<p>This just in:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Most kids at Dartmouth are good kids – bright, honorable, hard-working, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>The behavior at the squash match went beyond standard heckling to sexist and anti-Semitic behavior. Calling girls sluts and whores and asking the Jewish kid about his business ethics are not the same as yelling airball when a basketball player misses.</p></li>
<li><p>The behavior was so far across the line that there wasn’t anyone there (heckler or non-heckling spectator) who didn’t or shouldn’t have known that it was unacceptable. I don’t buy the “we didn’t know the norms of behavior” excuse. I agree that another batch of sensitivity training is not the solution. Everyone there had to know, at a certain point, that this behavior was unacceptable.</p></li>
<li><p>Ivy bands are tasteless (usually and funny sometimes) but their behavior is different than sexist or racist slurs directed at individuals. </p></li>
<li><p>There are bigots at all of these fine institutions. If you search for racist incidents at X, you will find newspaper articles, etc. about all of these schools. </p></li>
<li><p>The real question for President Kim is whether this was just a few rotten apples or whether there is something institutional that enables this behavior to emerge. That is to say, are there individuals at other schools including Harvard who might engage in this behavior but are restrained by norms or institutions that are stronger there than at Dartmouth? I’m not a Dartmouth hater and my son almost went there so this isn’t an exercise in schadenfreude but instead an attempt to be diagnostic. </p></li>
<li><p>Again, bigots and rude people exist at all schools. I suspect that there is something in the culture/institution at Dartmouth that hasn’t stamped this kind of behavior out. My really informal survey from Google searches that many of the racist incidents at Ivies were individual but that there was a higher prevalence over the years of semi-organized incidents at Dartmouth, sometimes connected to the Dartmouth Review. For example, if I remember correctly, there was a wildly conservative fringe at Dartmouth of students and alums often gather around the Dartmouth Review that in the old days said pretty offensive and sometimes racist stuff. There were conservatives at other schools (Sam Alito, for example) who did not cross the line to offensive so blatantly. </p></li>
<li><p>If that is true, the question is why Dartmouth has had a harder time quashing semi-organized bad behavior. One observation that I heard from students last year was that fraternities and sports teams at Dartmouth seem to have a relatively more prominent role in social life and social status. Organized groups with tight cultures can foster behavior that individuals would be more cautious about undertaking on their own. This might make it easier to commit these acts and harder to censure the actors in the past and the fringe alums/Dartmouth Review have been there to defend them. By the way, I’m not castigating athletes (I was one), just commenting on the effects of organizations with tight cultures (and probably hazing rituals of one sort or another). To the extent that bad actors have not been castigated as fully there as elsewhere (a hypothesis), they are more likely to recur. If so, there is an institutional problem that cannot be addressed by sensitivity training. Pulling the charter of the fraternity for a year, if it were deemed to have been a player, or possibly censuring the soccer team in some way if its players were the key actors, would send a much stronger message. A teaching moment where the lessons come from actions rather than words.</p></li>
</ol>