Dartblog

A prominent Dartmouth professor once sophomorically quipped that Dartmouth’s Departmental Editing Program, which provides subject-specific adult editors to Dartmouth students whose writing requires refining, was a useless dalliance because the editors are public high school teachers. Ignoring for a moment the blue-hued elitism of that comment, what struck me is that the professor failed to note that the alternative—Dartmouth’s own Research, Writing and Information Technology center—is entirely student-run and, at that, student-run by students who have no unique insight into the writing requirements of a given client’s specific field of inquiry.

Joe Asch, the Hanover resident and alum who started and funded the DEP, is ending the program, as The Dartmouth reported on Monday.

Because Joe has taken positions in the aforementioned newspaper in favor of what has popularly been called the Lone Pine Revolution, some petty little minds have taken to calling the program a ‘failure,’ after having months earlier called Joe a neoconservative troglodyte, or some similarly base catcall, for having supported two Dartmouth alumni in their bid for trustee positions who both happened to be political conservatives, and for opposing sanctioned racism in his own campaign. Through this abjectly doltish phenalphaline test, one unfortunately embraced by too many up in Hanover, anyone who associates with conservatives in even an apolitical environment such as collegiate administration, is colored a failure as are all his endeavors. Evidently, per an e-mail the contents of which it would be uncouth to reprint here, an entire new blog (using, per the left-wing meme at Dartmouth, pseudonyms) has been established for the express purpose of coloring anyone involved in disagreeing with the current administration on Dartmouth’s future as right-wing bigots.

It’s pathetic, and hardly worth a care, but for this: the Departmental Editing Program was actually a good thing that, donor or no donor, Dartmouth needs to continue.

The fact is that there is a serious lack of good writing ability at Dartmouth. It isn’t a problem specific to our school, but just because the English language writ large ‘cross our generation is being decimated doesn’t mean that has to be the case at Webster’s school. I consider myself no exemplar of Dartmouth’s proud history of writing talent, but it certainly existed, as any jaunt to Rauner Library and a peek at old issues of the Daily Dartmouth will make plain in spades. And it isn’t only me: Dartblog is fortunate enough to have a readership that extends into the College’s faculty and her other functionary departments. They see it. Even folks in the College’s communications office, who didn’t necessarily go to Dartmouth but recognize good prose when they see it—because that’s their job—have railed to me about the state of the written word here. Professors, too.

There has in certain quarters been expressed the notion that anything a student needs to learn about the written word or the spoken word he can learn within the confines of his chosen subject matter. Want to be a politician? The government department will teach you oratory! A reporter for the Economist? You’ll surpass Strunk in style with just a few short economics classes!

There is great benefit to learning the basic life tools of writing and speaking, and they can be learned well only from those whose job it is to teach them. Dartmouth’s elimination of the speech department was only one step down the wrong road. The Departmental Editing Program matched paid professionals to work over the course of years with students to hone their expository acumen. And it did so with an eye toward matching art experts with art students, religion experts with religion students, et cetera. The student-run editing department simply cannot compete.

To be fair, there is a place for an RWIT. Every school, after all, has one. That’s because they are cheap and they add a bullet point to a college’s advertising material. In reality, RWIT offers only one more set of eyeballs once a student’s paper has already been written. Maybe they’re good eyeballs, maybe not. Perhaps they are eyeballs in front of a brain that happens to be able to inform the editing session with exterior knowledge about the paper’s subject, maybe not. It’s hit-or-miss, and no one disputes that.

DEP offered an entirely new learning avenue for Dartmouth students. It was, as Joe is quoted as saying, an innovation. Professors and department heads are quoted as believing it an important program which addressed a real issue.

A few nigglers are stuck on their small, small island of selves, unable to see that perhaps, of all the criticisms the evil conservatives have made of Dartmouth, one just might be valid and that, perhaps, a half-million dollar program built by an evil conservative alum to find redress, just might have been a good thing. And, above all, they are convinced that The Republicans Are Coming and all changes must be averted. Dartmouth herself, meanwhile, is faced with yet another fork in the road. Yes, demanding a high standard of writing quality means committing to some form of objectivism, and it might mean a median grade lower than B+ in some classes. Yes, it might mean including more dead white men in our studies. Yes, it might mean that a given student gets to choose one or two fewer classes of his own in his four years.

All a small price to pay for the day when parents, advising their children on college choice, look at Dartmouth’s brochure and say, “That’s the school of Daniel Webster,” and mean it.

Alright? I’m done now. Congratulations, you dour few. You forced me to waste thirty minutes of work time. I’m going to get my coffee.