Diversity and Division at Dartmouth

Dartmouth College continues to weather its winter of discontent as charges of racism, bigotry, and inadequate leadership rock the small Ivy League campus located in the sleepy village of Hanover, New Hampshire.

Irony has reigned supreme for the Big Green in recent weeks. On Tuesday, for example, 18 liberal activist students were arrested for protesting the removal of their symbolic anti-divestment shanty--and only hours later, 12 conservative students who had tried to remove the cabins two weeks earlier were suspended from the college.

In an ironic foreshadowing, the shanty-busting dozen had vandalized the structures last month only hours before The Dartmouth, the daily campus newspaper, printed an editorial calling for the removal of the shanties. On the following day, The Dartmouth called for the expulsion of the 12 students who took sledgehammers to the shanties.

While the whole campus grapples with questions of racial and social intolerance, members of the strife-torn faculty and college administration have been leaving Dartmouth in an unprecedented exodus. And just when it seemed as though everybody was jumping ship, fired head football Coach Joe Yukica sued to get his job back--and won.

The recent events in Hanover have created an impassioned, if not embattled, atmosphere. Factionalism has divided a campus that prides itself on traditional community spirit. What long-term impact, if any, this divisiveness will have on the Dartmouth student body remains to be scene.