And How Are We Getting There?

Ah, Green Key. What could be better than a weekend full of “traditions and debauchery,” right? But as we emerge from the drunken haze of this particular Dartmouth tradition, which at this point is just an excuse to drink heavily, we have to ask ourselves, why exactly are we here at Dartmouth? The parties, the booze, the “cute boys/girls” (in all senses of that combination) all make sense in their way…but, barring a few exceptions, one should hardly expect these reasons alone to have driven us towards Dartmouth. So, what was it? Was it the liberal arts education? Was it because it was expected of us? Was it because we needed it for the cushy jobs we wanted in the future? Each person you ask is likely to give a different answer that varies depending on the time of day.

The reality is that each of us arrives at Dartmouth with our own expectations and aspirations. It does us little good to try to speculate why our younger, more naïve selves decided to choose the way we did. So let us turn instead to the normative. What should Dartmouth be giving us, for all the time and money we pour into this place? What should be the purpose of Dartmouth?

“Transform students into better people.”

“To teach you to deal with an insane amount of work.”

“I think it’s about time management skills.”

These are among the many diverse answers I received when posing this question to fellow students. If it is the latter two, though, what makes Dartmouth more than simply a fancy time-management class that costs almost $200,000 and lasts four years? Why bother with the entire pretense of majors, distributives, and liberal arts as a whole? And as for the first response, how does Dartmouth seek to accomplish that mission?

The official stance is similar to a synthesis of the student answers. Putting aside the long defunct and only recently “rediscovered” mission in being founded “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing and all parts of Learning” (despite graduating only nineteen Native-American students in its first two centuries), the College itself states that its purpose is: “to educate the most promising students and prepare them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.” If a “lifetime of learning” means dealing with an insane amount of work and managing your time, and “leadership” means being the oft-used societal simile “a better person,” then we have a definition that students and the administration seem to agree on in my admittedly very unscientific survey.

The main question then reveals itself. How do we become better people? And is Dartmouth set up to accomplish this stated mission? The administration claims that the faculty are transformative in this respect, but if faculty teaching alone did it, our nation’s college grads should be sparkling paradigms of better and more efficient people. If we did it well, we wouldn’t have the financial crisis either, considering how many of our fellow Dartmouth grads were on both sides (government and Wall Street) of the financial crisis. Does college actually make us into better people, or is it just a four-year long party?

The reality is that right now, like many institutions of higher learning across this country, we are a place where you live for four years, spend lots of money, and drink lots of beer. It seems much of the utility of our college education comes not from the college education itself, but the fact that you were originally accepted into the college. For institutions that claim to take the most promising of society and turn them into the best of society, this is a damning statement. Yet, many “real world” Dartmouth grads express this very sentiment. To quote an ‘89 investment banker, “ [I] loved Dartmouth. Classes didn’t have anything to do with what I do now though—‘fact, I’ve forgotten pretty much everything that I’ve learned there.”

So, is Dartmouth really producing civic leaders? Where is our dear small college in the wilderness sending its graduates? Based on the continual popularity of corporate recruiting, the answer seems to have been, largely, Wall Street. And in the years before that? Silicon Valley. It seems that we overwhelmingly tend to follow the money. According to economics, this is perfectly laudable—helping us allocate our most valuable individuals to where they do the most good (equivalent to where they make the most money). But after the economic collapse of late, these “altruistic” tendencies have been more frequently called into question, and it’s clear that the highest paying jobs certainly do not correlate to those that most improve society. Dartmouth’s ultimate contribution to society is its graduates $mdash;- given its undergraduate focus, the “public good” produced by the college is that graduates will go into the world and create good in the world.

We are business leaders. We are artists. We are doctors. We are activists and the next generation of civic leaders. And yet most of us spend our time here at Dartmouth simply drinking our nights away, hooking up, and pretending to be less mature than our soon-to-be “adult” selves actually are. It’s not a matter of moralistic preaching or prudishness. Students here can do whatever the hell they want. Clearly, I expressed this right in all capacities this past weekend. But as a society and a college, Dartmouth, while ever famed for its debauchery, has regressed. In our parents’ generation, career aspirations were driven by personal fulfillment and presidential speeches—students wanted to be civic leaders, and after Kennedy, they wanted to be scientists and engineers to help us reach space. However they spent their college years, they didn’t end up desiring a job that they “hate” mainly because it gives them “money, power, and prestige,” as I’ve heard finance described over and over again by wannabe I-bankers. However hard they partied, they didn’t have a countable percentage of their generation living with their parents, refusing to believe that the “party is over,” and getting jobs, as TIME magazine found was the case with recent graduates.

I don’t have all of the answers. In fact, this entire time, I have asked only questions. But asking questions is something that our generation has done too little of. The very institutions that were supposed to stand as guardians, instilling higher purpose within a higher education, have fallen victim to our headlong rush towards a “profit society.” At fault are both the college administrations that maximized their own profits through raising tuition—making it more difficult for students to take low paying jobs—and the students who became more interested in the parties and the fancy cars than societal good. And though it’s not all of us—there are plenty of notable exceptions—this is still our generation and in the end, it is still our own society. Now, seeing the consequences of our moral shedding, it’s up to us, and it’s up to Dartmouth, to finally step up and fulfill its true purpose—the one that we, the sons, daughters, and administration of Dartmouth seem to have forgotten.