A male student at Dartmouth College is facing a significant backlash to an op-ed he wrote in a student newspaper criticizing a campus program that hires mostly female students.
Dartmouth College Student Ryan Spector wrote a column in the Dartmouth College student newspaper, criticizing the college’s “Trips” program — which helps incoming students adjust to college life — for its nearly 5 to 1 hiring imbalance in favor of women.
“This year, the Trips directors’ obsession with diversity verges on the inane. Described as ‘majority female’ in The Dartmouth, this year’s directorate, excluding Pierson and Rodriguez-Caspeta, is nearly 80 percent female,” Spector wrote. “Yes — of the 19-person Trips directorate, there are merely four males on the staff.”
Spector provided a quote from the “Trips” program directors who claimed that all hiring decisions were made based on “merit” alone.
“Credentials matter not, but skin tone, womanhood, and claims of marginalized status do,” Spector continued. “[the program’s directors] may believe in merit, but it is a twisted form of it, a pernicious theory that sees race, gender and identity as dictating qualification. In the eyes of genuine, concerned progressives, this is called prejudice. This is what it looks like to systematically devalue minorities, to reduce them to nothing but a plate on the diversity buffet.”
“I support affirmative action-style policies,” Spector added. “But I do not support the extreme application of a diversity policy. And I do not support a directorate that is unrecognizable as representatives of Dartmouth’s student body.”
Spector immediately faced a backlash for his column. Close to 40 student organizations published statements condemning Spector for his op-ed. A column in the Dartmouth student newspaper penned by two professors of government listed some of the terms that had been used to describe Spector. One student even accused Spector of “endangering lives.”
Yet in their criticism of the column, and of The Dartmouth for publishing it, many (though not all) Dartmouth organizations escalated the rhetoric further, decrying Spector and his column as “hateful,” “toxic,” “vicious,” “privileged,” “ignorant,” “patriarchal,” “white supremacist,” “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobic,” “oppressive” and “endangering lives.”
As a result of the backlash, the editorial team at the Dartmouth distanced themselves from Spector’s column, claiming that it does not represent the team’s views. “Guest columns, and any column published in The Dartmouth not under the authorship of ‘The Dartmouth Editorial Board,’ do not represent the views of the newspaper or the editors who worked to bring it to publication,” they wrote.