A typical day at Bored at Baker. Screenshot taken directly from http://boredatbaker.com

Dartmouth has once again fallen under the spell of Bored at Baker. I’m not going to dwell on the obvious—this anonymous message board is plagued by outrageously offensive comments that not even the staunchest racist would condone. The amount of seemingly random, blindly hateful comments against women, Blacks, Asians, gay people, and every other group under the sun is overwhelming the trashcan, broken up only by pathetically uncreative insults aimed at every Greek house on campus and spam about corporate recruiting.

What fascinates me, however, and keeps me coming back, is the deep-seated voyeurism implicit in this kind of anonymous design. The posts that make me care the most about the toxic appeal of Bored at Baker are those that target specific students on this campus, everyday people who for some reason or another (or perhaps for no reason at all) have drawn an inordinate amount of attention to themselves and to their private lives. The guise of anonymity lends people a power they have never had before—to spew every opinion (hateful or otherwise) that they’ve ever had in a public domain. On Bored at Baker, they feel their voices can be heard without the consequences of culpability. What is it about our culture that fosters this sense of privilege to speak about people we hardly know, or literally had never heard of until we just Facebook-stalked them?

Our generation, unlike any other, is bombarded by celebrity gossip, reality television, and networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, which all further this trend of voyeurism; they quickly made it normal to feel as if we know people we have never met and who will never know that we are observing them. We idolize watchability above all else and especially those who seem the most unaware of being watched, the least self-conscious. We feel the need to comment on other people’s lives, to voice opinions and then gobble them up so that we can feel we’ve learned something about them—gained some access to them that they do not want us to have.

Now, I’d venture to guess that most Dartmouth students are all familiar with the concept of “campus celebs.” The term is basically a catch-all for anyone who makes themselves known in a public way, usually through some student organization or another, yet is completely unaware (or at least pretending to be unaware) that most people know who they are. Yet because Dartmouth is so small, everyone is bound to have multiple friends in common with these people, to have picked up certain tidbits of gossip about their lives and feel some secret access to their most intimate experiences. We even apply this celebrity image to ourselves, carefully crafting Facebook profiles to create these ultra-publicized personae that are all image and no substance. We become selfless, public figures that interact in a public and digital realm;we move from obsessing about being watched by others to watching ourselves and keeping track of all our friendships by such arbitrary measures as wallposts and mutual friends. We feel that our own personal thoughts are but distant third-party commentary on the goings-on of our superficial social connections, that there is some anonymous critical voice that transcends even ourselves in this hamster cage of staged social interactions.

Our lives are a TV show and B@B is the anonymous narrator. We feel we know the people in our little world, because we have some sense of their characters. They are our Barbie dolls, our celebrities. We can weave whatever scandalous stories we want out of their lives because all they are to us is a collection of Facebook drunk-at-a-party pictures—figureheads whose private selves are irrelevant to how we know them. We in turn give up our own private selves and join the TV show; we forget who we’d be if no one (including us) were watching. It’s only to be expected if you take into account the evolution of popular media itself, which went from scripted sitcoms with cookie-cutter characters perfectly fulfilling structured social norms (fantasy worlds we could imagine ourselves into); to reality television (“mirrors” of the real world we do live in, distorted and glamorized though it may be); to Facebook (a public display of our actual selves). We have become the celebrity, the fantasy, the show. The transition is complete.

Whatever form this transformation from human to celebrity takes—Bored at Baker, JuicyCampus—the implications are the same. We feel we have some right to the lives of others, some ownership of their images because they are so publicly known. Yet it is essential to remember that we are all human beings with similar insecurities and weaknesses, as obvious and repetitive as the idea may seem, and these sites are, in essence, pure garbage and nonsense. The hookups revealed on these sites themselves were probably just as shallow and impersonal as their crude public discussion, if they even happened at all. This kind of rampant anonymous hatred can be poisonous. It can make people feel unsafe in their own school, a supposed home away from home. But more disturbing is the underlying reason for this phenomenon of public commentary on the private lives of regular people. It is part of a larger trend that is ultimately more terrifying than any one violent or racist post could ever be.

artmouth is full of students who take the initiative to create successful clubs and programs each year, many of which become lasting institutions on the campus. But what about all those ideas—some awesome and some cringe-worthy in their stupidity—that didn’t make it? Our history is marked by plenty of successes, but underneath the overwhelming number of lasting traditions lie dead and abandoned programs, ideas that never really panned out, often despite a lot of potential. We took it upon ourselves to explore some of the many promising but ultimately flawed ideas that didn’t make it, and the reasons behind their failures.

DDS DELIVERY SERVICES

(April’94 $mdash; May’94) and (August 2002- November 2002)

What could have possibly gone wrong with such a brilliant idea? Who would rather walk through the endless winterland of Hanover than have someone bring them hot food on a bike? The idea was straightforward: students could send in their orders via Blitzmail (yes, they had it in’94) to Food Court, where DDS employees would then prepare the food and deliver it on bicycles outfitted with coolers. Students could pay for the food using DBA, with an added $1 tip to the delivery people.

The first time around, the pitfalls were easy to pinpoint. The idea of using Blitzmail was partly to blame. The first night of the program, Food Court received 20 orders for delivery in just a few minutes, and it wasn’t long before the printer broke. Most orders took at least an hour to deliver that night, and the hot orders were cold by the time they finally arrived. Frustrations mounted in response to the slow delivery times, as is reflected in an April 20th,’94 letter to the editor of The D from a ’96. It is only five sentences long, and ends with the question, “Where is my pizza?” That’s right; a Dartmouth student ordered one slice of cheese pizza on 4/20, waited almost 2 hours, and then instead of going to Food Court to get herself a slice of pizza, wrote a letter to the editor asking where it was. Great strategy. This program did not fail due to students’ willingness to get food themselves. On the contrary, it failed because lazy people found the service even more inconvenient than actually walking 100 feet to Food Court from their cozy homes on Mass Row.

Food Court soon did away with the Blitzmail ordering system and instead insisted that students call in their orders. Despite this change, delivery never really became any speedier, and the lack of adequate room to prepare the meals also contributed to the eventual petering-out of the program by the end of the year. The service lacked adequate planning, space, and manpower.

It took eight years for someone to revive this incredible idea, but it seems that no one took the time to fix the kinks that plagued the service the first time around. In August 2002, the delivery service began anew, this time using cars as the delivery vehicle of choice. Immediately the student body voiced its disapproval of the idea of wasting gas and polluting the environment to deliver food to students who, for the most part, lived within half a mile of Food Court. Also, it wasn’t wintertime. Food Court went ahead with the program anyway, agreeing to use environmentally friendly materials to cut down on waste. But this time they were too timid to go the distance with the program, only offering cold foods like sandwiches and drinks on the delivery menu. Still, one would expect the program to have had at least a modicum of success. Yet by November, Food Court was reporting a loss of money as a result of the program. Not enough people were ordering food to be delivered, and the cost of employing extra people to run the delivery service and paying for gasoline and delivery vehicles proved too much to make it worth the time and effort. The service also wasn’t publicized very well, so that many students didn’t even know it was available. And once again, waiting for a delivery was not nearly as efficient as walking your lazy drunk ass to Food Court. Any more major problems with this second iteration were never completely identified; it seemed that this time, perhaps this ostensibly genius idea could work. Unable to find a definitive reason for the failure of the program, we drew our own conclusions. Drunk people appreciate hot foods, like mozz sticks, pizza, or chicken nuggets. They don’t want cold sandwiches and they don’t want to wait. Plus FoCo’s already on the way to Theta Delt! Sick!

BIG GREEN BIKES

(2000-2006)

This program lagged on for far too long. It failed again and again, but was reintroduced in slightly different forms three times. In essence, Student Assembly provided about 100 shared bikes to the campus community, and for the price of $10 per term students could purchase skeleton keys to unlock any of the bikes. This, too, seems like an idea that shouldn’t have failed so hard. One obvious problem in the first two implementations of the program was a lack of a membership clause. Any student could access any of the communal bikes without paying the $10 fee or having to use a key to unlock the bikes. This oversight led to mass bicycle thievery and random destruction of the bicycles. Campus-wide apathy and general disregard for the worth of property led to the destruction and theft of most of the bikes. Student Assembly wasted over $4,000 trying to make the program better, and despite finding some success after its repeated failures, the program was marked by contentious debate even before it was launched for the third time. Student Assembly saw heated argument amongst its members, some of whom wanted to salvage the program, and some of whom wanted to cut their losses and stop trying. Extremists called the program “communistic” in the hopes that it would eventually fold. The continuing deliberations more likely than not led to the final and comprehensive failure of the program. Those who were opposed to the program made sure it did not succeed by destroying or stealing the bikes, or leaving them unlocked. Plus, they were cheap bikes, with “fragile handlebars” and locks that were difficult to secure. And again, our campus is not very large. The only time that walking across campus seems dreadful is during the winter, when it’s difficult to ride bikes anyway. It simply wasn’t a necessity. However, similar programs have worked very well at other schools, such as Middlebury. I blame drunk people again. Drunk people love unlocked bikes, and they love never returning them as well. And who doesn’t love the feeling of throwing a bike that doesn’t belong to you into the Connecticut River? I know I do.

TUBESTOCK

(1986?-2005)

Everyone knows about this tradition of sophomore summer that came to a crashing halt in early 2006, when the state passed legislation making it illegal to congregate on a public waterway. Let’s be honest—it was never exactly legal for large numbers of underage students to get drunk and go tubing on the Connecticut River, but the Norwich and Hanover police had previously turned a blind eye to the event, because no one entity could be found responsible for it. Dartmouth never officially recognized Tubestock, thus clearing the college of any liability on their part for organizing an event without a permit. However, numerous complaints from Hanover and Norwich townspeople—such as an irate Norwich resident who found fault with students’ inability to clean up after themselves, leaving behind debris and empty alcohol containers after the Tubestock debauchery—led to a new law holding individual students liable. The only way to save the event would be for the College to officially sanction it and then go about paying up to two million dollars for an insurance policy that covered the school, in order to obtain the three permits needed to make the event legal (one permit each for Hanover, Norwich, and the state of New Hampshire). Of cou
rse, the College had no interest in sanctioning an event whose very essence rested on its fun and illegal nature. The complications of saving Tubestock proved too much in the end, and once again a theoretically wonderful idea was destroyed by drunkies.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

“Outdoor Sleep”: Starting in the early 60’s, Dartmouth students would sleep with their dates on the golf course (emphasis on “sleep with”), resulting in dozens of arrests and the College putting the kibosh on the event in’65.

Dartmouth Indian Mascot: Racism = Epic fail

Student Life Initiative: What a royal fuckup this was. You can take away our drunk tubing, drunk biking, and drunk munchies, but don’t take away our drunkenness altogether!

ast November, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which guarantees employment protection for gays and lesbians, sparked great controversy in the House of Representatives. Ironically, the controversy did not stem from homophobic opposition but from the majority of the LGBT community itself, because of a last-minute, transparently strategic exclusion of transgendered individuals. The initial bill (H.R. 2015) was sponsored in the House by Barney Frank (the only openly gay member of Congress), and included employment protection for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Under that bill, an employer would be prohibited from “employment discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.” However, Frank and his co-signers soon changed it to pursue what they viewed as a necessary political strategy for progress.

Around that time, H.R. 2015 was replaced by H.R. 3685, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation alone (though religious institutions and the military would still be exempt from this policy). Transgender people were completely ignored in the new draft of the bill, which passed the House in a vote 235 to‘4. At once, most influential LGBT groups responded with outrage. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force immediately issued a statement saying they were “deeply disappointed that the House Leadership decided to ignore the position of a vast majority of LGBT” people. The bill would make it virtually impossible for any transgender inclusion to ever occur, but its backers in the House determined that it was more politically viable to take baby steps in gaining full civil rights for LGBT people.

On April 2nd, Senator Ted Kennedy (the Senate sponsor) formally introduced the bill to the Senate, despite months of opposition from LGBT organizations for ignoring transgender people’s rights for the sake of incremental progress. Kennedy believes that the sacrifice of transgender people’s rights is worth the remarkable win for the rest of the LGBT community, since it is currently legal in’ states to fire anyone on the basis of sexual orientation alone. It is his position that “the best opportunity for progress is…to follow along on the action of the House of Representatives, and then look down the road to a new day after we have a good Democratic Congress and a Democratic president.” The problem with such an approach, though, is that if the bill does pass in its current form, it is unlikely that transgender people will ever see the same protection as their LGB peers, as its unlikely another similar bill will garner support. From the standpoint of the LGBT community and many gay rights activists, incomplete equality is inequality.

Currently, only nine states have laws in place that protect transgender people from being fired on the basis of gender identity. Since they make up such a small percentage of the LGBT community overall, their exclusion will ultimately be overshadowed by the success of ENDA in securing long-awaited rights for the homosexual and bisexual community. The first time a bill like ENDA was introduced was in’96, when it lost in the Senate by a vote of 50 to 49. Since then, politicians and citizens pushing for gay rights have seen no progress on the issue of employment discrimination until now. Notably, the Human Rights Commission (HRC), an LGBT lobbyist organization based in Washington, is the only influential LGBT group to support the bill in its current version. Though they did express “disappointment” at the exclusion of transgenders from the bill, it was only as an afterthought to their praise of such a monumental success for the gay and lesbian community. They echoed Kennedy’s sentiment of incrementalism, issuing the following statement: “Today, we witnessed the making of civil rights history in the U.S. House of Representatives by the passing of ENDA. This vote by Congress is an important step at ensuring that millions of gay and lesbian Americans will never again have to go to work in fear of losing their jobs because of who they are… Our fight for equality will not be won overnight. It will be won one step at a time.” This mantra of “one step at a time” makes sense in the context of the political reality that the inclusion of transgender people would most likely kill the bill in Congress.

By that same token, however, George Bush has promised to veto the bill even if it does pass Congress. Given such circumstances, there is no reason given whatsoever for making such a clear statement that transgender people do not deserve the same rights as lesbian, gay, or bisexual people, or anyone else for that matter. Furthermore, the HRC was evasive as to their actual position on the exclusion. Mara Keisling, the leader of the National Center for Transgender Equality, stayed in contact with the HRC throughout the legislative process and insisted that the HRC had been “aggressively pushing for the passage of the non-inclusive ENDA since September,” and summarized their stance as, “Forget transgender people, we need a win,” despite their official statement claiming disappointment at the exclusion.

Officers of GSX (Gender Sexuality XYZ) at Dartmouth also spoke out strongly against the glaring exclusion of transgenders in ENDA. Last fall, GSX set up a petition in Thayer to fight against the exclusive version of the bill. Jen Schuster ’09 described the “genuinely shocked and angry” reactions of most students to the divisive political strategy. Cody Lavender ’10, another co-chair of GSX, brought up the overwhelming negative message of such exclusion, calling it a “slap in the face” to transgender people and saying, “If it continues forward as an exclusive bill, it is evident that the larger LGB movement doesn’t see Trans-people as part of the larger community. As soon as the white middle-class LGB people are no longer fired based on sexual orientation, then there won’t be a need to include our Trans-brethren.”

Sadly, such a grim prediction for the future of employment protection for transgender people is probably true if the bill becomes law and leaves transgender people behind. Ultimately, the legislation will never succeed under this administration no matter who is included, so ironically the president’s veto will actually make it more likely that an all-inclusive bill could pass in the future. The LGBT community and our society as a whole can look forward to a reinvigorated and bold attempt in 2009 to reintroduce the inclusive version of ENDA and hopefully bring some measure of equality at last to a community that has seen very little progress in social or legislative equality in the past decades.

he controversy between the Dartmouth Association of Alumni and the College administration has been escalating for four years now, so it may come as somewhat of a surprise to know that many (dare I say most?) Dartmouth students have no idea what is actually going on. That is not an accident. Dartmouth for Parity, the so-called “pro-parity” organization bringing the lawsuit against the College, has presented only vague explanations of their actual stance in the conflict. This group of well-funded alumni is not representative of the Association of Alumni as a whole, but they have blinded outsiders (and many current students) to that fact, as well as to their goals and intentions, by using rhetoric about democracy, parity, and loyalty to paint a black-and-white picture of a much more complex history of conflicts.

The alums behind the lawsuit put forth the argument again and again that this fight is about the College doing away with the democratic process by violating an eighteen ninety-one resolution that allowed the alumni to elect 50% of the Board of Trustees. If you listen to Dartmouth Parity’s side of the story, the administration, in a blatant show of dictatorial disregard for alumni voices, has unfairly “packed the board” in their favor to shift the balance of power. This particular account of events makes it seem as though it is in every student’s best interest to support this group of alums—after all, we’re going to be alums ourselves in only a matter of time. It would be naïve and narrow-minded to suggest that this story has no truth to it, but the way it has been presented to the Dartmouth community by many of those on the side of Dartmouth Parity has been skewed at best, and deliberately deceitful at worst.

Here follows an attempt at a strictly factual account of the history of the eighteen ninety-one resolution and the convoluted controversy dating from 2004.

In eighteen ninety-one, the Board of Trustees enacted a resolution that stated “the graduates of the College, the Thayer School, and the Chandler School, of at least five years standing, may nominate a suitable person for election to each of the five trusteeships next becoming vacant on the board of trustees of the College (excepting those held by the Governor and the President) and may so nominate his successor in each trusteeship.” Part III of this same resolution acknowledged that it supplanted a previous resolution adopted by the Board in ‘76.

The Board of Trustees is free to create new resolutions at any time, even ones that reverse earlier resolutions and, according to the Statement of Governance and Trustee Responsibilities, the Board has the duty to act always in the best interest of the College. If the new eighteen ninety-one resolution was meant as a binding agreement to be carried on “in perpetuity,” as Dartmouth Parity has claimed, the Board of Trustees would have perhaps amended the college Charter to lend the agreement some air of permanence. However, the Board did not alter the Charter, which still states that in the case of an absent seat on the Board, the remaining “trustees and their successors . . . [shall], as soon as may be after the [vacancy occurs], elect and appoint such trustee or trustees [in replacement],” maintaining the final authority of the Trustees to choose their own successors. Furthermore, throughout the entire eighteen ninety-one resolution there is never any mention of parity, only the assurance that five of the Trustee positions should be filled by alumni election, as they still are. There is also no mention of this resolution existing in exchange for continued “generous financial support and loyalty” on the part of the alumni, as Todd Zywicki ’88—a newly elected Trustee and supporter of Dartmouth Parity—wrote in his opinion letter to The Dartmouth last August.

The‘91 resolution made the governance of the College unusual, in giving so much power to alumni compared to other colleges and universities, but for over a century this structure of the Board was conducive to a harmonious allegiance among those with the best interests of the College in mind. As the College grew, so did the Board, while maintaining the equal number of Administration-appointed and Alumni-elected trustees. By 2003, the Board of Trustees was made up of‘ members—eight appointed members, eight elected members, James Wright, and the governor of New Hampshire. Up until that time, the Alumni Council nominated candidates to fill open positions on the Board, and all alumni had the right to vote for the candidate of their choosing. In 2003, however, a small group of well-funded, in-the-know alumni began nominating petition candidates under what had previously been an obscure clause in the Charter, which allowed for nominees other than the Alumni Council’s official nominees to run, provided they could collect 500 signatures of other Dartmouth alums. The petition candidates were not announced until after the Alumni Council’s official candidates, and their backers had access to an extensive, prized mailing list of about 60,000 addresses (nearly the entire alumni body).

The candidates all unabashedly espoused conservative or anti-Administration political leanings. Through extremely effective campaign efforts, the petition candidates continuously managed to beat out the Alumni Council’s official nominees for positions on the Board, and they all consistently opposed many of the current Administration’s stances. In September of 2007, the trustees voted to supersede the resolution of‘91 with a new resolution that added 8 more seats to the Board, all to be filled by trustees appointed by the Administration. In response to this resolution, which Dartmouth Parity calls “board-packing,” a group of six alumni brought a lawsuit against the College to reverse the new resolution.

This account of the controversy may leave readers with more questions than answers. Why is this administration supposedly against its alumni? What exactly is the administration doing that so many alums seem to disagree with? When met with those questions, a supporter of the lawsuit is likely to be evasive every time, because the members of Dartmouth Parity do not usually want to state outright which policies of the administration led them to pour tens of thousands of dollars into getting the petition candidates elected. It is no secret that Wright’s presidency comes at the end of a line of fairly progressive administrations that aimed to change many outdated aspects of Dartmouth that led to a restricted or limited Dartmouth experience. Wright certainly did oversee an administration that was concerned with reshaping the male-dominated Greek scene and emphasizing both financial and multicultural diversity in admissions. However, President Wright is not extreme in his liberalism, while many of the petition candidates elected in the past four years represent extreme socially conservative viewpoints.

One of the four petition candidates elected during the past years—Stephen Smith—was a law clerk for Clarence Thomas, and another, Peter Robinson, was the head speechwriter for both George H.W. Bush, during his vice presidency, and Ronald Reagan. Robinson wrote a study of the Republican Party entitled “It’s My Party” and a book called How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Such clear political leanings do not exist for any of the other trustees, either appointed or elected by the Alumni Council.

These conservative leanings alone, of course, do not comprise a reason to keep them from participating in the administration of the College if they are fairly elected. However, many of Zywicki’s comments are outright inexcusable and do not reflect favorably on the College (as per the Statement of Governance and Trustee Responsibilities). Zywicki infamously spoke at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Conference: &#
8220;Those who control the University today, they don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in country. University is their cathedral. Their entire being, both those who fund it and those who teach within it, are tied up in the universities. It is basically their religion.” He went on to spew more baseless attacks against the administration, insisting that the current Board does not care at all about its students: “The establishment within these universities is vicious. They are vicious people. They have their own dogma. …There is a new dogma that is environmentalism, feminism, and, uh, that is the dogma. And they will enforce it viciously. We have the Spanish Inquisition, and you can ask Larry Summers whether or not the Spanish Inquisition lives on academic campuses today.” Zywicki criticizes those who “bankroll the institution” as trying to assuage their guilty consciences by “buy[ing] indulgences for being rich. Which is that they are fully embracing, and happy to embrace, all the multiculturalism and all the other stuff because this is their way of getting forgiveness, of showing how virtuous they are despite the fact that they make a lot of money.” Finally, he went so far as to call previous president James Freedman “a truly evil man.” He considers feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism separate parts of a three-pronged “vicious” attack on his alma mater. How could Dartmouth Parity realistically argue that their petition candidates represent the best interests of the College, or even a relatively moderate mindset towards the direction of its future? What else could such ruthless and baseless statements be called but neo-conservative propaganda that consists of blatant opposition to gender equality, environmentalism, and diversity?

This is not a case of silencing alumni voices. Actually, Dartmouth Parity is made up of conservative alums who, when describing their slate, intentionally ignore the extremely important change that they enacted in 2004; namely, taking advantage of a never-used clause to allow petition candidates to defeat the trustees nominated by the Alumni Council through the traditional procedure. Where was the preservation of tradition in that case? Their official statement, called “Where We Stand”, offers no mention of the Alumni Council, or their use of the clause. Furthermore, they claim that the‘91 resolution guaranteed that the Alumni could elect 50% of the Board in exchange for financial support and loyalty, when the resolution only implicitly entailed the former and did not at all entail the latter portion of that claim.

In addition, Dartmouth Parity fails to recognize the intended impermanence of the resolution. In fact, if the Board of Trustees had never superseded one resolution with another, women would still not attend the College, as it was a’72 resolution that finally allowed for co-education to begin at Dartmouth—one that reversed an April’71 resolution to create a sister school and to keep Dartmouth an all-male institution. Nowhere in our Charter, nor in the language of the‘91 resolution, was any unbreakable contract constituted. Perhaps Todd Zywicki would have preferred if that April’71 resolution had been permanent, so as to ward off the “vicious dogma” of feminism?

Dartmouth Parity claims that the Board of Trustees has acted with “a blithe disregard for history” by reshaping their Board, and argues that it is in the best interest of all alums to maintain Dear Old Dartmouth, lest the old traditions fail. Unfortunately, the “preservation of tradition” has recently become a catch-all term for opposition to progress. The fundamental conflict here is really a war of ideals, and, beyond that, the fact that those who love Dartmouth and make it what it is believe that there should be one standard by which we determine its worth. The beauty of Dartmouth—or any productive community for that matter—is that it offers so many different experiences to so many different people, and one student could only hope to share in a small fraction of all the possible “Dartmouth experiences.” Perhaps when we can stop warring over that term and who has the right to define it, the desire to “preserve tradition” (or the tradition that a student of some bygone generation may cherish) will be uncovered for what it really is—a desire to create a monolithic Dartmouth experience, a whitewashed and cyclically problematic haven for good-old-boyism and anti-intellectualism.

ast November, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which guarantees employment protection for gays and lesbians, sparked great controversy in the House of Representatives. Ironically, the controversy did not stem from homophobic opposition but from the majority of the LGBT community itself, because of a last-minute, transparently strategic exclusion of transgendered individuals. The initial bill (H.R. 2015) was sponsored in the House by Barney Frank (the only openly gay member of Congress), and included employment protection for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Under that bill, an employer would be prohibited from “employment discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.” However, Frank and his co-signers soon changed it to pursue what they viewed as a necessary political strategy for progress.

Around that time, H.R. 2015 was replaced by H.R. 3685, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation alone (though religious institutions and the military would still be exempt from this policy). Transgender people were completely ignored in the new draft of the bill, which passed the House in a vote 235 to‘4. At once, most influential LGBT groups responded with outrage. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force immediately issued a statement saying they were “deeply disappointed that the House Leadership decided to ignore the position of a vast majority of LGBT” people. The bill would make it virtually impossible for any transgender inclusion to ever occur, but its backers in the House determined that it was more politically viable to take baby steps in gaining full civil rights for LGBT people.

On April 2nd, Senator Ted Kennedy (the Senate sponsor) formally introduced the bill to the Senate, despite months of opposition from LGBT organizations for ignoring transgender people’s rights for the sake of incremental progress. Kennedy believes that the sacrifice of transgender people’s rights is worth the remarkable win for the rest of the LGBT community, since it is currently legal in’ states to fire anyone on the basis of sexual orientation alone. It is his position that “the best opportunity for progress is…to follow along on the action of the House of Representatives, and then look down the road to a new day after we have a good Democratic Congress and a Democratic president.” The problem with such an approach, though, is that if the bill does pass in its current form, it is unlikely that transgender people will ever see the same protection as their LGB peers, as its unlikely another similar bill will garner support. From the standpoint of the LGBT community and many gay rights activists, incomplete equality is inequality.

Currently, only nine states have laws in place that protect transgender people from being fired on the basis of gender identity. Since they make up such a small percentage of the LGBT community overall, their exclusion will ultimately be overshadowed by the success of ENDA in securing long-awaited rights for the homosexual and bisexual community. The first time a bill like ENDA was introduced was in’96, when it lost in the Senate by a vote of 50 to 49. Since then, politicians and citizens pushing for gay rights have seen no progress on the issue of employment discrimination until now. Notably, the Human Rights Commission (HRC), an LGBT lobbyist organization based in Washington, is the only influential LGBT group to support the bill in its current version. Though they did express “disappointment” at the exclusion of transgenders from the bill, it was only as an afterthought to their praise of such a monumental success for the gay and lesbian community. They echoed Kennedy’s sentiment of incrementalism, issuing the following statement: “Today, we witnessed the making of civil rights history in the U.S. House of Representatives by the passing of ENDA. This vote by Congress is an important step at ensuring that millions of gay and lesbian Americans will never again have to go to work in fear of losing their jobs because of who they are… Our fight for equality will not be won overnight. It will be won one step at a time.” This mantra of “one step at a time” makes sense in the context of the political reality that the inclusion of transgender people would most likely kill the bill in Congress.

By that same token, however, George Bush has promised to veto the bill even if it does pass Congress. Given such circumstances, there is no reason given whatsoever for making such a clear statement that transgender people do not deserve the same rights as lesbian, gay, or bisexual people, or anyone else for that matter. Furthermore, the HRC was evasive as to their actual position on the exclusion. Mara Keisling, the leader of the National Center for Transgender Equality, stayed in contact with the HRC throughout the legislative process and insisted that the HRC had been “aggressively pushing for the passage of the non-inclusive ENDA since September,” and summarized their stance as, “Forget transgender people, we need a win,” despite their official statement claiming disappointment at the exclusion.

Officers of GSX (Gender Sexuality XYZ) at Dartmouth also spoke out strongly against the glaring exclusion of transgenders in ENDA. Last fall, GSX set up a petition in Thayer to fight against the exclusive version of the bill. Jen Schuster ’09 described the “genuinely shocked and angry” reactions of most students to the divisive political strategy. Cody Lavender ’10, another co-chair of GSX, brought up the overwhelming negative message of such exclusion, calling it a “slap in the face” to transgender people and saying, “If it continues forward as an exclusive bill, it is evident that the larger LGB movement doesn’t see Trans-people as part of the larger community. As soon as the white middle-class LGB people are no longer fired based on sexual orientation, then there won’t be a need to include our Trans-brethren.”

Sadly, such a grim prediction for the future of employment protection for transgender people is probably true if the bill becomes law and leaves transgender people behind. Ultimately, the legislation will never succeed under this administration no matter who is included, so ironically the president’s veto will actually make it more likely that an all-inclusive bill could pass in the future. The LGBT community and our society as a whole can look forward to a reinvigorated and bold attempt in 2009 to reintroduce the inclusive version of ENDA and hopefully bring some measure of equality at last to a community that has seen very little progress in social or legislative equality in the past decades.