Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Dartmouth fraternities

This is a disturbing article. A "good school" may be hard to get into and have many high-earning graduates but may not be a good place to live and study.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture...inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328
Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth's Hazing Abuses
By Janet Reitman
Rolling Stone
March 28, 2012 2:05 PM ET

I read that article. It was pretty disgusting.

As a first year college student in the 80s, I went to frat parties at Dartmouth and Amherst occasionally. I witnessed a lot of the stuff described in that article. The frats were in beautiful old buildings with high ceilings, large windows, and gorgeous curving hardwood staircases. Incredible architecture.

And your shoes stuck to the floors because they were permeated with old beer. So were the walls (also sticky). Everything stank of stale beer. On a weekend night, beer-ponging frat boys made a point of throwing up everywhere. The beautiful buildings had been trashed. I gave up on those parties during my first semester!

But then, once, a friend with high school pals at MIT took me to Boston with her. We went to a fraternity there and thought we'd accidentally meandered into someone's house. It was clean. There were healthy potted plants. Someone took two cans of our beer and left us a note and $2 to pay for them. Talk about a contrast.

I'm not saying that MIT is perfect and I get that college kids want to blow off steam. I used to blow off steam. I returned to MIT frequently, and we had our share of drunken fun. Yet destroying buildings and acting like thugs was never part of the program. Actually, a lot of people I met were oddly proud of spending the night in the library from time to time.

MIT may be better overall, but a school that annually celebrates dropping a piano out of a tall building also has room for improvement http://www.boston.com/yourtown/camb...piano_drop_still_strikes_a_chord_at_mit/ .

I don't think there's even a comparison. The pianos used in the Piano Drop are unplayable and generally donated. There is far more attention to safety. In fact, it is pretty much socially unacceptable to carry out any hack that involves any significant risk to bystanders.

MIT has had its hazing incidents, too. But the Piano Drop is really a great example of how to be a quirky college student doing "crazy" things without becoming depraved.

I'm still not sure what the purpose of college is even supposed to be.

The only thing I got out of it was a piece of paper that let me apply to law school.

Oh, and I get to have nightmares about it on a regular basis.

I would have been much better off emotionally, socially, and intellectually if I had skipped the entire thing.

We need to figure out a better idea because I think that college doesn't work.

Why exactly do we throw a bunch of 18 year olds into a socially chaotic situation?

From what I've read and heard, the purpose of college these days, for most people, is to get a job. Every other article about going to college touts the idea that college graduates earn more than people without BAs. The article about Dartmouth described membership in certain fraternities as a ticket to lucrative Wall Street-type jobs. Ivy league schools are seen by many people as tickets to high-paying jobs. Etc.

I've met a lot of young people who see "gen ed" courses as things to be gotten out of the way. There's no love of learning and often limited curiosity about courses outside one's chosen field. And this is hardly surprising given that we encourage C students and other students with little academic aptitude to head to college.

So all this makes college more of a form of job training and less of a mechanism for creating educated people who are well-rounded and thoughtful.

And then people do studies that measure what graduating students have learned and find out that the answer is "not much:" they can't reason or write any better than they could on day one. And for some reason, everyone is surprised and mystified.

I am a Dartmouth graduate and my brother recently graduated from Dartmouth as a fraternity member. I find the article to be greatly exaggerated, not close to my experience or my brother's experience at all. Dartmouth is a wonderful school for gifted kids, I absolutely thrived there creatively and intellectually, and count many professors there as friends today. I was accepted to both Harvard and Dartmouth and chose Dartmouth because the college truly focuses on the undergraduate experience. The town is safe and a beautiful environment to learn. Though I am sure many disgusting things happen at fraternities at Dartmouth and at other top schools, our children certainly do not have to participate. It's our job to raise them to take responsibility for their behavior.

Good to hear to it might be exaggerated. Unfortunately, from now on when I meet a male Dartmouth grad, I will probably always wonder if he has eaten a vomlet.

I went to college a while ago, but not THAT long ago (I'm not yet 40) at a small, quirky liberal arts school with no frats or sororities that is in the top 25 colleges nationwide. College was nothing like this for me at all. Admittedly I surrounded myself with bright and interesting people, but they weren't hard to find. Most of the alums I know are doing fascinating things. However, not many of them are making money, and certainly some of our grads are fulfilling the "loser liberal arts grad" stereotype--that is, they have a degree in philosophy and work at Starbucks. They are probably pretty interesting to talk to, though, and they may well be pursuing art or something else worthwhile on the side. Oh, laugh if you like. I don't care. The world is a bit of a hard and dreary place, and at 24, I'm not convinced that depressed newbie corporate drone is doing that much better than Starbucks dude, though admittedly, he/she is probably not living at home and is asaving something for retirement. BTW, some numbers are in and most parents of the kids who are boomeranging back to live at home don't appear to mind. It's on the Pew Research site, if anyone's interested...

Most of the people I ended up meeting in college had various levels of what, in hindsight, were severe psychological issues.
And I mean really severe issues.

They were very bright and very "interesting", but not in a good way.

Two of the people I know ended up in the psych ward a number of times. One guy took crowbars and smashed car windows for fun. His friend would throw knives at you. One guy would smash live cats against walls for fun.

Another guy I knew in the dorm already drank himself to death.

My first college roommate had just committed a felony, was an alcoholic, and would piss in the hallway. As one of the other people in the dorm once noted "hey, this floor is sticky!"

And this was the honors dorm, with the intelligent people. There was true weirdness there. And then we had the aspies, too.

Eventually, I started hanging out with the evangelicals because, while they wanted to convert me and didn't really like me, they were relatively psychologically stable.

I really didn't have the social tools to deal with crazy, considering that I didn't realize that crazy even existed.

BTDT... nothing like having friends with florid manic-depressive episodes who can't or won't seek help since it may prevent them from keeping scholarships... My experience is that honors dorms are a huge warning flag. If the overall campus atmosphere is so anti-intellectual that they have to segregate the smart kids to provide a peer group then it isn't really a great place for gifted kids no matter how much money they are throwing at the problem. At my school the drop out/underachievement rate was an order of magnitude higher among the most elite scholarship recipients.

It did provide job experience, since I now deal with manic-depressives and various other issues professionally.

"When did you last OD and end up in the psych ward?" is one of the questions I now lead with when I talk to the one person who I still maintain contact with from my college days.

I just wish that I had a copy of the DSM-IV on hand when I was in college.

Now that I understand the broad range of psychiatric disorders, I would be much better equipped to have a meaningful college experience.

I had the exact same thought.

I came upon this article about hazing at Dartmouth while surfing the web during lunch.

Brief excerpt:


So, she's lucky to be alive.

I hope she does not really believe that there is a "magic number" of 0.4 BAC that is deadly while a slightly lower level is non-lethal. It's more complicated than that.

True; I left out the next part of her statement for that very reason.

But her overall points are valid. I think she did a good job of putting people's behavior in the context of group sociology.

I wonder if it's not more frat/sorority behavior than Dartmouth behavior.

The worst offenses I heard about were always at the frats at my college.

The nastiest women I've ever met were from sororities.I think that the Greek culture seems to lure the "belonger sheep"/"controller wolves" in.

Independent thinkers need not apply, for the most part.

Loved the story about MIT and the pianos-it must make such a satisfying sound when it hits!