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Monday, October 17, 2005

Nothing Political About This Revolution

The left-leaning student majority at Dartmouth has found both little to get excited about and little to get offended about with respect to the so-called Lone Pine Revolution, which despite claims to the contrary has involved more than the expression of alumni discontent through the continuous election of petitioners to the Board of Trustees. (Consider, for one, the recanting of what was a de facto speech code.) The dearth of uppityness is a bit disconcerting, but while most of it can be attributed to apathy on issues of high governance, the rest is perhaps due to a recognition that, as I wrote just after the last trustee election, there is nothing distinctly Republican about the various reform movements afoot.

T.J. Rodgers is a libertarian, sure. And Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki are decidedly on the right. But the issues that pervade this reform movement—freedom of speech, class sizes, institutional orientation, financial transparency, administrative priorities, and ideological diversity—are not, or at least should not be ones embraced solely by Republicans. That so far they have been the domain of conservatives is only a function of a very established establishment seeing a threat in the enaction of those reforms.

Would an official institutional stance toward ideological diversity bring more Republican students and professors to campus? Assuredly. Would a focus on class sizes mean diverting resources from unpopular majors like Native American Studies to popular ones like government? Probably. Would fiscal transparency mean that the next $100,000 freed up in the budget is more likely to go to a new professor than to a Dean of Happiness? Hopefully. These are ends destructive of a hard-line liberal establishment, but that should be seen as a clarion call for a rather tired ideology to revitalize itself. It shouldn’t be cause to tar any alum, send any e-mail, change any bylaw, ignore any blogger all for the sake of keeping an old guard’s iron lung going. Why, what a reactionary response that would be!

But there is nothing political about the reforms themselves. What is political about the debate between Dartmouth the Liberal Arts College and Dartmouth the University? What is political about allowing students and alumni to deposit their two cents before the school’s budget is iron-plated into law? What is political about smaller class sizes? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is ‘nothing’. They are simple and not-new proposals which arguably have Dartmouth’s best interests in mind. It is a terrible mistake to see them as Republican versus Democrat. The campus’ right-wing outlets like the Dartmouth Review and, well, me, have been cheering on the revolution partly out of a natural positive reaction to the prospect of having political company at the highest echelon. But the meatier reason is that their ideas as outlined above are good ones. And that Dartmouth, through this obscure petition clause, could be at the forefront of rejuvenating the academy, as it very well ought to be.

Posted on October 17, 2005 11:43 PM. Permalink