Dartblog

Herewith, an email distributed several days ago to the studentry of Dartmouth College:

TOMORROW
7 PM
COLLIS 212…

Come to the FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING of the DCP (Dartmouth Coalition for Peace)!

Learn about who we are, what we want to do, and help pick up where the Dartmouth Progressives left off…

Fill the need for an activist group on campus!

The sender, an Allison Levy, summoned two exclamation points to state her case. She is plainly excited about her fledgling organization. Will the little bird grow wings? One shouldn’t think so: competing with the “Dartmouth Coalition for Peace” in the market segment called “activist groups” are: AfriCaSO, Afro-American Society, Animal Welfare Group (called DAWG), ASEANO, Black Praxis, College Democrats, Dartmouth Progressives, Darfur Action Group, Dartmouth Asian Organization, Dartmouth Black Business Association, Dartmouth Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Dartmouth Civil Liberties Union, Dartmouth Latino Business Society, Dartmouth Rainbow Alliance, Gay Straight Alliance, Green Key Society, Green Magazine, Hokupa’a, International Humanitarian Foundation, La Alianza Latina, M.E.Ch.A. (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlan), Minority Association of Pre-Health Professionals, National Society of Black Engineers, Native Americans at Dartmouth, Native Women’s Dancing Society, Por Latinoamerica, Queer, Society of Women Engineers, South Asian Business Association, Student Campaign for Child Survival, Students for Africa, Untamed (the Womanist Publication), Vegan Society, Women In Business, Women of Color Collective, and of course the ruthless Medieval Enthusiasts at Dartmouth.

All of these, it has been ordained, have a right to a certain cut of the checks parents and students make out to “Dartmouth College” every few months. Excepting the Medieval Enthusiasts, whose interest is in the vainglorious and conspicuous protection of Dartmouth damsels from threats unnamed, each of these is “activist.” Moreover, each, asked, would resolutely endorse the cause of “justice” or “peace” which the brand-new Dartmouth Coalition for Peace takes as its own aim.

Of course every organization has an altogether different view of what justice is, which is why justice is so damned convenient. No one is against it; yet no one is for any conception of it save his own sculpted gloss on the word. Were the battlefield of human communication less polluted by absurd modern lexicologies, one might object to 4,000 young people—and their sires—being forced to finance causes they find destructive. (This very principle, in weakened form, was used to deep-six the Dartmouth Indian.)

I did not attend the inaugural meeting of the Dartmouth Coalition for Peace. I cannot imagine what they intend on doing. Probably they consumed pizza and chortled exultantly at the unworthies who dared not come. Probably in the last five minutes they elected to disband the group until such time as another subsidized meal of transcendent mediocrity was required by the seven seedling members.

It could be, of course, that the meeting never transpired at all. Recently I have become aware of widespread dissatisfaction in the quality of “social spaces” round campus. Was the nascent Dartmouth Coalition for Peace unable to requisition a peaceful social space? Was there a tinge of injustice lingering in the air from the medievalists who had it an hour ere? Perchance all of the available spaces were not yet feng shui’d, and so had mountains to the south rather than to the north; and a river absurdly running to the right. Any Coalition for Peace, aiming to undo the very Fall of the race of man, needs a comfortable environment in which to work. Anyone taking up activism, the acromatic secret of grand institutions like Dartmouth, surely needs plush chairs and cherrywood floorboards upon which to conduct business.

Could it be that Dartmouth’s social space problem is to blame for forestalling the achievement of peace?

Zak ADDS: I’ll be damned if I sit here and allow Joe to cast aspersions on the Medieval Enthusiasts at Dartmouth. Let’s get down to the facts: there has not been one catapult attack on the Dartmouth campus nor a single Visigoth invasion since the inception of this club. When the integrity of interesting and essential clubs like this are attacked, my question is: what’s next? Today it is Medieval Enthusiasts at Dartmouth, tomorrow it will be the Yo-yo Club and the Pittsburgh Club and, though it may seem fantastical, a day may come when the integrity of even the Dartmouth Union of Bogglers is assailed.