Volume CXXXIII, Number 14 February 1, 2002 f

Closing the Orient's books

The Orient has never been an entirely autonomous organization-its advertising and subscription revenue has always been supplemented by grants from the SAFC and its predecessor, the Blanket Tax Committee-but we have, until last week, maintained a considerable degree of financial independence with our off-campus bank account.

Having unrestricted money, outside of the College's control, is a benefit to the newspaper as a safeguard on editorial integrity. For fear of becoming a happy newsletter (like the alumni magazine), it is always to our benefit to retain distance from the College administration, as well as its accounting system.

When we closed out the off-campus bank account (see Editors' Note), we lost that distance, but, more importantly, we lost the ability to make our own decisions, and we lost stake in our own organization. The closing of the bank account is unfortunate but inevitable: it follows the destructive trend of the College increasingly controlling all aspects of students' lives.

The decision to close out the account and reorganize the Orient's finances was unilateral: the Orient editors were never consulted on the matter prior to our receiving an email (just after we had all left campus last May) detailing the new way to run our organization. Granted, this email came from SAFC chair on behalf of the SAFC, which is considered to be a student-controlled group. But the SAFC is a function of the Administration, as the director of Student Activities sits on it. The SAFC cannot be student-controlled until it runs itself, without an administrator sitting in on its sessions and influencing decisions.

When the College did away with fraternities not long ago, much more was lost than its social structure. Students lost the ability to control their own lives, to make their own decisions without the approval or oversight of some administrator on campus. Administrators control the culture of Bowdoin College through Res Life, Dining Services, Student Activities, the deans offices, Security, and so on. The Administration of Bowdoin College has, in the past few years, taken over so many aspects of our lives, that we no longer have real responsibilities, other than simple ones handed to us in the form of classwork.

The worst thing about the loss of autonomy-and responsibility-at Bowdoin is that the younger classes do not even know what it means to have it. And they therefore cannot know that they lack it. The Orient may quite possibly be the last organization at Bowdoin to know what autonomy means.
Incoming students might think, for example, that the social house system offers autonomy, but that's only because they don't know any other system. Students leave the strict, tightly-controlled world of high school and enter an only slightly less-controlled world of college. It used to be different-even two years ago-and students once controlled the culture of Bowdoin College.

This is no longer the case, but only the upper classes, the last generation of the phased-out Bowdoin culture, know this.

In order for students to care about an organization, they need to have a stake in it. They need to be fully responsible for everything related to it-both successes and failures-and they need to have some incentive to keep an organization alive. Increasingly, students have no stake in their organizations, which explains why so many are foundering or short-lived, rarely living past the legacy of the one or two students who founded them. This is no wonder, as organizations no longer belong to the students who "run" them.

A few years ago, the key word was "ownership"-realizing that the social houses were not succeeding, students were asked how they could feel "ownership" of their social houses. The answer was, and still is, autonomy. We're only beginning to see the detrimental effects of a non-autonomous system in which a moralizing administration runs the whole show but defers all significant liability. The years ahead will reveal the damage in yet undetermined ways.

-NJL, BJL, & JMF

Maybe we editors aren't so 'highly able'

In last week's Orient, Assistant Professor of Economics Gregory DeCoster and Visiting Instructor of Economics Jim Hornsten made a number of assumptions regarding grades and their correlation to student "ability."

Specifically, they said that "nearly everyone receives high grades regardless of ability," and thus grades have ceased to really mean anything. What is reflected in grades, according to them, is that "the few students whose transcripts notably lack 'As' are quite unlikely to be high ability."

It would almost appear as if the professors had in fact interviewed all straight-A students and determined that yes, in fact, they all were smart, and after interviewing all of the students with Cs on their transcripts, it was undeniable that they were in fact all quite stupid.

But this could certainly not be the case. Or if it were, then they obviously forgot to come interview a few of us on the Orient staff with less than stellar GPAs. I'm sure that if they had, they would recognize that we're really not stupid at all. It just happens that we have a number of other things that we enjoy doing, including producing this newspaper, and there's simply not always the time, or even the desire, to be a straight-A student.

The professors in general seem to have confused a person of "high ability" with a person of intelligence, whereas a better definition would be a person both desirous of good grades and with the professional skills to attain them. The simple fact is that making good grades requires not so much intelligence as it does an understanding of how to take tests, how to write on particular subjects for certain professors, and how to say just the right things (both in quality and in quantity) during class discussions.

The problem is that truly intelligent students share a tendency to have a wide range of interests, and professional classroom skills is often not one of them. That in no way means, though, that such students could not, if they so chose, do just as well as the average straight-A student. They may very well possess equally "high abilities."

Although the professors did say that students with "high ability" often see little purpose in "excelling," it is likely that their idea of "excelling" is an "A+" over an "A-," whereas most normal people would be content with excelling via any sort of "A."

The result of these students not striving after the "A+," according to the professors, is "a decline in the intellectual environment at the College." This could not be further from the truth. There is no sort of intellectual benefit to be gained from students reading every single word any professor ever tells them to read, twice, just to make sure they understood it all. Nor is there anything to be gained from students spending twelve hours a day in the library essentially attempting to commit everything to memory so that if the professor asks a question, the student will be able to answer without hesitation and thus "excel."

It is a widely-held misconception that students are here for one reason and one reason only-to work as hard as they can in all of their classes so that they can get the best grades possible. If this were the case, we would all do just as well to have the academic departments of Bowdoin put on a CD and shipped home to us for $10, as if we were taking correspondence courses.

Very few of us ended up in Maine by accident. Very few of us are part of student organizations because we tripped on a table at the Student Activities Fair and accidentally scribbled our name on some sign-up sheet. Very few of us go to dinner in Portland on the weekend because we're working on some sort of psych research project (although I'm sure a few of us do).

Academics is only one of many, many things that we do at this College, and to assume that all students, or at least the smart ones, are completely focused on "excelling" in academics is a serious mistake. And to accuse those of us who do not excel of causing "a decline in the intellectual environment at the College" is insufferable. Without us, the "environment" would not extend past the library walls.

-BJL