The Dartmouth Winter Carnival Special Issue 2016

Finding a Voice: Activism at Dartmouth 2.12.2016

A HISTORY OF ACTIVISM|3

BLACK LIVES MATTER |4

ACTIVISM SURVEY|16-17

SOCIAL MEDIA AND ACTIVISM |8 COURTESY OF RAUNER

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Editor’s Note

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Table of Contents ACTIVISM AT THE COLLEGE, A HISTORY IN MANY PARTS

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STUDENTS REFLECT ON #BLACKLIVESMATTER

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STUDENTS REFLECT ON ADMINISTRATION’S REACTION TO ACTIVISM

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FACULTY SHOW SUPPORT FOR CAMPUS ACTIVISM 6

TIFFANY ZHAI/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

For this year’s Winter Carnival issue, we chose to focus on activism at Dartmouth.

As students, we may feel like we are on campus during a particularly turbulent time. The past few years have been filled with high-profile forms of activism on several salient issues. We watch demonstrations happen on campus and read about them nationally. Social media posts about different movements crowd our newsfeeds. Yet, our campus, just like our country, has a rich history of activism. When examined more closely, it can often provide context and perspective for the issues we care about today.

Activism comes in big dramatic moments, but it comes in smaller, quieter forms as well. For some people, it is easy to determine where they stand on different issues, but for others, it is harder to find their voice. In this issue you will find an exploration of different types of activism, focused on a variety of issues, carried out by all sorts of people. We urge our readers to reflect on the many nuanced parts that come together to form the greater concept of “activism” at Dartmouth, and what role in this campus climate they want to have themselves.

With its page limitations, this paper can only explore a small portion of this enormous and complex issue. However, we still think that the paper comes at a critical time when activism’s presence permeates both our campus and the entire country. We hope you enjoy it.

Thank you,

STUDENT GROUPS FOCUS ON INTERNATIONAL ISSUES

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SHARMA: ARTISTRY IN ACTIVISM

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ALBRECHT: ACTIVISM FOR ALL

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FACULTY DISCUSS RESULTS OF STUDENT SURVEY ON ACTIVISM

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ALUMNI DISCUSS ACTIVISM AFTER DARTMOUTH 29 HOW EFFECTIVE IS SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISM? 30 TTLG: DARTMOUTH IS NOT FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME 31 TTLG: ACTIVISM AS A RADICAL FORM OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE 32

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Activism at the College, a history in many parts

By CARTER BRACE

The Dartmouth Staff

The afternoon of May 6, 1969 a group of about 40 students stormed the Parkhurst Administration building and forced everyone to leave. The students demanded the immediate abolition of Dartmouth Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, an end to military recruiting on campus and the replacement of ROTC scholarships with ones offered by the College. The students barricaded themselves inside the building for the rest of the night.

“The administration had had some indication that something like this might happen,” Anne ReedWeston ’16, who studied Vietnam War protests at Dartmouth for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, said.

The goal of the administration was to avoid the violence that had happened on other campuses. The administration obtained an injunction against the protesters. Then after negotiations with the police, the protesters agreed to vacate the building and face arrest. Almost all the protesters would end up with jail sentences and the College proceeded with its original plan to gradually phase-out ROTC, with the program temporarily ending

in 1973.

But the Parkhurst occupation wasn’t just about a national issue.

The occupation, like many instances of activism at Dartmouth before and after that afternoon in 1969, was motivated by tensions on campus.

“These episodes are never only about the external events,” history professor Edward Miller said.

In this case, former College President John Sloan Dickey was not sympathetic to the anti-war movement and to the campus activism of the late 1960s, Miller said.

Students today may think that Dartmouth’s campus climate has been unusually turbulent the past few years. However, Dartmouth has a rich history of activism, and of students changing, or preserving, the College’s character.

“Dartmouth has a reputation for being an unusually conservative campus,” Miller said. “However, since the 1960s, Dartmouth has a tradition of radical student activism which has been a very significant part of campus intellectual life and the campus culture.”

Vietnam War activism was common on Dartmouth’s campus in the late 60s and early 70s. At the forefront of student protests was the aforementioned opposition to the

COURTESY OF RAUNER LIBRARY

Students sit in the open windows of a building during a Vietnam War protest.

ROTC and its continued presence on Dartmouth’s campus.

“ROTC was a big deal at Dartmouth in the 1960s. Roughly a third of Dartmouth students in the early 1960s were in ROTC at some point,” Miller said.

ROTC was also a logical focus of Vietnam War activism at Dartmouth and nationwide.

“ROTC was an obvious target

because ROTC was recruiting Dartmouth students to serve in the U.S. military, some of whom would go on to fight in the Vietnam War.” Miller says.

Dartmouth students and faculty voted in the spring of 1969 to phase out ROTC by only allowing students already enrolled in ROTC to continue with the program, according to Reed-Weston. Some students

thought ROTC should not have any role in campus life, leading to the storming of Parkhurst.

A new administration under President John Kemeny dealt with later Vietnam War protests in a different way. As part of a nationwide student strike in May 1970, classes were cancelled for a week because SEE HISTORY PAGE 10

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Students, faculty reflect on the #BlackLivesMatter movement

By RACHEL FAVORS The Dartmouth Staff

Emerging in 2012 from a social media hashtag, the slogan “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry for larger issues related to police brutality, racial injustice and structural oppression that many feel disproportionately affect black communities. Many Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff have answered this rallying cry, participating in protests and demonstrations to stand in solidarity with the BLM movement and against alleged institutional oppression at

the College.

Community organizers Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors co-founded the BLM movement after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. In response to Zimmerman’s acquittal, Garza penned an online letter to the black community saying, “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” Cullors then responded to the post with the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter”.

From this post, a new organization and movement was created.

BLM later expanded to become one of the most prominent activist

groups during the Ferguson protests in response to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a police officer.

Overall, the BLM movement has received both praise and criticism, especially in regards to its tactics, as it continues to spark national conversations on race relations and racial injustice in America.

The movement provokes discussion on the racial inequality that is present in this country. The rise of the BLM movement speaks to the advent of social media where people are able to instantly mobilize around a particular issue, vice president of the Men of Color

KATELYN JONES/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Students protested in support of the Black Lives Matter movement this past spring.

Alliance Darnell Marescot ’18 said.

“Young people have grown tired of police harassment and brutality that have ended in death,” associate professor of history Derrick White said.

White said social media has allowed people to make connections between events and realize that the state has no respect for AfricanAmerican lives. Although the counternarrative to this is black-onblack crime, the issue is not simply about intraracial crime. It is about crime from the state, represented by the police force, against black communities. Instances where

there is “state-sanctioned death” serve as a “stark” contrast to the Obama era where young people have been told the narrative that racism is over, White said.

Interim associate director of the Academic Skills Center Alphonso Saville said that black student protest related to the BLM movement is part of a historical cycle tied to the violent oppression of black people.

In this historical context, the BLM movement is similar to every other “black freedom struggle.” FundaSEE BLM PAGE 12

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Students reflect on administration’s reaction to activism

By ZACHARY BENJAMIN The Dartmouth Staff

Though activism around many issues is present at both Dartmouth and its peer institutions, the focus of this activism differs from school to school. The College, for example, has seen significant dialogue in recent months about race relations and diversity on campus, while students at other Ivy League schools said issues such as sexual assault and mental health occupy the campus spotlight.

Similarly, administrative responses to such activism has varied across schools.

Much of the activism at Dartmouth in recent months has centered around racial relations, as students of color say that they do not feel adequately supported on campus. One of the most controversial events on campus was a “Blackout” that took place last November, sponsored by the Dartmouth Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Afro-American Society and Student Assembly. Activists dressed in black gathered at Novack Café and marched across the Green to Dartmouth Hall in solidarity with students of color at Yale University and the University of Missouri and the greater Black Lives

Matter movement.

After the official protest ended, several students moved to Baker-Berry Library, where they continued to protest. Several participants shouted at library patrons for not standing up and joining them.

The Blackout was originally designed as a response to the defacement of a display erected in the Collis Center, NAACP president John Diakanwa ’16 said. The display showed 74 shirts, symbolizing 74 unarmed people who were killed by police in 2015. Twentyeight of the shirts were black to represent the unarmed black victims of police violence.

Several of the shirts were stolen from the display after its unveiling.

As a form of counter-protest, the NAACP decided to organize the Blackout to demonstrate students’ continued dedication to spreading their message, Diakanwa said.

“You can take black shirts off of a board, but you can’t really rip them off of a person,” he said.

However, after hearing about protests at Yale and Mizzou, the protest was reorganized, broadening the focus from the display in Collis to a more general showing of solidarity for students at those schools, Diakanwa said.

Many students and alumni have

criticized the protesters who moved to the library afterwards for what they describe as overaggressive actions towards library patrons.

Brian Chen ’17, while declining to comment on the substance of the protesters’ concerns, said he did not approve of the library as a space for potential protesters. While he supports freedom of speech, it should be limited to appropriate venues that do not disrupt the functioning of the university, he said.

Sandor Farkas ’17 said that while he believes the protesters genuinely believe in their own message and are not simply seeking attention, he disagrees that many of the issues they claim to face are necessarily limited to certain groups. He criticized a mentality of “competitive suffering,” saying that while students might come from different backgrounds, they can still face similar issues.

Diakanwa said that he understands critics and their complaints about the library protest. He said the raw emotion of the protesters likely made other students uncomfortable, especially because many of them had likely never realized how strongly the protesters felt. Many of the protesters experienced a “very different Dartmouth” than the students who were shocked, he said. At the same time,

Diakanwa said he did not think that the emotions of the protesters should detract from their overall message.

Another recurring issue at the College has been faculty diversity.

Several student activists argued that faculty of color are underrepresented at Dartmouth, which they believe negatively impacts Dartmouth as an academic institution.

Diakanwa said that faculty diversity is one of the main issues the NAACP is currently raising with administrators. He noted this is in part because the issue affects the entire population at Dartmouth, not just students, he said.

Geovanni Cuevas ’14 agreed that Dartmouth has issues with retaining faculty of color. In the last couple of years there has been a “mass exodus” of faculty of color from the College, he said.

“We see professors that we adore, admire, respect, leave this place,” he said.

The constantly revolving nature of Dartmouth’s student body contributes to the lack of discussion on minority faculty retention, Cuevas said. As students move on and off campus in accordance with their D-Plans, they lose the focus and organization necessary to sustain long-term social movements, he said.

According to Dartmouth’s 2016 Diversity Report, compiled by the Office of the Vice-Provost for Academic Initiatives, in November of 2014 there were 110 faculty members from underrepresented minority groups out of a total of 678 faculty members, or about sixteen percent of the total.

Within the College of Arts and Sciences, there were 69 URM faculty members, representing 17.6 percent of the total.

Felicia Teter ’13, who has participated in previous student protests, spoke specifically about issues with tenure at Dartmouth, saying that numbers of tenured faculty of color at Dartmouth are “astronomically” low. This could in part be because of existing social structures, as many currently tenured faculty members are white men, she said. Since tenuregranting committees are made up of currently tenured faculty within a department, who likely are satisfied with the current system, they might be inclined to turn away minority candidates who speak out against the status quo, leading to a lack of faculty diversity, she said.

In 2013, only four percent of full professors came from URM groups, a decline from nearly six percent SEE ADMIN PAGE 13

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Faculty show support for campus activism

By SONIA QIN

The Dartmouth Staff

On a campus where most students do not stay longer than the usual four years, faculty members who stand with student activists in the push for increased diversity, inclusivity and equality at the College are the drivers of continued dialogue at Dartmouth. In the fall of 2015, following the Black Lives Matter protest in Baker-Berry Library, 150 professors and staff members demonstrated their solidarity with student activists by signing a letter of support addressed to the College administration.

Several faculty members who signed the letter had different reasons for taking part in this initiative.

Geography professor Abigail Neely said she wanted to sign the letter of support because an inclusive campus is fundamental to the kinds of education that should be provided at universities.

“An inclusive campus to me doesn’t mean a campus where everybody is happy and comfortable,” Neely said. “It means a place in which we can have difficult conversations and exchanges of ideas, and when there are multiple different positions and different positionalities.”

History professor Walter Simons also thought the contents of the letter addressed important issues for higher education.

“I think [the letter] addresses fundamental problems in higher education that need to be corrected on a large scale in a concerted effort with other institutions,” Simons said.

History professor Annelise

Orleck said that the letter was intended to foster a positive climate on campus regarding diversity and student activism, and that it was important for faculty, who are in a more powerful position compared to students, to express their support for student activists. She said that she applauded the students’ courage.

“I wanted to sign it because oftentimes my students who have been activists have been subject to really terrible harassment, including email threats,” she said. “I think sometimes faculty support is important for students emotionally and intellectually.”

English professor Ivy Schweitzer signed the letter because she thought it was important for faculty to support groups of students and staff members on campus who had been trying to bring issues of inequality and discrimination on campus to people’s attention, she said.

“Things had gotten so complicated in the fall that there was a lot of misinformation about what had happened,” Schweitzer said, referring to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that happened last term.

Evelynn Ellis, vice president of the Office for Institutional Diversity and Equity, said that the letter was the most concrete form of activism in concert with students that she has witnessed. Ellis has been at the College since 2008. She said that the letter sent a clear message to the community that student activists are not alone.

Ellis said that for the majority of faculty at Dartmouth, their activism tends to show in the classroom.

SEE FACULTY PAGE 8

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Student groups focus on international issues

By LAUREN BUDD

The Dartmouth Staff

Despite focusing on issues outside the Dartmouth bubble, student groups on campus dedicated to international activism still see high turnout and passionate student interest.

Dan Korff-Korn ’19, winter chair of J Street U, described the group as a “pro-peace, pro-dialogue campus discussion group” which supports both Israel and Palestine. The organization hosts events to discuss issues, and KorffKorn emphasized that the events rely primarily on discussion rather than a lecture format. J Street U has several branches at colleges and universities across the country under the overarching group J Street, which actively works to lobby for Congressional support for legislation that would promote peace in the region and a two-state solution, he said.

J Street U has an executive board of six members, and KorffKorn said events see attendance anywhere from 20 to 50 people.

He said that most people who participate in J Street U’s events

already have some sort of interest in the issues being discussed and recruits through political groups.

Korff-Korn said that J Street U is very self-selecting.

“The issues we think of when we think about activism, like sexuality and race, those are things that, even if you’re not a sexual minority or a racial minority, you might be driven toward because you’re just surrounded by other people who care about them,” he said.

Smaller crowds can lead to more intimate and productive conversation, however, which is the overall goal of the organization, he said.

The Dandelion Project, which is a volunteer group dedicated to ending educational inequality in China, is another student organization that focuses on international activism.

Kieran Sim ’17 has been a member of The Dandelion Project since his first term at Dartmouth.

He volunteered in Beijing for the project and developed strategies to enhance the project’s sustainability.

SEE INTERNATIONAL PAGE 24

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Faculty discuss their role in activism FROM FACULTY PAGE 7

Naming a lecture she recently attended about African-American women in convict camps, Ellis said that the number of courses and guest lectures that address inequity and discrimination has greatly increased in the past few years.

“I think the most powerful part of [faculty] activism is how they support students away from the view of everyone else,” Ellis said. “It is just as powerful, what they put out there for students to learn.”

The people who are teaching students are critical, because they will impact what students will learn, Ellis said.

“If people can claim ignorance, then they can be silent,” she said.

“Then they don’t have to come up with an action.”

Schweitzer was part of the teaching collective that taught the Black Lives Matter course in spring of 2016. The course, called “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter,” was co-taught by several departments, including the geography, English, anthropology, history, women’s, gender and sexuality studies and mathematics departments and the African and African-American studies program.

She has also done work with community-based learning courses. In one course, her students do work with local jails and drug rehabilitation centers, collaborating with inmates on joint projects.

“For me, that’s a very practical way of addressing issues of difference and the invisible walls that separate us,” Schweitzer said.

Neely was also part of the faculty that taught the BLM course last spring and helped to organize the class. “[The class] is a node of agitation and activism on campus,” Neely said. “It’s a node that is institutionalized through the curriculum.”

Neely said that Dartmouth is not a bubble, but is actually part of a larger world.

“People mistake things happening at Dartmouth as specific to Dartmouth, but often they are about larger issues in higher education,” she said.

Change at the College is part of a bigger social change that is needed, Neely said.

Orleck said that faculty should be doing more with respect to issues addressing faculty diversity, and that the fight continues.

“The issues that matter to you, you fight for throughout your life,” Orleck said. “Very few times can you say ‘Victory! Time to go home.’”

Orleck said she has been active

on campus in terms of recruitment, mentoring, speaking out to administration to express her views, supporting student activists, faculty diversity, reforming the Greek system and overall making the campus safer and more comfortable for many different kinds of students.

She said that the College needs to take a close look at itself in terms of tenure and promotion, and the hiring of a critical mass of faculty of color.

“I think that this campus, like many others, has a problem,” Orleck said. “I think that Dartmouth needs to pay special attention — not only to recruitment but also to retention, not only to raises, but really thinking about the climate of the campus.”

Ellis also said that addressing issues like inequality and discrimination can be more effective with the recruitment and retention of more diverse faculty members.

“I want us to get to a place where it’s not required for the faculty to sign a letter,” Ellis said.

Simons said that one of his reasons for participating in faculty activism is that in the last 10 years faculty have lost quite a lot of say in how their institutions are being governed.

“The role of the faculty in general, especially in small institutions, has been much reduced recently,” he said. “We need to find other ways to participate in governing the institutions.”

As tenured faculty at an institution like Dartmouth, we are incredibly privileged, Simons said.

“This requires us to think about and speak out on very fundamental issues with a long-term perspective,” he said.

Simons said that activism at the College is not always easy.

“It’s a relatively small institution with very strong traditions and it’s an institution that’s very hard to change,” he said, adding that it is sometimes hard for faculty to unite on certain issues.

Schweitzer said that faculty activism is important in the context of a college campus because faculty are an important constituency in the College and they model activism for students.

“I think it’s important that we takes stands, for those of us who have tenure,” she said.

Neely said that faculty activism is important on campus because of the transience of undergraduate students, meaning faculty have to sustain the conversation.

“Social movements aren’t about individual sets of protests, they’re about long, hard work and a sustained attention,” Neely said.

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Dartmouth has history of activism FROM HISTORY PAGE 3

of students protesting the United States’ actions in North Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.

“He actually facilitated the student protest and he made it clear that he was not interested in punishing or restraining students who wanted to speak out against the Vietnam War,” Miller said.

The Vietnam War was not the only issue that mobilized students at the time.

Between the early 1960s and the late 1960s, Dartmouth’s community reacted very differently to two speeches given by segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 and 1967 at the College.

In 1963, students laughed at the governor’s jokes and applauded him 27 times. Protest was limited to an orderly demonstration outside the Hopkins Center for the Arts and black armbands worn by faculty members.

In 1967, the reception was different. Wallace was heckled by students chanting, “Wallace is a racist.”

Other students walked out of Webster Hall where the event took place.

A group of students who attempted to rush the platform where Wallace was speaking. Other students surrounded and rocked Wallace’s car was surrounded and rocked by students. The eight chanters were members of a student group, the Afro-American Society, that would come to play an important role in change on campus.

Before the AAS’ foundation in 1966, national black leaders had visited campus, with Martin Luther King Jr. visiting Hanover in 1962 and Malcolm X in 1965.

But a member of the Class of 1958 recalled how black students would “go their separate ways” before the AAS was created. Only 0.4 percent of students from 1962-1965 were black.

However, in the late 1960s, the AAS pushed the administration to do more to accommodate black students. In March 1969, the AAS presented the administration with a list of demands. The list included items that called for black students to make up 11 percent of the student body, a black admissions SEE HISTORY PAGE 15

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STAFF COLUMNIST HANSA SHARMA ’19

SENIOR STAFF COLUMNIST EMILY ALBRECHT ’16

Artistry in Activism

Activism For All

Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance challenges the idea of activism.

While brainstorming a title for an award for an event I was involved in organizing last year, we tired of coming up with eloquent ways to describe an advocate of the program. I added “activist” to our whiteboard. Although words like “ambassador” and even “supporter” were still viable candidates, “activist” was immediately wiped off the board due to its negative connotations. Growing up in a neighborhood a block away from Goldman Sachs and having had to encounter Occupy Wall Street protesters on my evening commute, I was not new to activism and all it entails, positive or otherwise. Although I can see why certain activist groups and protesters might conjure a negative image in certain circles, it seemed unfair to generally characterize a term in that manner, especially since activism is so prominent in our culture.

When Beyoncé performed her new politically-charged single “Formation” at the Super Bowl last Sunday, her act was more than just entertainment. Back-up dancers attired in all black evoked images of the Black Panthers with their stylized berets, black afros and leather ensembles. The robust half-time tribute, which paid homage to the Black Lives Matter movement, Malcolm X, Southern “bama” blackness, Michael Jackson and African-American step dance on the 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers, has garnered substantial criticism. Most notably, former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani stated, “This is football, not Hollywood.” In response to my former mayor, I would like to know what he expects from the most watched television broadcast of all time, which blurred the lines between entertainment and sports when Michael Jackson was the half-time headliner in 1993.

Through her uninhibited performance on Sunday, Beyoncé ventured outside of her carefully concocted public image to give voice to an issue that is immensely personal and sensitive. What is this move met with?

Backlash from the National Sheriffs Association for the song’s anti-police message. In

fact, Beyoncé’s artistic activism had such a compelling impact that it has spewed a chain of reactionary protests itself. An anti-Beyoncé group hopes to protest outside the NFL’s New York City headquarters on the grounds that her performance glorified a “hate group” and to prevent the Super Bowl from airing any hate speech in the future. This response is a healthy activist process critically responding to Beyoncé’s performance. However, I cannot help but think back to the negative connotation of the word “activist” I grappled with a year ago.

Activism is not solely limited to racial tensions. In the same half-time show as Beyoncé, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin used his coveted stage time to celebrate marriage equality with a rainbow spelling out “Believe in Love.” As the wholesome nature of mainstream entertainment is redefined and hopefully “wholesome” will come to include diversity of opinion and inclusivity.

Alongside this, it does us well to reestablish our own terms of activism. Activism is, you guessed, an active word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an activist is one who advocates or engages in action, specially one who undertakes vigorous political or social campaigning. Since activists inherently have to fight against the status quo to bring about change, it is sometimes necessary for them to take their intended audience outside of their comfort zone. By transforming our idea of mainstream entertainment in the form of the Super Bowl half-time show, Beyoncé seamlessly addressed the largest possible television audience and effectively made many feel very uncomfortable while simultaneously galvanizing the pride of a significant number of people who have been disenfranchised. These polarizing reactions to the half-time show are precisely why there is a need for politically charged performances in the first place. The response to her performance demonstrates the need for a shift to challenge the status quo and people’s comfort zones, which may in turn lead to more uncomfortable conversations.

ELISE WIEN/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF

We need both online activism and concrete action to affect change.

Activism comes in many forms. Whether you are out on a street corner petitioning for better environmental regulations, spending hours phone banking for a favored political candidate or even spreading a hashtag in solidarity with a given movement, now more than ever there are so many mediums through which you can fight for social and political change. I would posit that most, if not all, students on this campus have participated in activism of one form or another — some taking more energy-intensive and serious actions to combat perceived problems in society, and some sticking to the realm of online activism.

Yet, who decides who is an activist? There is undoubtedly a difference between posting a tweet and actually marching in protests (though the two are not mutually exclusive, of course). I have heard the argument that only action on the latter scale actually constitutes activism — thinkpiece after thinkpiece have decried the rise of “slacktivism,” or online actions that nominally support a cause but take little energy or effort to execute, such as signing petitions or posting on social media.

Shonda Rhimes ’91 even explicitly said “a hashtag is not a movement” in her 2014 commencement speech at the College.

These arguments are valid, but misguided in their scope. A hashtag alone may not be a movement, but lasting social and political change is not created through short bursts of cinematic, revolutionary action. A movement needs actors across all parts of the spectrum in order to make meaningful, long-lasting and deep-seated change. Political and institutional reforms must be coupled with the changing of hearts and minds — laws will mean nothing if underlying cultural norms and sensitivities are not there to enact them in the lived experiences of each person’s day.

The truth of this has been demonstrated throughout American history, from postCivil War Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement to legitimate gender equality. We have laws safeguarding civil liberties and

social justice that simply do not manifest in the daily life of marginalized communities because the hearts and minds of many within society remain in the past. Legal and structural change means little without the sociocultural change to support it.

Hashtag activism, slacktivism, Tumblr social justice warriorism or whatever one would like to call it has the benefit of spreading awareness and education to constituencies that may have otherwise remained ignorant. This is how we achieve the kind of sociocultural change crucial to the manifest efficacy of laws regarding whatever issues for which one is fighting, be it civil rights or environmental regulations and protections. Exposure is crucial to the success of changing hearts and minds, and the more popularity and newsworthy a hashtag or a petition or a Facebook profile is, the more people will be aware of the underlying issues that these tools purport to support. If the public is largely unaware of an issue, the concrete on-the-ground action by more dedicated activists is unlikely to culminate in lasting change. The fact that you can go up to almost any individual in this country and they will having at least a passing knowledge of the #BlackLivesMatter movement fundamentally changes the import and scope of the movement. Public exposure and common knowledge confers legitimacy upon movements that would otherwise remain on the fringe or in the shadows.

Ideally, more and more people would be on the streets or in the halls of government agencies fighting for change with more than words or online presence. The people who are already doing so are incredible, and I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. But in today’s technologically-flooded society, we need actors on all parts of the spectrum — we need online petitions and we need hashtag activism. Ignoring the efficacy of these tools minimizes the very real effects of education, exposure and the spread of information in the fight for social change.

ELISE WIEN/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF

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Students react to broader Black Lives Matter movement FROM BLM PAGE 4

mentally, the black student experience at the majority of universities has been the same since legalized desegregation, he said.

NAACP executive board member Mae Hardebeck ’18 said campus protests related to the BLM movement affirm that students of color at Dartmouth live “inherently different college experiences than other students on campus.”

Campus activist Geovanni Cuevas ’14 said that the current resistance and protest occurring at Dartmouth is part of a strain of activism that has existed since black people have attended this institution. However, Dartmouth does not have “the real BLM movement” that is seen in larger cities because formal activism has been stigmatized at the College, he said.

Last term, Cuevas, along with other members of the Dartmouth community, met with the Winter Carnival Committee to change this year’s theme “The Cat in the Hat Comes to Winter Carnival” to “Snow Justice, Snow Peace,” in order to center the weekend around conversations of racial justice and the safety of students of color on this campus, he said.

This conversation revealed the superficial defense of keeping the current theme — people did not feel it would be fun to have a racial justice theme, Cuevas said.

Although the committee said they were open to modifying the theme to incorporate racial justice, Cuevas said they never received word from them about it. Instead, he said he and a group of students are planning to have a conference sometime this term on issues of racial justice and history of students of the color at the College as a continuation of the “snow justice, snow peace” idea, Cuevas said.

Chinedum Nwaigwe ’19 said she uses her campus radio show, “The Roundtable,” to address national and politicized issues including conversations on racial justice.

She said she started the show following the November protest, to give students a platform to discuss polarizing topics and learn from each other’s experiences.

“I wanted people to be able to talk about issues that they shy away from and I wanted to give a voice to people who have been silenced on this campus,” Nwaigwe said.

Dartmouth faculty have also contributed to campus conversations on racial issues with the in-

KATELYN JONES/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Students participating in a protest for the Black Lives Matter movement.

troduction of a Black Lives Matter course last spring, dedicated to considering race, structural inequality and violence in both a historical and modern context. The course will be offered twice over the next four years.

Geography professor Abigail Neely, who coordinated the BLM

course along with English professor Aimee Bahng, said that the course was a great opportunity for this “historically and presently white institution to use its resources to have a sustained conversation about this movement and its broader historical, political, economic and geographical context.”

However, the course was never meant to be a “catalyst,” it was meant to be a part of a larger conversation, she said. The rhetoric of this “Dartmouth bubble” often does not recognize Dartmouth’s ties to other places and the imSEE BLM PAGE 14

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Students speak about spotlighted issues on campuses FROM ADMIN PAGE 5

in 2007, according to the Diversity Report. This number is lower than averages within the Ivy League and across the nation, which were both about 5.5 percent in 2013. There are also no URM full professors in the social sciences, English or engineering departments at Dartmouth.

Numbers for URM associate professors, the majority of whom possess tenure, are higher. In 2013, just over 16 percent of associate professors at Dartmouth were URM, compared to just over six percent in 2007, according to the Diversity Report. This 2013 number is higher than averages across the Ivy League and the nation, which were at about ten percent in 2013.

However, the report also states that in 2013 there were no URM professors in the sciences at Dartmouth.

Teter also criticized what she says she perceives as a lack of student feedback in the tenure-granting process. Right now it is difficult, if not

impossible, for students to learn which professors are up for tenure, she said.

Student feedback should be weighed more heavily in the tenure-granting process, Teter said, as it is impossible to speak to the quality of a candidate’s teaching abilities without input from students who have actually had classes with that professor.

Under the current system, the Dean of Faculty office will solicit letters from former students when reviewing an assistant professor for promotion to associate professor with tenure, according to the Dartmouth Faculty Handbook. In addition, candidates are allowed to submit to their associate dean a list of students whom they believe can speak to their teaching abilities; letters will also be solicited from these students.

Students interviewed from other schools mentioned that while race and diversity issues are definitely a part of campus discussions, other issues — like sexual assault, mental health and academic requirement

s — also make up a large part of campus discourse.

Gloria Tso, a freshman at Columbia University who has been involved in protests on campus, said that it is difficult to point out a single area of focus for protests at Columbia, because students at the university tend to be very active on social issues. The biggest social movement was probably No Red Tape, an organization protesting how the university has responded to complaints of sexual violence, she said. The case of Emma Sulkowicz, who carried a mattress around with her until graduation as a performance art piece protesting her alleged rapist’s continued enrollment at Columbia, is also still fresh in people’s minds, Tso said.

Justice Gaines, a senior at Brown University, said that in recent years the three biggest issues on campus have been sexual assault, race and first-generation student issues. In the last three to four years environmental issues have also been a large topic of

JULIANNA LEE MARINO/THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Students at Brown University stage a protest of the occupation of indigenous lands.

discussion at the university, xe said.

Ruben Reyes, a freshman at Harvard University who attended the Ivy League Latinx conference last fall, said that sexual assault and mental health have been discussed often in recent months. Reyes, who is also a member of Fuerza Latina, a pan-Latino cultural group on campus, said that discussions about race are also prevalent within his personal community.

Just as issues at different campuses reflect different concerns, so too have administrative responses differed from campus to campus, as have student reactions to those responses.

At Dartmouth, for example, administrative responses to protests have been mixed. Vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer, for example, originally called the Blackout protests a “wonderful, beautiful thing” and apologized to protesters for having to deal with “a whole conservative world out there that’s not being very nice.”

She later apologized for the statements towards conservatives, and reiterated her support for all students on campus.

College President Phil Hanlon released an email praising the official Blackout protest, but calling the alleged use of vulgar epithets, personal insults and intimidating actions by the protestors and students in the library “antithetical to our values and goals as an institution.”

At the beginning of February, Hanlon and Provost Carolyn Dever announced the creation of three working groups composed of students, faculty and staff aiming to address issues of diversity at the College.

At Brown, president Christina Paxson released a draft document last November about how to promote diversity and inclusion at Brown, with a final draft released on Feb. 1.

The plan sets aside $165 million to increase representation of historically underrepresented groups on campus, support research on diversity and inclusion, improve life for students from underrepresented groups and enhance the curricula to include programming on inclusivity.

At Harvard, a working group on diversity and inclusion released a report in November detailing their findings. The report investigated diversity at other Ivy League schools in comparison to Harvard and provided recommendations on how Harvard can improve. The report included calls for increasing cultural training for college staff, making it easier for students to find diversity-related courses and expanding mental health support for historically underrepresented groups.

In November, Yale’s president Peter Salovey announced the creation of a five-year $50 million diversity initiative to support faculty recruitment and retention.

Responses to administrators have been mixed at all schools. Many activists believe that while administrators are taking a step in the right direction, they have not yet done enough.

Diakanwa said that administration at the College has responded to protests in similar ways in the past: speaking with student leaders, listening to their concerns and then letting them graduate without enacting serious change. Given this, he is cautious about believing things will change in the foreseeable future.

While Diakanwa said he believes current administrators like Hanlon and Dever genuinely do want to see change at the College, he does not think this is the same as actually being willing to enact change.

While Dartmouth administrators SEE ADMIN PAGE 13

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Students comment on effectiveness of BLM protests FROM BLM PAGE 12

portance of considering those connections and broader implications, Neely emphasized.

At the College, opinions on the BLM movement, its tactics and the actions of student activists in campus protests are divided.

Marescot said it is important to try to put the emotions from protesters in perspective. Emotions in protests, as in BLM protests, result from being in a space where people feel they have no agency.

Ultimately, everyone wants to feel that if they have chosen this place and believe in the dream that this institution provides, then this institution should invest in their general safety and active inclusion, Marescot said.

“Emotion comes from the sense that you are no longer invisible, but visible in this group that is asserting their power by expressing their grievances,” he said.

Specifically referencing the allegations of physical and verbal assault by protesters in last November’s Blackout demonstration organized by Dartmouth’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jack Mourouzis ‘18 said that it is difficult for many students to support a movement that receives so much negative press.

Joshua Kotran ’18 said that clear incidents of racism and discrimination were committed by protesters, which undermines the movement’s objectives. Even if protesters do not think that their comments were racist or discriminatory, other people are seeing those comments and forming their opinions of the BLM movement based off of those comments, Kotran said.

Kotran said that he does not agree with some of the events that sparked the BLM movement, but he does believe that there is a broader national issue of racial inequality with data supporting it, especially regarding the criminal justice system.

However, the BLM movement has been “overextrapolated” on the collegiate level, he said. Although discrimination exists at Dartmouth and on other college campuses, it is not always easy to see what the particular concerns of campus BLM activists are, he said.

“I think that if members of the Black Lives Matter movement were more open to productive dialogue and more specific when voicing their grievances, we could make significant strides towards improving race relations at Dartmouth,” Kotran added.

For Mourouzis, the movement follows a “very heavy-handed ideology” that does not facilitate open discourse or acknowledge other

perspectives, which generally leads to an “us versus them” mentality, he said.

Mourouzis also said that he does not that think that protests at Dartmouth have the same “merit” as protests in larger cities because we all are in “the Dartmouth bubble” and are privileged to be here.

Nwaigwe said although she believes that everyone is privileged to attend this institution, the notion that racism does not exist once black people have earned their entrance into a “white space” is one of the “largest misconceptions of our society.”

Broadly looking at the commonalities in the list of demands of students at many universities, Saville said that the main stated goals are the desire for greater representation of underrepresented groups in faculty and staff and wanting significant financial contribution towards the “creation of intellectual and physical space on college campuses that promote healthy and intellectual engagement with black culture and history.”

“The need or appropriateness of the Black Lives Matter movement is substantiated by its presence here,” Saville said. “If black students feel that the spirit of the movement, the goal of the movement, and the values of the larger movement speak to or reflect part of their experience here at Dartmouth then that justifies the need for its existence.”

Campuses across the nation have become “fertile ground for activism” because students are tired of the administration’s crisis management responses to racial issues on campus, Nwaigwe said.

White said part of the activism also comes from frustration from the unfulfilled expectations of an inclusive culture that Dartmouth and other universities have sold to its students. Underrepresented minorities are expected to assimilate into these norms while the mainstream culture is not expected to do anything or to ever be made uncomfortable, he said.

“The reason there is protest is because there has not been any institutional will to implement those goals, despite there being a lot of rhetoric about diversity and inclusivity,” White said. “These institutions will continue to face protest because the language, the rhetoric and the reality don’t mesh.”

Ultimately, the changes at Dartmouth must start from the “top-down”, Cuevas said. Until people at the higher echelons of the College leadership can address and explain the systemic challenges of students of color SEE BLM PAGE 18

KATELYN JONES/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

The Black Lives Matter movement started in response to various cases of policy brutality across the country.

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Faculty discuss results of student survey on activism

By NOAH GOLDSTEIN

MICHAEL QIAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

The Dartmouth Staff

Dartmouth has seen its fair share of activism in years past — from the Dimensions protest in 2013 to the Parkhurst sit-in in 2014 to the recent Black Lives Matter protest during fall term.

With the increasing calls for social justice, The Dartmouth released a survey to gauge student reactions to activism at Dartmouth and beyond.

Three hundred and seventy Dartmouth students responded to a survey regarding activism on campus. Questions ranged from those asking about personal participation in activism to personal opinions and feelings about activism at the school.

Respondents evenly represented each class, and 60 percent identified as female, 38 percent male and 1 percent as other.

In order, the most important issues to students were socioeconomic issues, political ones, environmental ones and race-based ones.

Women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Julia Rabig, who studies social movements, said she was not surprised by the results, because the issues reflect not only what is happening at Dartmouth in regards to activism, but also what people are more broadly concerned about in the election year.

Women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Michael Bronski, who studies the practice of media and activism, said that he would have expected students to care most about race-based issues, due to recent discussions of diversity on campus and the Black Lives Matter movement. He noted that responses depended on the make-up of respondents, including if students of color answered the survey.

Sociology professor at Stanford University

Doug McAdam said that he was not surprised by which issues were important to students, as he thought that they are ones that young people are often interested in. For example, he said that the Sanders campaign is an area that shows students interests in socioeconomic issues.

Vice president of Institutional Diversity and Equity Evelynn Ellis said she was not surprised by the issues listed because socioeconomic, political and race-based issues are all connected by education, an aspect of society that effects everyone.

Fifty-eight percent of students said they had not participated in any form of activism.

Of those who have, the majority of those who responded took part in race-based activism. At the same time, 75 percent of students agreed that activism is necessary in order to enact change.

Rabig thought that the difference was a result of the many barriers to activism, including the difficulties of organizing action, fear of repercussions, the demands of student life or even just having the issue click within ones consciousness.

Ellis said this disparity could be in part due to the brief and packed nature of Dartmouth terms, which make it hard for students to take action. For example, Ellis noted that going to a rally would be hard for her due to her own work schedule. Some people may not care, she said, but there are also people who have legitimate excuses.

Bronski was not surprised by the difference in these statistics, as he said that the pattern would probably remain constant throughout

the entire country.

“I think Americans in general have a clear understanding of how social changes happen, but, for a variety of reasons are apprehensive to identify themselves as engaging in it,” Bronski said.

McAdam said that he actually thought that 42 percent students have participated in some form of activism was “extraordinarily high.”

“Serious activism demands a hell of a lot out of an individual. Most of us get up in the morning and organize our day around taken for granted routines. We don’t even really think about stepping outside of those routines very much, and activism asks us to do just that,” he said.

When asked if the culture at Dartmouth fosters activism on a scale of extreme disagreement to extreme agreement, 37 percent disagreed, 23 percent were neutral and 39 percent agreed.

McAdam said that college students have typically always been involved in activism.

However, he does not think that is attributed to the institutions themselves. Rather, he said that students have a more flexible schedule where they can engage in activity. Additionally, he said the ecology of college campuses is ideal for mobilization.

Ellis was initially surprised by these results because they contradict her expectations for the College.

“We are the brightest of the brightest, although I might be wrong,” Ellis said. “We are small enough that we can really create change.

We have dissidence enough that we are reminded on an almost daily basis that we need to change.

“A ny a d m i n ist rat i on of a wealthy non-profit or a business is going to be hesitant about social change. Is that true of Dartmouth? Sure. When it comes to its own change, any organization is going to be conservative. So it doesn’t surprise me that Dartmouth, or any college, does not embrace political activism, even though they may agree generally with the impulse behind some of the need for change.”

- MICHAEL BRONSKI, WOMEN’S, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES PROFESSOR

For me, that should add up to it being the place [to foster activism].”

To address this, Ellis said that there should be a curricula environment in which students learn that activism has a proper place on campus and allow for it to be executed in a proper form.

Bronski said that Dartmouth’s relatively isolated location makes activism harder. Additionally, he suspected that the social structures at Dartmouth do not actively encourage people to engage in activism.

Rabig said that historically, the College has been known as a place to foster conservative activism, but past activism at the school has been complicated.

The statement “the administration reacts well to student activism” saw 63 percent of students disagree, while 11 percent of students said that they agreed.

Ellis said that she would expect those numbers to remain the same over a long period of time, because of the imperfect nature of communications between schools and the students. Oftentimes, students do not know about discussions that happen within an administration about its goals and the College does not talk with the students enough about their own problems, she said.

Ellis said that she thinks Provost Carolyn Dever recognizes these communication issues and that she is trying to foster a culture of communication.

Rabig said she understood where student views were coming from, as many of the issues are ingrained problems that change at a slow pace.

“If students felt that the administration did respond well, then there probably wouldn’t be the same sort of need for activism to push the administration in a certain direction,” she said.

Bronski said that he would expect a majority of responses by colleges to activism from the 1940s on would be negative and unwelcome.

“College administrations by their very nature are conservative,” Bronski said. “Any administration of a wealthy non-profit or a business is going to be hesitant about social change. Is that true of Dartmouth? Sure. When it comes to its own change, any organization is going to be conservative. So it doesn’t surprise me that Dartmouth, or any college, does not embrace political activism, even though they may agree generally with the impulse behind some of the need for change.”

Seventy-nine percent of students said that activism relating to race changed their perspective on issues relating to race.

In response to this statistic, Ellis said that activism tends to create curiosity in people as to why people might be taking action, thus encouraging them to look into it and better understand the problems being addressed.

“We respond to things based on our limited knowledge of why that occurs, why they are responding in a certain way.” Ellis said. “We have so little information from which we draw conclusions.”

Rabig said that those involved in a protest, either as a member or a bystander, will often have their views changed by the events themselves.

When students were directly asked about how they felt in regards to activism at Dartmouth,

38 percent had a negative view, 25 percent had a neutral view and 37 percent had a positive view. When asked about activism outside of Dartmouth, 10 percent had a negative view while 61 percent had a positive view.

Ellis said that the current campus climate in regards to activism needs improvement, which she noted was possible.

Another concern Ellis raised was whether or not Dartmouth was supplying a safe, diverse and inclusive environment for students. She said that the school’s priority should be students feeling safe, although the definition for safety varies for students.

“We are productive when we work as a whole community, where everyone is putting in their 100 percent because they feel safe to do it and they feel appreciated to do it,” Ellis said. “We did not say we would get you ready to work in Hanover, or even to work in Boston. We said we would get you ready to be world leaders. To do that, the world needs to be your teacher.”

The best way to address these issues is to carefully choose the staff, she said. She noted that the staff should come from backgrounds similar to the students they work with, she said.

“Students going through the Dartmouth academic community really should see a reflection of themselves periodically,” she said.

Ellis said this kind of representation will encourage students to have a mindset that they can do anything they set their minds to.

She added that the changes should come from within the faculty search committees to take diversity further into account when judging quality alongside academic aspects.

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Campus discussions on racial equality continue

interact more with black students and black culture. However, it is with the appropriate language, he a “fundamental problem within said he cannot expect the average itself,” if students do not wish to Dartmouth student to engage engage, Marescot said.

White said many students at the and understand the concerns of College try to find ways not to enstudents of color.

To improve the effectiveness gage. He said Dartmouth’s “ethos” is that one of campus acto the tivism and en“I wanted people to be comes woods to engage more of the Dartmouth able to talk about issues dure peace c o m m u n i t y, that they shy away from.” and partying before startthere should be ing your camore open disreer and no course on racial -CHINEDUM NWAIGWE ’19, one wants to issues, Mour“THE ROUNDTABLE” RADIO disturb that. ouzis said. In Activism the past, discus- SHOW HOST upsets that sions and proethos and tests seemed to “placid culcreate “a hosture,” White tile atmosphere said. for conflicting He said campus activists have opinions,” Mourouzis said. Currently, people do not feel comfort- tried to have discussions and meetable calling into question many of ings on these same issues since the issues the BLM movement is 1965. Students run out of patience of having these discussions and brings up, he added.

Marescot said that past panels many feel that protest and direct on diversity relating to the BLM action are the only way that their movement have been hostile to voices can be heard, White said.

Referencing a quote from Marcontradictory perspectives.

He said everyone wants control tin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from and agency, and for many white A Birmingham Jail,” Nwaigwe said students, these protests and discus- that the “white moderate” feels it sions may have been the first time can dictate for the black community that they did not have control over the time and manner that they can their environment, which can be a address racial inequality issues.

BLM co-founder Opal Tometi has very scary experience.

Marescot said students who also referred to King’s quote to say care to engage in these conversa- that the BLM movement has run tions, but feel uncomfortable in out of patience with working in attending these discussions or par- the existing structure of politics ticipating in protests, should attend and the “acceptance of order at Afro-American Society events and the expense of justice.”

FROM BLM PAGE 14

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Past activism include issues of war, race FROM HISTORY PAGE 15

a large bottle of rum, with scenes including one of a Native American figure crawling out of the forest on hands and knees, lapping up the rum, and a Native American women reading a book upside down. In response, the College decided to cover the Hovey murals during most times of year. Then, on March 8, 1979 classes were cancelled to allow for a series of speakers to discuss recent events. The Hovey Murals still remain at the College to this day, in a closed room in the bottom level of ‘53 Commons.

As the events of 1979 gave way to a new decade, divestment became a new issue at the forefront of campus activism.

Divestment had long been an issue at Dartmouth. As early as 1967, the AAS protested Dartmouth’s $400,000 investment in Eastman Kodak, a photography company, when Kodak refused to hire black employees at a factory in Rochester, New York.

Divestment spurred a lot of activism in reaction to the College’s investments in apartheid South Africa.

In November 1985, student members of the Dartmouth Community for Divestment erected three mock shanties on the Green in protest of the College’s continued investment in American companies operating in South Africa. The investments targeted by activists made up $63.4 million out of Dartmouth’s then $414 million endowment.

“The DCD asked the administration ‘How can you simultaneously educate black South African students and contribute to the success of the apartheid regime?’” Tim Harrison ’16 said.

Harrison is writing a thesis on anti-apartheid activism at the College. Along with the shanties, hundreds of people participated in rallies held on the Green, according to Harrison. However, the controversy over the shanties intensified when a group of students attacked the shanties the morning of Jan. 21, 1986.

The attack served as a catalyst to involve the AAS in the divestment effort.

“The international black students and the African-American SEE HISTORY PAGE 20

COURTESY OF RAUNER

Protests have long been a part of campus, with many being controversial.

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History of Native American activism FROM HISTORY PAGE 19

students never formed an alliance at Dartmouth [before the divestment campaign],” Harrison said.

“This changed overnight on January 21, 1986 after the shanty attack because the attack happened in the early morning hours after the very first observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. To the leaders of the Afro-American Society it wasn’t a coincidence,” Harrison said.

The next day, on Jan. 22, 1986, 100 protesters held a sit-in in then President David McLaughlin’s office. Ten of the twelve students punished for the destruction of the shanties were members of the conservative student newspaper, The Dartmouth Review.

On April 11, 1986, 20 DCD members occupied Baker Tower in protest of what they saw as the lenient punishments the College gave to those who attacked the shanties.

The campaign for divestment was successful, with the College divesting by 1989. The campaign against divestment also contributed to the resignation of McLaughlin in late 1986, the same year as the shanty attack.

“He resigned because he lost the support of the faculty,” Harrison said. “Many of the faculty were keen for the administration to divest, and when the board and the president signaled explicitly to the contrary, it continued a process of very strong disaffection from the majority of the faculty with the president.”

The use of divestment as a goal of campus activism continued beyond apartheid. In 1992, 2,300 students signed a petition for the College to divest from Hydro-Quebec, a company building a dam that would have flooded an area the size of Vermont and displaced 10,000 people, mostly Cree Native Americans. The students argued it was hypocritical for the College to support its Native American and environmental studies programs while investing in the company building the dam.

Activism concerning Native American issues has spanned several decades at Dartmouth, especially since the decision in 1970 to reaffirm Dartmouth’s original commitment to Native American education, which was itself caused by Native activism nationwide.

SEE HISTORY PAGE 22

During the 1980s and 1990s, Dartmouth saw a push from its students to divest from apartheid South Africa.

COURTESY OF RAUNER

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PAGE 21

“ACTIVISM IS NECESSARY TO ENACT CHANGE.”

MICHAEL QIAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Data for this graph were taken from 370 respones to our survey.

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Past forms of activism on campus include protests, sit-ins FROM HISTORY PAGE 20

“That’s an interesting commitment because it coincides with President Nixon’s announcement of a new Indian policy,” history and Native American studies professor Colin Calloway said. “There may not be many Native students on campus at the time but nationwide this is a time of tremendous social activism.”

However, the few Native students at Dartmouth also pushed for the

renewed commitment.

“I think the Native students who were here, and there was a handful of them, are really pushing the College and reminding them that they should not be an anomaly,” he said.

Much of Native American activism since 1970 has been responsive, according to Calloway. It has often taken the form of protesting the use of the Indian symbol at Dartmouth and other actions seen as disrespectful to Native Americans.

“Time and again, our Native

students have been called upon to educate the larger Dartmouth community on why this stuff matters and why this stuff is hurtful,” Calloway said.

The fall of 2006 was filled with controversial events targeted at Native Americans. Fraternity pledges disrupted a solemn drum circle marking Native American genocide on Columbus Day by clapping and mock dancing. It was alleged that a student sold t-shirts in the main dining hall for an upcoming football

game saying “Holy Cross Sucks” and showing a Holy Cross crusader performing oral sex on a Native American. The crew team held a party called “Cowboys, Barnyard Animals and Indigenous People.”

Amid these and other controversies, a college committee debated again whether the Hovey Murals should be covered. The Native American Council, a group consisting of members of NAD, the Native American Studies department, the Native American Program and college offi-

cials that met four times a term, took out a two-page advertisement in The Dartmouth aiming to highlight the controversies. The culmination of these events was an edition of The Dartmouth Review with a depiction of a Native American holding a scalp entitled “The Natives are Getting Restless!” In response, the next day, 500 students participated in a “Solidarity against Hatred” rally on the Green.

SEE HISTORY PAGE 25

“Time and again, our Native students have been called upon to educate the larger Dartmouth community on why this stuff matters and why this stuff is hurtful.”

-COLIN CALLOWAY, NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES PROFESSOR

COURTESY OF RAUNER

Before women were accepted to the College in 1972, many protested co-education.

“That’s an interesting committment because it coincides with President Nixon’s announcement of a new Indian policy. There may not be many Native students on campus at the time but nationwide this is a time of tremendous social activism.”

-COLIN CALLOWAY, NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES PROFESSOR

COURTESY OF RAUNER

Every year as part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations, a vigil is held on campus.

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Admin responses vary around the Ivy League FROM ADMIN PAGE 13

have generally been willing to listen to protesters after major events, Cuevas said, this eventually becomes inadequate if actual changes are not made. The College needs to fully appreciate dialogues about social justice, he said, such as how white supremacy — meaning systemic social structures that favor white people – has influenced and continues to influence College culture. While critical of some administrators, such as Hanlon, for not being active enough in enacting change — for example, by not having enough presence with students of color and not showing up to events relating to their issues — he praised others, like Ameer, for genuinely trying to help minority students on campus.

In contrast, Farkas was critical of Ameer’s position at the College, which he believes is designed specifically to implement initiatives in response to student protestors, even though other members of the student body might disagree with them. He believes administrators should be less involved in regulating student relations on campus, allowing instead for students to solve these issues themselves.

Chen said he would like to see

student protestors who violate college policies be subjected to appropriate judicial processes. The administration should also be firmer in condemning protestors who violate such policies, he said, citing Hanlon’s email as a step in the right direction.

At Columbia, administrators tend to respond to student activism selectively, Tso said. As an example, she cited how the university quickly addressed protests about a first-year science course, promising to consider changing it, while moving much more slowly to address other issues like sexual assault.

At Brown, the administration should work more to improve student support and be less reactionary in taking student input, Gaines said.

Xyr opinion of the administration has not changed, though over the past year they have been more responsive, xe said. They often talk about issues without truly trying to change them, xe said.

It is hard to group all administrators at Harvard together in terms of their response, Reyes said. While some have been open to conversation, others have been more complacent, he said. He hoped that students would not lose momentum after returning from winter break.

ALEX ZHANG/YALE DAILY NEWS

A protest takes place at Yale University this past fall.

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International activism has place on campus

coming to Dartmouth, but wasn’t sure whether the difference in the Sim said that in general the political environment was due to group attracts students who are being in the U.S. or being in a both “dedicated” and “passion- college environment.

Assistant professor of govate.” However, he emphasized that because it is a volunteer organiza- ernment Jeffrey Friedman, who focuses his studtion, it attracts ies on civil war p e o p l e w h o “I don’t think by a b ro a d , s a i d view it as a hobhaving this kind of that he has by or side activseen a relatively ity that receives student organization large number less priority we’re detracting of students use than academresources from ics, work or pre- from any other College to professional orefforts that are going the travel overseas ganizations.

Sim said that on here on campus at during the summer or postthe number of Dartmouth.” graduation in people involved order to go to fluctuates even throughout the -KIERAN SIM ’17, MEMBER countries such as the Congo, term, with anyBurma, Camwhere between OF DANDELION PROJECT bodia or Co5 and 15 people lombia to link attending genup with noneral meetings.

He said he thought recruiting profits in order to do on-themembers was no more difficult ground work or gain a better unthan for any other organization, derstanding of the issues abroad.

These and attributed trips are not lower numbers “My sense is that usually “volto being a very untourism,” specific, niche people can always be Friedman organization. more engaged, but said, but come The group from a place of has never re- my sense is also that genuine moceived any Dartmouth students tivation and criticism for curiosity about f o c u s i n g o n are far more engaged finding careers needs outside than the norm.” in internationthe United al affairs and States, he said. providing aid. “ I d o n ’ t -JEFFREY FRIEDMAN, He also added think by havthat these are ing this kind GOVERNMENT PROFESSOR often not easy of student trips to take, org anization which reflects we’re detracta lot on the ing from any motivation of other efforts the students that are goattending. ing on here on Friedman says he has also seen campus at Dartmouth,” he said.

“We’re simply adding a new orga- students go on to publish term nization that’s working towards a papers from his class dedicated to different cause, so I only see it as civil wars in Dartmouth’s foreign affairs journal or in other outlets, a positive thing.”

Sim is an international stu- which he said was less organized dent himself, hailing from New activism but still dedicated to the Zealand. He said that though cause and demonstrative of a selfDartmouth is more “progressive starter model of activism.

“I will say the students who and liberal” than any place he had experienced in the past, he come to my classes seem really thought even students coming from engaged in foreign affairs, and within the U.S. would experience particularly engaged in humania similar ideological shift. He said tarian issues,” he said. “A lot of Dartmouth’s environment fosters them really do have real knowledge conversations about political and about these things. My sense is social issues and has made him that people can always be more think more critically about them. engaged, but my sense is also that Sim said that he had become Dartmouth students are far more more active in political issues since engaged than the norm.”

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MICHAEL QIAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2016

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Women’s presence protested in ’70s FROM HISTORY PAGE 22

Activism hasn’t always been in the form of dramatic displays, such as the occupations of Parkhurst or rallies on the Green. Sometimes, campus activism has focused more on providing a space for new groups who become part of the Dartmouth community, such as women, who the College first admitted as full-time students in 1972.

“There was a contingent of men who were not happy to have women here,” Susan Ackerman ’80 now a religion professor at the College, said. “And they could be very vocal and in your face about it.”

In response, women seized on different methods of activism. For example, space in the Collis Center was designated as the Women’s Resource Center.

“It really was just a space for women to gather and have a space that felt safe and a place that a

minority group, and we were a minority group on campus, could call our own,” Ackerman said.

However, some approaches were more confrontational.

“The most activist response I can remember was that there were some ‘Take Back the Night Marches’ that happened in the late 70s, a major target of where those marches went was down frat row,” Ackerman said.

Women also took the initiative to establish sororities, starting with Sigma Delta which was formed in the fall of 1976 and winter of 1977, with its first members joining in Spring 1977.

Activism at the College hasn’t always been to enact change.

Sometimes, activists aim to preserve traditions on the campus.

The Dartmouth Review was founded in 1980 by Gregory Fossedal ’81, a conservative former editor of The Dartmouth. The newspaper focused on restoring what it saw as the worthwhile tradi-

tions of the College, be it a renewed focus on Western civilization in the curriculum, the return of Indian symbols, or the reinstatement of ROTC. The newspaper also stirred controversy soon after its inception.

It published a list of student officers in an organization called the Gay Student Alliance, when many of those officers had not come out to friends or family, in 1981, and an article critical of affirmative action entitled “This Sho Ain’t No Jive” in 1982, according to the memoirs of McLaughlin.

But, student activism in defense of tradition could have broader support than the often controversial Review.

In February 1999, after thenPresident James Wright and trustees announced the Student Life Initiative that would have put an end to the single-sex Greek system, the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council cancelled all Greek-sponsored SEE HISTORY PAGE 28

COURTESY OF RAUNER

Some of the first women at Dartmouth, who were admitted for the first time in 1972, stand outside Cohen Hall, a building in the Choates Cluster.

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“The culture at Dartmouth fosters activism.”

“Activism on campus is effective at enacting change.”

MICHAEL QIAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Data for these graphs were taken from 370 respones to a survey sent out by The Dartmouth three times in the previous week.

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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2016

Recent activism on campus covers a range of issues FROM HISTORY PAGE 25

Winter Carnival events. Instead of Carnival events, students held rallies at Psi Upsilon fraternity, replacing the traditional Keg Jump, and in front of the president’s house, 1,000 people protested. 83 percent of Dartmouth students supported the Greek system. The Student Life Initiative was not implemented in the end.

In recent years, activism at the College has used many of the same methods and tackle the same issues as activism of the past, while still bringing new issues and ideas to the foreground.

Here is a timeline of recent activism at the College: - April 24, 2013: Classes are can-

celled after protesters, organized as the group Real Talk, demonstrated at a Dimensions of Dartmouth show and subsequently received anonymous threats on the website Bored at Baker.

- April 25, 2013: Fifty students and faculty participate in a “Take Back the Night” march protesting sexual assault.

- May 23, 2013: Over 30 students and alumni file a Clery Act complaint against the College alleging Clery violations of sexual assault, hate crimes, bullying, hazing and LGBT, racial and religious discrimination.

- Feb. 10, 2014: Hundreds of students rally on the green against sexual assault after a student posted a step-by-step guide to assaulting a female member of the Class of

2017 on Bored at Baker.

- Feb. 24, 2014: A group of students release the “Freedom Budget,” an eight-page document outlining more than 70 demands to the administration concerning systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism and ableism.

- April 1, 2014: Students protesting the College’s response to the “Freedom Budget” occupy College President Phil Hanlon’s office for two days.

- May 1, 2015: 150 students march against police brutality and complicity and complacency at Dartmouth.

The next day, 20 students protest outside Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity’s Pigstick party and Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority’s Derby event.

- Oct. 8, 2015: Over 20 students

hold signs outside of a presentation titled “The College Rape Overcorrection,” featuring controversial Slate columnist Emily Yoffe, to express disagreement with her views.

- Oct. 12, 2015: Students tear down flyers encouraging students to celebrate Columbus Day with vintage Dartmouth Indian apparel that were hung all over campus the night before. The flyers were put up at the same time perspective Native students were on campus as part of the Native American Community program, formerly known as the Native American Fly-In Program.

The posting of the flyers followed a demonstration on the Green by Native American students the day before. Groups all over campus expressed outrage at the flyers and support for the NAD community

through campus emails.

- Nov. 12 2015: More than 150 students, staff and community members dressed in black and marched across campus in solidarity with the black communities of Yale University, the University of Missouri and the larger Black Lives Matter movement. While in Baker-Berry Library, some of the protesters allegedly directed profanities at students studying.

- February 2016: Student-run Divest Dartmouth has obtained 1,905 of the 2,000 desired signatures on a petition to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, calling for the College to withdraw investments and endowments from the top 200 fossil fuel extraction companies, including BP and Chevron.

COURTESY OF RAUNER

The current Afro-American Society emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at Dartmouth.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2016

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Alumnae discuss activism after Dartmouth PROFILE

By Abbey Cahill

Rianna Starheim ’14, avid traveler and human rights activist, believes in equality and freedom of speech. These concepts are pretty simple on paper, she acknowledges, but they are remarkably rare in the world.

“These are the issues I feel most interested in spending my life working on,” Starheim told me.

She said that these issues are global ones, noting that she has lived over 70 percent of the past six years out of the country.

The photos on her website are proof — they capture the stories of people and places around the world in vivid color, from Egypt to Taiwan to Italy, to her rural hometown, Jefferson, New York.

In fact, she wrote me from her current home in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she works as the managing director of a public relations and marketing firm called Rumi Consultancy. Rumi Consultancy is a social enterprise, which means it’s a for-profit company that works with a social mission.

Although Starheim worked with many non-governmental organizations during her time abroad in college, she participated in the Tuck School of Business’ Bridge business program during her senior winter and was immediately drawn to the idea of social enterprises.

“I fell in love with the efficiency and high standards of the for-profit world,” Starheim said. “Social enterprise is an ideal way to merge a social mission with a for-profit business.”

Both Starheim and her classmate Meghan Hassett ’15, public interest campaign organizer, are interested in fighting gender-based violence.

While she was at Dartmouth, Hassett was a part of Movement Against Violence, where she worked to change the conversation around the issue of sexual violence. Yet a lot of the time, she said, her demands for change took the form of impassioned rants on her Facebook wall.

She felt like she needed a more efficient outlet to voice her concerns. Hassett is currently working as a campaign organizer through a two-year fellowship program at We Are Impact.

“I thought just me at my Facebook being angry wasn’t going to resolve any issues, so I wanted to be a part of something that would really help,” Hassett said. “Impact doesn’t work on gender issues, but it is definitely a way to get started with activism.”

Impact, she explained, is a nonprofit that runs campaigns to take action against important issues like global warming, clean water and the influence of big money in politics. Impact does the active fieldwork for larger organizations like Environment America and the Public Interest Research Groups. It energizes and mobilizes citizens to enact change.

“One citizen might not be able to create significant change,” Hassett said. “But when you have hundreds and thousands of petition signatures and you have rallies

and tons of press around it, that’s when we really build momentum.”

Like Impact, the Santa Fe Dreamers Project is another organization that gives strength to individual voices. Allegra Love ’03 started the Dreamers Project after working in New Mexico public schools for years. During her time as a teacher, she saw first hand how talented immigrant students and their families were negatively affected by American immigration policies.

“Our immigrant youth have the potential to make our city, our state, and our country stronger,” Love said. “But some of them are not going to be able to do that when their hands are tied by an inhumane immigration policy.”

So, Love started the Santa Fe Dreamers Project to offer free legal representation to young immigrants. She calls them Dreamers.

Love explains that her clients qualify for Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals, an immigration policy for undocumented immigrants who entered the country younger than age 16 and before June 2017. DACA provides work authorization, a valid social security number and a reprieve from deportation.

“When we provide high quality legal services to help individuals access this tool, we empower them to achieve educational success, economic stability, and civic engagement,” Love said.

She speaks assertively, with quiet confidence, so it surprises me when Love admits that she wasn’t always this driven. She was not passionate about much during her time at Dartmouth, and she insists that she was a mediocre student. Love found it difficult to unearth that “spark” of inspiration that so many of her classmates seemed to have discovered in college. However, she reminds me that college does not necessarily dictate the rest of your life.

“Just because you lack the rigor for intense academics doesn’t mean you can’t go out into the world and kick ass on different terms,” Love said. “Not everyone is the most glorious version of themselves at 21.”

It wasn’t until years of working with the Santa Fe immigrant community that she began to truly understand the problems she was trying to solve and value the people who were affected by them. When she was at Dartmouth, Love explained, it was impossible to learn firsthand about issues of poverty and justice, because she was surrounded by wealth and privilege.

“I simply didn’t have any actual exposure,” Love said.

Starheim agrees that nothing beats real, firsthand experience. She encourages current students to travel outside of the Dartmouth bubble.

“Under the D-Plan, we have the opportunity to do something completely new every three months, with the safe landing pad of Dartmouth to fall back on,” Starheim said.

As a college student, Starheim spent an off term teaching at the School of Leadership Afghanistan, the only girls’ boarding school in Afghanistan. She recalls her experience there fondly. Although each of the girls’

lives had been touched by violence, Starheim remembers them burning the rice over dinner and watching movies and stressing over homework, just like girls anywhere else in the world.

One of her favorite memories was doing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge with them.

Twice, she noted with amusement, because the camera didn’t record the first time.

“The SOLA girls see the world with a bewildering mix of naïveté and clarity,” Starheim said. “My introduction to Afghanistan was through the eyes of some of its girls, and I am very lucky for that.”

Hassett also advises current students to get outside of their comfort zones.

“I was the economics major who did not do corporate recruiting at all,” Hassett said.

As a sociology and economics double major, Hassett was presented with interesting and often conflicting perspectives on the world.

“I’d go from one class that was all about maximizing profits, and then go to another class about how maximizing profits often leads to socioeconomic inequality,” Hassett said. “From those different perspectives, I got very interested in corporate accountability.”

Corporate accountability is the idea that we should be conducting business in a way that is sustainable, socially responsible, and environmentally friendly. Hassett became interested in the nonprofit world and took an internship with Corporate Accountability International during one of her off terms.

Later, she found Impact at a career fair and fell in love.

She explains that Impact’s strategy is all about leveraging people power to influence decision makers. A lot of the time, elected representatives and corporations don’t make changes unless voters and consumers start making their voices heard.

“Politicians want to make sure that the voters are on their side and corporations want to make sure that the customers are happy with their companies,” Hassett said.

“It is leveraging that and getting their self interests to align with the public’s interests.”

This past fall, for example, Impact persuaded the fast food chain, Subway, to go antibiotic free. Hassett explained that the use of antibiotics on factory farms contributes to a major health crisis. The prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is rising and actually killing thousands of Americans each year.

As the largest fast-food chain in the world, Subway’s decisions have a big impact on factory farms. Impact rallied Subway customers to call on the restaurant to take action and commit to banning antibiotics in their food.

“People are dying from antibiotic resistance, and we are one of the only groups working on that right now,” Hassett said.

“And we do it by building people power.

That’s pretty exciting.”

Working as an activist is grueling, she confessed, but the victories are always worth it. Starheim echoed Hassett’s sentiment.

“It’s hard to have those moments where you realize there is so far to go,” Starheim

said. “But then, think of how far we’ve come. One hundred years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was the norm in America. Last year, LGBTQ couples didn’t have the right to marry.”

For Starheim, there’s never a question of whether activism is worth it. Love agrees.

She is constantly humbled by the intelligence and resilience of the immigrants she works with. She recalled one case in particular, in which she fought for a client’s U.S. residency.

“There is a kid in my life, someone who is very special and smart and beautiful and very dear to me,” Love said. “He has suffered in ways none of us can imagine and was in danger of being deported to his home country which is a terribly violent place.”

Last September, after what Love described as a long legal nightmare, she drove to El Paso, Texas with him and appeared before a judge. His deportation was cancelled and he was awarded legal, permanent residency in the U.S. “I have never been so proud of myself and I was so proud of him and it has given me so much peace to know that he is so much safer now and that he is going to live a wonderful life,” Love said.

Interviewing these three women has been a deeply inspiring experience. I recently read a piece of creative nonfiction that Starheim wrote for English professor Jeff Sharlet’s class. It’s about a local Vermonter — a drug user, a mother, and a victim of domestic abuse. Something about her writing strikes me as so candid, unsparing of even the most thorny details, that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Starheim believes that writing is a great way to create social change.

“Writing skills are vital, no matter what you’re interested in after college,” Starheim said. “Write, write, write.”

Enacting social change is about putting yourself out there. It’s important to be heard, Love emphasizes.

“Don’t be afraid if you have an idea that is different or a solution that no one has tried before,” Love said. “We need big change in our country right now and that happens when people do brave things.”

Love is following her own advice. She’s in the process of an unusual undertaking: the conversion of an RV into a mobile legal clinic so that she can access clients living in rural areas in the southwest. She thinks that it defies most stereotypical ideas about lawyers.

“It’s going to be really wild and super fun and probably frustrating but definitely not lawyerly,” Love said.

I notice the same type of bravery and ambition in each of these alumnae which Hassett described perfectly at the end of her interview.

“It’s definitely hectic work and it’s very difficult and has crazy hours sometimes,” Hassett said. “But when we have something to celebrate, we really have something to celebrate. We literally save lives.”

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How effective is social media activism?

STORY

By Erin Lee

As Shonda Rhimes wrapped up her insightful Dartmouth commencement speech back in 2014, she slipped in a little zinger admonishing social media activism — “A hashtag is not helping.”

“Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter,” she said. “But a hashtag is not a movement.

A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything. It’s a hashtag. It’s you, sitting on your butt, typing on your computer and then going back to binge-watching your favorite show.”

Rhimes went on to encourage her young, Ivy League audience to instead go out and do something. But is Shonda right?

April Reign, creator of the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, said she has seen the power of social media and the influence that “hashtag activism” can have. She created #OscarsSoWhite in response to the lack of racial diversity in the 2016 Oscar nominations, sparking a national sensation.

Mainstream media picked up the hashtag, and some celebrities announced they would boycott the Oscars in protest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences eventually said it would make significant changes to its voting requirements and governing structure to work towards increasing the diversity of its membership.

“I think we can credit the conversations stemming from the hashtag and the issues behind it to making system change for the first time in the 80 year history of the Academy,” Reign said.

She said that young activists often use social media as a way to communicate, organize and raise awareness, citing the Black Lives

Matter movement’s active use of hashtags.

“We’re connected more by the internet than by a personal relationship or a geography,” she said. “Those who think hashtags don’t work or that young millennials are apathetic really haven’t spend a lot of time being a part of that, because it does exist and it is successful.”

Kevin Bui ’17 said social media works as a forum to share articles and contribute to a greater social conversation.

“I want to put a certain message out there through my social media and state what I believe about certain issues,” Bui said. “The majority of people won’t care, but what it can do is help challenge the people who do care to think about things in a new way or different way.”

Bui added that many young people are unaware of current social and political issues, which is something social media can help solve.

“I do think in general the current generation is more resistant to change and activism because the structural inequality we see today isn’t as blatant,” Bui said. “A lot of people think we have already achieved equality, which I don’t think is true.”

Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin said that historically, college students are generally not socially and politically active because they have other more immediate priorities.

“Most students at most times are apathetic in that whatever they think or think they think, they have other priorities besides stepping up and doing political work,” he said. “With the exception of episodic excitements, only a small percentage of students participate in any kind of political activity.”

“How effective do you think actvisim on social media is?”

Robert Wright ’18, a Dartmouth organizer for Bernie Sanders’ campaign, noted that many students are not as politically active because they are not immediately affected by policy changes.

“A lot of young people are already jaded and feel like no matter what they do nothing big is going to change,” he said.

Gitlin said he believes social media does not make a difference in levels of student activism, as many high points in student activism, such as the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s, occurred before the advent of social media and the internet.

“It could even be argued that social media makes it easier to pull people out to a single action,” he said. “It also inflates the feeling that the movement is already on top of its environment, that it’s got momentum.”

Gitlin added that popular social mediadriven movements, such as President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign or the Occupy Wall Street movement, tend to be short-term moments that can distract from enduring efforts.

“Social media are like wisps of oxygen — they get people excited but then they wear out,” he said.

However, Alcides Velasquez, communications professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, wrote in an email that his research shows social media does have a mobilizing effect among young adults, though the degree varies depending on the type of social media activity.

He said social media can make college students feel like they have a greater ability to effect change in the real world.

“Political uses of social media among col-

lege students increases how capable young people feel about achieving their own political objectives,” he said.

Velasquez said movements generated on social media do not often result in concrete, institutional change, though some do turn into offline movements. Perceptions of efficacy, social resources and the level of cohesion of the group all play a role into how successful a movement becomes, he said.

Avi Sholkoff, a first year student at the University of Michigan student, wrote a Huffington Post article advocating for hashtag activism in the midst of the 2014 uproar over events in Ferguson, Missouri. In an interview, he said social media can amplify awareness of issues, which sometimes translates to more legitimate action. He cited the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as a social media campaign that raised a significant amount of money for a cause, moving beyond the confines of the internet.

“Something I’ve learned in years with technology is that technology is a tool and not a toy,” Sholkoff said. “Social media can be fun, but it also is a tool to educate and advocate.”

Wright, who started the “Dartmouth Students and Staff for Bernie” Facebook group, said social media was an effective way to reach out to large groups of people, though it is more of a “means to an end.” The goal is to use social media to help recruit people to campaign door-to-door, phone bank and actually vote, he said.

“The only way to make a democracy work is to get off social media and do things in the real world,” he said.

“Have you ever posted anything on social media as a form of activism?”

MICHAEL QIAN/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

Data for this graph were taken from 370 respones to a survey sent out by The Dartmouth three times in the previous week.

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Through the Looking Glass:

Dartmouth is not for people like me COLUMN

By Kristina Williams

My freshman fall in 2012, Dartmouth seemed like an unreal experience to me. Even though I knew that the utopia Dartmouth presented to me was not for people like me, I wanted to believe in the dream. It was easier to tell my friends and family back home that Dartmouth was great than to tell them I would rather sleep on the floor next to my mother, grandmother and brother in our studio apartment again than to have my own room and my own bed while living in a space where I felt hyper-invisible and unwanted. I wanted to tell them that I felt more broken and hopeless at this institution then I ever had before. But, I didn’t want to disappoint them because I knew my story, a story of a Black girl from the Southside of Chicago who had gone to Dartmouth, is one that they took immense pride in. So, even though I knew Dartmouth’s utopia didn’t include people like me, I thought that I was going to have the opportunity to make it include people like me. I was wrong.

Just how wrong I was became more apparent with time, starting with my freshman spring. When the Real Talk protest happened, I watched my friends get verbally and physically attacked while daring to fight for their humanity. The Dartmouth administration criminalized them, denounced their character and gave them judicial sanctions all because they decided that their well-being on this campus as students of color was more important than a Dimensions dance show. I saw the evil stares that some white community members would give them and anyone associated with the movement whenever they walked into the Hopkins Center for the Arts or the library. I

read the emails and the Bored at Baker posts that threatened to rape them in their sleep. I watched my friends as they cried because everywhere on this campus they felt unsafe — unsafe in their skin, unsafe in their rooms, unsafe in their classrooms, unsafe when interacting with Safety and Security.

The white resistance that I experienced is called white backlash. According to Martin Luther King Jr., “The white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there.” This white backlash did not, however, make me stray away from fighting for justice. I made the decision that I would make my voice be heard and always speak truth to power on this campus.

It was in those moments of truth that I experienced backlash that hurt much more than that of whiteness. This backlash came from my own community. A backlash birthed in Black self-hatred and loathing, seeped in a long history of Black self-erasure in the face of white supremacy. I saw how the many fearless women of color were isolated and degraded by the vast majority of people of color on this campus. As a Black woman myself, this was a reality I could not escape.

When I began to protest, through demonstrations, through the sit-in in College President Phil Hanlon’s office, through advocating the “Freedom Budget,” through speaking out on Facebook, in The Black Praxis, a publication from the Afro-American Society, and in The Dartmouth Radical, I saw the same thing that happened to the upperclasswomen of color happen to me. When I dared suggest that

Black men be held accountable for their violent masculinity and that Black women be treated with respect from both white and Black men, I was met with resistance by all parties, including Black women. When I denounced the rape culture that penetrates every crevice of this campus, I in turn was denounced, debased, slandered and isolated by all parties. I have spent the last four years of my Dartmouth tenure being attacked because I love both Dartmouth and my community, but my love has not equated to complacency or silence or neutrality. I refused to allow them both to take comfort in my silence.

White patriarchal supremacy has always turned my community against itself by offering fleeting rewards and hollow security, and Dartmouth, as the seat holder of white supremacy, continues this legacy. Dartmouth has not been the almighty College on the Hill, and freedom has not rung from every mountainside surrounding Hanover.

Dartmouth has not been the number one undergraduate institution. Dartmouth has not been the leading school in LGBTQIA inclusivity and diversity. But, what Dartmouth has been is the college that will quickly expel Black students for misquotes in papers, but refuses to condemn men who are openly accused of rape and assault and will welcome those same men back to campus with open arms of forgiveness and praise. It is the college that ignores that institutional racism is embedded throughout the tenured process, disproportionately denying excellent faculty of color tenure. Dartmouth has the dubious record of having nearly the same number

of tenured track African American faculty now as in 1980.

This is the Dartmouth that allows it students to unabatedly splatter their racial hatred on the physical and social infrastructures of this campus, while its professors infuse their racial bigotry into our educational infrastructure. This is the Dartmouth that allows racism to run rampant on sites such as Bored at Baker and Yik Yak, where it is okay to tell “all niggers to go back to Africa” and “all faggots to rot in hell,” by saying that it’s simply freedom of speech. This is the Dartmouth that will then conversely demonize and allow the national demonization of its Black students who protest for a better life on this campus, students who only want to affirm their existence in this space! This is the Dartmouth that refuses to allocate adequate funds and resources to its students of colors but will spend $12 million to replace its football stadium. This is the Dartmouth that refuses to acknowledge its violent history, refuses to stop parading Native Americans around as the spoils of ancient conquest, refuses to recognize the Black men and women who built the foundation of this school. This is the Dartmouth where not even wealthy white women are safe at the bottom of fraternity basements. This IS Dartmouth; an institution that has ultimately failed and has shown no commitment to bettering the lives of its students of color, womyn, lower class and queer community, and as a Black woman, this is an institution that will always hate and marginalize me.

TIFFANY ZHAI/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

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Through the Looking Glass:

Activism as a radical form of self-acceptance COLUMN

By Kevin Bui

I am a foreigner. Yes, I may be a citizen and may have been born in the United States, but I am still foreign all the same. I don’t fit the cultural norms of an American society that has constantly tried to shape the person I am, to shape me into a passively obedient, productive member of American capitalism.

Yet, for most of my life I have tried. I have tried being quiet, being obedient. I have tried dating women. I have tried maintaining a low profile. And I have tried presenting in a masculine way. None of it helped. I was still a fish out of water, a person floundering in a society not made for them.

No matter what I tried, I could never reconcile the person I was with the person society wanted me to be. Even when I first came out as queer, I still tried desperately to hide it. To still fit in to heteronormative society. If I didn’t stand out, if I didn’t push back I thought I could still be accepted. I thought I could still be normal. But nothing I did, nothing I tried could change the sense of isolation I felt or my status as not just an outsider in society, but also a foreigner in my own body.

My first year at Dartmouth, I never felt like more of an outsider. On my First-Year Trip, as soon as I said I was from Taipei, Taiwan, I knew I was always going to be on the outside. Nobody understood my background, nobody understood my culture. I was clearly different, as illustrated by my trip leader’s comment that he didn’t know what to expect from me when he saw our information, I was the “wildcard.” When I heard that, I tried to laugh it off. I didn’t want to admit to him or to myself that I felt alienated. The experience that made everyone feel like Dartmouth was home made me feel more out of place than I ever had in my life.

Throughout my whole freshman year, I tried desperately to hide my queerness and Asian-ness. I thought that if I distanced myself from my race and sexuality, I could restore some sense of normalcy to my life.

Maybe I could fit in, maybe I could be normal. Instead I was miserable. I dreaded each day — every time someone told me I should major in economics so I could be successful, dress a certain way because that’s how the preppy boys dressed, or dance with girls at frat parties because that’s “what men do.”

It was exhausting, and in the end I couldn’t keep it up. It affected my mental health and the negativity it created in my mentality started to ruin the person I wanted to be.

My lack of self-confidence and my negativity made me a difficult person to be around.

I struggled with the dichotomy between presenting my identity and being accepted as “normal” in our community. It became a burden on my closest friends, as tending to my mental health became a chore because it was seemingly impossible for me to love myself. All of this was happening over a long period of time, but I was so consumed in myself and in my worries that I couldn’t notice what was happening right in front of me. My best friends tried their best to push me to find my own self-love, but no matter

COURTESY OF KEVIN BUI

Kevin Bui ‘17 talks about how one of the most radical forms of activism is learning how to love oneself.

how hard I tried, I couldn’t reconcile loving lower-income people and non-men have been the person I wanted to be with the fear of disregarded in American society and pushed being alienated from society. The weight of aside to maintain a status quo of supremacy. my self-hatred took a huge toll on me, and Social norms are a product of systematic opaffected my relationship with my best friends. pression, and when we uphold the status quo I couldn’t figure out how to wholly, genuinely we contribute to this cycle. Activism is about love someone else because I couldn’t find the radically challenging the normative structures strength to love myself. of society, and loving ourselves and our fellow No matter where I was or who I sur- marginalized communities enough to fight for rounded myself with I would always feel like a foreigner. My “People of color, queer lived persona and the idea of who people, non-men and all I want myself to be have been in a constant conflict, a constant other marginalized people — push back and forth between remember you are brilliant, you conformity and individuality. But lately, individuality has been win- are beautiful and you are worthy ning out. The strain created in my of loving yourself. I know it is close friendships has pushed me hard, I know it is a struggle to to think about the importance of self-love in my own perceptions. I love yourself when society tells am a Southeast Asian American, you not to.” queer, gender non-conforming person of color. Society has constantly engaged in the erasure of my narratives, and the narratives of my com- our place in society. munity. White, heteropatriarchal supremacy We are not the norm, we are always going to normalizes self-hatred in people like me, be foreigners in our society and we will never people who don’t fit into societal norms. be fully accepted by mainstream society. The To love my own identity in itself becomes a more we fight for our rightful place in society, radical act of resistance. the more people will push back against our very For me, that is what activism is about. It existence. But to exist in society is in itself a is about radically loving yourself and under- radical challenge to norms of society and to standing your identity, and fighting for your profoundly love ourselves is to actively push right and the right of other marginalized back against marginalization we are subjected communities to exist in society. People of to in an oppressive kyriarchy. To be proud of color, queer people, differently-abled people, our identities is to reject societal norms.

I am an Asian American, ethnically Vietnamese, queer, gender non-conforming person of color at Dartmouth. I don’t fit the mold of a Dartmouth student; I don’t fit the mold of what society has expected me to be since I was born. My presence and my existence are radical, active challenges to white, heteropatriarchal supremacy, a challenge to social norms that have been created to oppress us. But now, I embrace it. I no longer run away from my identity, no longer try to fit in to a society that wasn’t made for me. Because one of the important lessons I have learned about activism is the capacity for radical love of oneself. Love of those who are willing to fight for their right to thrive in an oppressive society, and love of all the beautiful queer people, non-men and people of color who everyday struggle to survive in a messed up world.

Activism is not just a protest — it is a constant state of revolution that builds up over time, a revolution to push back against the status quo. It is a state of perpetual growth and challenge, an active push to love ourselves enough to know our worth, to know our beauty. And ultimately, the knowledge that we deserve the same rights to thrive and flourish in American society as anyone else.

People of color, queer people, non-men and all other marginalized people — remember you are brilliant, you are beautiful and you are worthy of loving yourself. I know it is hard, I know it is a struggle to love yourself when society tells you not to. But loving yourself is sometimes the most radical, revolutionary act you can commit.