Posted by
Doctor Demex on Saturday, October 07, 2006 12:06:05 PM
As the alumni of Dartmouth College ponder how to vote on their proposed
new alumni association constitution, I am reminded that, as an alumnus
myself, I enjoyed for several years the long-established reputation the
College had for accepting and graduating what were known as "smart
people." I regret to say, however, that I became more and more
embarrassed to be associated with the College every year it drifted
further away from using proven educational techniques and became a
laboratory for testing the latest fashionable egghead's unproven
theories of political pedagogy. I was still a student there when
the College's leadership began sliding down the so-called slippery
slope of appeasing politically active, intellectually lazy students'
demands to tell the teachers how and what to teach them, thus
abrogating all the College's responsibilities to Western
civilization. These narcissistic baby-boomers are narcissistic
professors now.
Today, when I tell people I graduated from Dartmouth, they say either,
"Ah, yes! The school that gives condoms to freshmen at
orientation and provides graphic how-to manuals for having
consequence-free sex with their fellow students!" or, "Isn't that the
school that expels students who want to get a real education instead of
anti-capitalist indoctrination?" To be fair, one could say the
same thing about any number of colleges and universities these days,
sad to say. Harvard is usually cited as the worst example of an
enterprise that takes every penny parents can borrow to unravel two
decades of childrearing and turn their children into dissolute
adults. Dartmouth's claim to fame is that it was in the vanguard
of the movement to turn American higher education into the costliest of
jokes, and I bitterly regret being unable to recommend this most
beautiful of campuses to any serious student today.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that there are distinguished
Dartmouth alumni younger than I making notable contributions to the
United States, but they were negotiating an obstacle course while they
were undergrads. The best alumni of Dartmouth went in with strong
"family values" and endured a trial by fire. Most of Dartmouth's
alumni did not escape unscathed.