Last Tuesday, a group of Dartmouth College students staged an overnight sit-in in the office of college president Phil Hanlon. The activists demanded a point-by-point response to their Freedom Budget, which entailed over 70 action points ranging from diversity concerns to problems with sexual assault within the greek community.
The Wall Street Journal issued a harsh rebuke to the Dartmouth protesters. “Mr. Hanlon might have told the kids occupying his office that most of mankind would love to be as oppressed as they are,” the WSJ advised in a Friday op-ed.
We challenge the WSJ's assertion that privileged people should not seek to improve their own communities. It is absolutely true that students at top-tier universities—like Dartmouth, Duke and many others—are immensely privileged. We have impressive resources denied to many others who have neither the means nor opportunity to receive an elite education. Nevertheless, that does not imply that elite universities are not the sites of injustice—however your political orientation inclines you to interpret that word. It was only 50 years ago that Duke admitted its first black students, and today 31 percent of Duke undergraduate women report unwanted sexual contact from another Duke students.
Given that their privileged situation does not foreclose their right to advocate for change, we turn to the concrete demands of the Dartmouth protesters. Their Freedom Budget includes calls to hire more minority faculty, implement more gender-neutral housing, implement higher penalties for sexual assault perpetrators and ban the phrase “illegal immigrant,” among other policy decisions. We find that their demands fall into four broad categories: regulation of offensive speech, mandated numerical diversity, equitable access to resources and curriculum changes.
Although we support the protesters’ general goal of making Dartmouth a more inclusive place, we disagree with a few of their specific recommendations. We find that banning the phrase “illegal immigrant”—however insensitive—and expunging objectionable words from the library catalog are antithetical to the free and open intellectual discourse of the university. But we agree with other demands, such as making their campus more handicap-accessible. Throwing all these 70 demands together promotes quantity over quality. Although the interests of women, racial minorities, the LGBT community, handicapped, poor and undocumented students may often overlap, merging them messily under one umbrella proposal is intellectually premature.
That being said, we understand the political strategy behind this decision. Building coalitions among different interest groups is a common activist tactic. Working alone, an interest group may be too small to gain traction. If the protestors were truthful in claiming they had exhausted all other avenues, then a communal sit-in to broadcast their combined—but somewhat inconsistent—demands might have been their only robust option.
Will these methods of civil disobedience work to open dialogue or close it? Is this the only recourse for students seeking to correct some perceived injustice? How can we maintain an intellectually ventilated university environment while broadcasting some severe opinions? The Dartmouth protesters have every prerogative to imagine a better university. Whether their political tactics actually produce a better university is to be determined.
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