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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDartmouth Vows to Curb Student Misbehavior.
I saw this on GMA this morning and it reminded me of an article I read in Rolling Stone about a student that was considered a whistle-blower on the fraternities there. He wasn't squeaky clean himself and also a Republican. Apparently enrollment is down...link to the RS article below...it angered me. I didn't know Paulson and Geithner went there until I read RS.
Dartmouth College president Philip J. Hanlon is declaring that the university must fundamentally change its student culture to combat a litany of harmful behaviors including binge drinking, sexual assault, hazing, and anonymous online vitriol that have kept the school in the headlines and limited its advancement.
Dartmouths promise is being hijacked by extreme and harmful behaviors, often masked by its perpetrators as fun, Hanlon said in an interview Wednesday. But in fact this is a barrier to Dartmouth achieving its potential and promise, and we cannot allow this to continue.
Hanlons message which he planned to deliver to a group of student leaders, faculty, and alumni Wednesday night is an extraordinarily rare acknowledgment by a university president of a dysfunctional campus culture.
Link:http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/16/dartmouth-president-says-ivy-league-school-being-hijacked-drinking-assault-and-other-social-ills/jRZkfsqVSGqbelGK28yIlM/story.html
RS link: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328
exboyfil
(17,863 posts)shut down $500,000 of on campus events because of their drunken riot (Iowa State's VEISHEA). The only thing that will curb this, in my opinion, is swift and sure action by the administration. They have arrested 12 so far (10 students). I would hope that expulsions will quickly follow.
I can't believe enrollment is down at Dartmouth. They took less than 5% of their applicants.
RiffRandell
(5,909 posts)It's been brewing for awhile because the RS article is old...at least a couple years.
Highly recommend reading it...it was disturbing, but enlightening.
Half a mill of events shutdown? Wow!
KurtNYC
(14,549 posts)perhaps because its fundamental business model is now hollow.
What are colleges actually selling these days? Their highest paid employees are their football coaches, with salaries going to over $5 million per year, next up is the Chancellors, averaging $421,000 per year. The set-up of a college class is virtually unchanged from almost 200 year ago -- one lecturer, 40 to 900 students listening and taking notes, mid terms, finals. About the only thing that has changed in that scenario is the addition of electric lighting, maybe a PA and the blackboard has become a white board or projection screen.
Early colleges offered only degrees in law and medicine, they now offer pretty much everything. You can create your own Major and your own course of studies. The college gets paid the same amount whether you get a good job after leaving or not. They have almost no stake at all in your future and what they are selling is the past: goofy rituals that involve square hats and tassels, a curled up piece of paper like the charlatan in the Wizard of Oz gave out, and the secret societies and handshakes of the Greek (frat and sorority) system.
The simplistic view of college in the 1950s said that men went to get their reserved spot in the middle class and women went to get a husband. Colleges were all segregated by gender and race, now they are more open but far from perfect. If anything the above chart shows what the customers think college is selling to them: a bulwark against race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But the colleges themselves embody a hyper consciousness of race and gender as they refer to rape as "non-consensual sex" and leave their hired athletes without pay and without a real opportunity to get the education that an athletic scholarship supposedly includes.
Courts have ruled that NCAA athletes are employees of the university since their presence at the schools is dependent on them spending around 70 hours per week working for the professional sports programs of the colleges. NCAA has fired back with a sad irony -- 'players aren't employees because they don't get paid.' And they don't. There is a term for that...working 70 hours a week without pay...it was supposed to end in 1865.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2014/03/26/nlrb-rules-college-athletes-are-employees-can-form-unions/NcgoJZ7XxzjEaBhUdQpEBJ/story.html
When the news of top athletes going hungry while the colleges make millions off of them came out last week, the NCAA responded by proposing unlimited meals:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2014/04/15/the-ncaa-approves-unlimited-meals-for-division-i-athletes-after-shabazz-napier-complains-of-going-hungry-the-lesson-for-other-college-athletes/
RiffRandell
(5,909 posts)I didn't realize how conservative it was until reading it.
Alarmed by the skyrocketing rate of binge drinking, which studies show is nearly twice as high among fraternity residents, a growing number of colleges have opted to kick frats off campus or do away with them altogether. Williams College was the first to shutter its fraternities, in the 1960s, and many others have since followed suit, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Colby and Middlebury. But Dartmouth, whose unofficial motto is "Lest the Old Traditions Fail," has resisted that transformation, just as it has stood fast against many other movements for social and political progress. Dartmouth was one of the last of the Ivies to admit women, in 1972, and only in the face of fierce resistance from alumni.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328#ixzz2zG1b9Ckd
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KurtNYC
(14,549 posts)I think the Sandusky/Paterno and Big Red cover ups showed us all how broken many colleges are. The culture on these campuses circled the wagons around rapists, even a serial child rapist who shared his victims with donors (!) on private jets (as witnessed by the pilot) at the college's expense. Unreal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/jerry-sandusky-booster-sex-abuse-private-plane_n_1772564.html