by Noelle Blake
art by Rachel Roncka
I: The Institution
The myth of academia promises community in the liberal arts institution: students from a wealth of backgrounds, like-minded in their intellectual curiosity, come together and learn about themselves and each other through the passionate pursuit of knowledge. University in practice falls short of this promise. While disillusionment is not uncommon in academia, it carries greater pain for women, people of color and queer people. It threatens the community that sustains the oppressed.
Dartmouth College functions as a corporate institution. The community that this institution promotes — the coinciding, but ultimately individual striving for excellence at all costs — is antithetical to community as a supportive network, a lifeline, a collective. Meaningful community, community in which solidarity is possible, must be rooted in what belle hooks characterizes as “interests, shared beliefs, and goals around which to unite.”[1] In the corporation-controlled private university, unity under shared goals is not possible. Through the expectation of “academic excellence,” the institution promotes competition and divides common interest.
It is one thing to acknowledge the institution of the university, especially the private university, as incapable of promoting collective good and unity; it is another thing to find that it never actually claims to do so. In reality, Dartmouth College’s mission is geared towards “educating the most promising students and preparing them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.”[2] There is no promise of community, other than the intellectual community, which is hardly a community at all. The promise is to our benefactors, that the institution will produce leaders that will return on their investments.
Our motto, “vox clamantis in deserto,” rings true in the worst way.[3] The institution encourages individualism, but individual voices go unrecognized. Only a select few — those who reflect the excellency that Dartmouth demands through their economic capital or legacy status — are heard, let alone considered. The feelings of isolation that persist on this small campus are symptomatic of a community that neglects care in favor of optimization.
By and large, the students of Dartmouth College adopt the attitudes of the institution. They are taught to care about one another, in terms of what their peers possess and how they might gain from it; they are not taught to care for one another. In the same way that community is thought of narrowly (i.e. existing at Dartmouth is sufficient engagement with the community), alternative conceptions of power, such as the creative and life-affirming power that might challenge traditional patriarchal systems, are dismissed by the institution.[4] Students are equipped to become powerful, in the traditional sense of power as domination and control.
This erasure of value conceived outside of traditional structures of power is harmful to every person who strives to succeed by traditional means. Dartmouth’s expectation of excellence is meaningless as a metric of success. In a 2017 linguistic study about the prominence of the word “excellence” in academia, researchers Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, and Damian Pattinson determined that “‘excellence’ is primarily a rhetorical signaling device used to claim value across heterogeneous institutions, researchers, disciplines, and projects rather than a measure of intrinsic and objective worth.”[5] The emphasis on heterogeneity is particularly notable; difference and inequality are prerequisites for excellence in the academy. The goals of students as “leaders” must be achieved at the expense of their peers.
Even worse is the harm for those who attempt to participate in this traditional power structure while having an identity historically disenfranchised by power systems. As belle hooks theorizes in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center regarding white feminists of the 1970s, marginalized identities can use institutional power to gain purchase in larger spheres, but only through “embracing, supporting, and perpetuating the dominant ideology of the culture,” which continues to oppress them. This is the paradoxical problem with cultivating community with the shared goal of individual excellence. While a marginalized person may attain traditional success through corporate institutions like Dartmouth, the systematic harm persists. They are told that their success in using the master's tools is the rule and not the exception.[6]
II: The Resistant Collective
To reduce the harms of the corporate institution, we must reject excellence and turn our attention to a collective struggle for autonomy, justice, and safety. When feeling the pressures of the institution, we turn to each other. The creative power that comes from the collective challenges the oppression we face as we’re made to feel individual, isolated, and worst of all, invisible. Farnush Ghadery, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Rohini Sen detail this acute sensation within academia, stating that “neoliberalism [in the university] forces us into an isolationist, individualist conception of labour where structural inequality is made invisible and a politics of care untenable.”[7]
[1] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, (South End Press, 2000), 67.
[2] Dartmouth College, “About,” Dartmouth, 2024, https://home.dartmouth.edu/about.
[3] Jonathan Good, “Notes from the Special Collection: The Dartmouth College Seal,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 37, no. 2, April 1997, https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/Library_Bulletin/Apr1997/Good.html.
[4] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, (South End Press, 2000), 87.
[5] Samuel Moore et al., ““Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3, no. 16105 (July 2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105.
[6] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series), (Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2007), 110-114.
[7] Farnush Ghadery, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, and Rohini Sen, “Collaborative Praxis: Unbinding Neoliberal Tethers of Academia,” Feminista, May 6, 2021, https://feministajournal.com/collaborative-praxis-unbinding-neoliberal-tethers-of-academia/.
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