Political Atmosphere

half_baked
Tue, 16 May 2006 20:48:53 +0000

When i visited dartmouth, i got the feeling that it was one of the few truly political schools in the ivy league. there was a notable lack of the bleeding heart mentality that seems to be so ingrained in many of the other ivies. i think someone on CC somewhere put it correctly when he or she said that dartmouth’s student body is concerned less with the type of nebulous academia that’s so popular at other institutions and leans more towards figuring out how they, as students, fit into the world as they conceive it. in that way, i think you’ll find that politically, dartmouth is far more pragmatic, on both sides of the isle, than the other ivies.

in my opinion, pragmatism in political ideology and true debate over political differences breeds some of the most tenacious, rugged, and fierce intellectualism there is. i don’t think that speculating about a concept on a campus where the opposition to the concept, let alone demands for a means of actualizing it, are null helps individuals grow intellectually.

so what does all of that mean? it means that dartmouth is a school with an active and vocal base of both liberalism and conservatism. like many instiutions of higher learning, especially the more elite ones, dartmouth seemed to have a large number of very smart and articulate liberals. You can google the Dartmouth Free Press and read articles online, there are some really well thought-out essays in there. at the same time, the Dartmouth Review is an excellent independent conservative newspaper. i forgot exactly what it was, but i was told when i was there that a major national publication once picked up on a story first scooped by the DR, just to give you an idea about what a great paper it is, and the intellectual firepower that backs it. You should check out the Review’s website too and read articles. the breed of conservatism at Dartmouth is an extremely smart kind and the conservative student body is very able to articulate and debate with its liberal counterpart.

So in a nutshell, Dartmouth is a place without as many of the hopeless liberals or close-minded conservatives. It is, in my opinion, one of the truly political schools left in the ivy league, where most of the schools tend to settle for easy concensus rather than true debate. It is a school of pragmatic yet visionary liberals and intellectual yet staunch conservatives.

Oh, as a disclaimer, I’m not a student or an alum. I’m going to be at Dartmouth in the fall as a freshman, and i’ve visited the whole ivy league, and while i think what i said is valid and valuable, i don’t speak from the extensive experience that some of the other posters on this forum will surely have.