology will soon become a relic of the past, unwelcome news, one would expect, for China, India, and the other developing countries struggling to put together fleets of their own. What good would a large, slow, and extremely expensive target do against planes capable of flying at speeds that would kill any normal human being? Could such a fleet defend against sea-based drones that can approach and destroy faster than they can be detected and stopped?

Despite these startling advances in air and sea technology, however, the most troubling robotization research has thus far been done by the United States Army. In simple terms: we are very close to developing machines that fight without human guidance, machines that will no longer require a human finger, not even a remote one, to pull the trigger. But in the messy business of ground combat, especially in our new world of low-intensity guerilla and urban warfare, is this acceptable? Here, the ethical questions are too many. You’re not likely to have civilian fighter jets, nor are you likely to have civilian aircraft carriers or warships. You are, however, likely to have civilian people. It’s far easier for Air Force and Navy drones to identify what they should be killing than it is for Army ones.

In ground warfare, for instance, how will a robot distinguish between an armed militant and a scared child—and how will such a thing cull intimate emotional, even physical, detail from a situation? How can we program a robot to identify real versus feigned surrender? Can a robot read the emotions of an enemy? Can it recognize a scared son/daughter/husband/brother/sister who could never pull the trigger of his or her AK-47? Soldiers themselves, in the heat and confusion of war, are often not able to make these distinctions. How could a robot ever do so?

With these concerns in mind, the U.S. Army is drafting a whitepaper that will outline a kind of robot code of conduct. The military is still not comfortable—rightly so—with the idea that autonomous robots will be capable of killing other humans. It should be uncomfortable at the very least. While the world of Terminator may not come to pass anytime soon, the idea that humans might be removed entirely from combat raises difficult ethical issues. If we claim to be fighting just wars, to be sacrificing for our causes and ideals, how can we simply remove “sacrifice” from our side of the equation? What necessary, albeit tortured, checks on war making would we sacrifice were it to no longer entail the loss of soldiers’ lives?

Running headlong into mechanized warfare might be our best choice militarily, but it’s anything but clear that it’s our most moral one. Forgetting, for a moment, the intrinsic danger associated with autonomous killing machines, we have to look at the broader consequences of dehumanizing warfare, especially if it is a tool available only to the powerful. Implicated here is the valuation of our citizens’ lives over the lives of the people we fight, not to mention the trivialization of war. If we don’t risk our own life and limb, after all, what’s to stop us from starting all sorts of wars for trivial reasons? Forget SKYNET, cylons, and robotic revolution—these are the concerns that will define our generation’s tortured relationship with modern warfare. It would seem Pandora’s Box has been opened all over again.

Posted in UncategorizedComments (0)