Muckraker Ida Tarbell’s striking image—Standard Oil Company as an octopus—might well apply to Dartmouth if scale and competency weren’t at stake. True, deep in bucolic New Hampshire, the corporation exerts a monopoly on student life, reaching greasy FoCo tentacles into every crevasse of our Keystoned lives. But something doesn’t match. Every tentacle seems fatter, with suction cups less efficient than the octopus of Standard Oil; every administrative action has its own separate calamari brain. We look more like a schizo-octopus, a fat starfish, than the big-eyed, helmeted monstrosity of the Tarbell days. If anything to cause revulsion abides at Dartmouth, it is by gross negligence rather than intent.

Recently a series of rapid, striking modifications began to transform the campus landscape. Not only has the Dartmouth Experience master plan brought new dormitories, academic buildings, and massive renovations to fruition, but the new climate of liberalism and activism has also caused both grassroots and institutional change in our public spaces.

When building for the future, problems don't come in all or nothing. Instead, they appear by degrees. The issue with Dartmouth's recent attempts to restructure its public space stems from its incompletion. Many new projects seem like empty shells, their surface hinting toward functionality, while their realization undermines their intent. Our public space has become a forum for many issues—diversity, sexual assault, and other worthy causes among them—but has it been well designed? And how do the new buildings, which bring perhaps the most overarching changes to Dartmouth, stand up to their predecessors?

This fall I spent much of my time at Georgetown, whose stunning castle stands out, an architectural beauty among the smaller flats of the surrounding city. At Dartmouth, Baker tower and other older structures serve a similar function. Extremely functional, they are also designed to impress, doubling as a symbolic, visual stand-in for the College itself.

Walking among the new buildings, however, one gets only a sense of copied design. Something strikingly corporate grinds against the Dartmouth grain. Despite the use of copper, bricks, and their stunning size, they seem only functional, somehow unaesthetic, their boxlike structure the first thing one notices when one walks among them. Dartmouth College has built for the future by repeating a design that seems somewhat less virile this time around.

Haldemann and Kemeny’s architecture seems, from the outside, the most promising, but appearances can be deceiving. The materials inside seem obviously cheap, the wood reminiscent more of balsa than any other materials. The bricks and cinderblocks that line the whitewashed walls are barely obscured. The white paint and plaster congeal at some of the edges, forming globules that indicate the building’s hasty construction. In Haldemann’s basement, the new auditorium leaves much to be desired. The design scheme in itself seems garish, seemingly copied, albeit not so well from the basement seminars of the Rockefeller Center. But looking closely, the perhaps fake-looking wood is uneven at points, as though it were glued together without a level. It pains me that these buildings were designed to survive generations of Dartmouth students.

But perhaps the most egregious addition to Dartmouth life currently sits in front of McNutt. The Inuksuk statue, which sits boldly in front of the green, is slightly taller than a person and resembles one, a rock pile that recalls a designed cairn. The work, commissioned specifically for our school, seems on the surface conceptually sound. Dartmouth College offers the following press release: "Some Inuksuik [plural] have windows, indicating that they point to something important," [artist Peter] Irniq says. "Through the window of this Inuksuk, students can see from the admissions office across to the place where they will one day graduate from Dartmouth. They'll be able to look at their futures and to contemplate what they might do." Despite having no reason to question the integrity or sincerity of the artist’s work, something unsettles me about the work.

Indeed to many the installation appeared to be a top down approach to a political quandary. How would Dartmouth College repair its reputation with the Native American community and the community at large after a fall term that rained disaster? Perhaps it is our duty to express solidarity as a community with the Native Americans. But can the governing institution of a group assumedly containing the members who insensitively targeted the Native American community express true solidarity by institutionally deciding to commission a monument?

Dartmouth College eschewed this question when it placed the Inuksuk in front of McNutt. Worse yet, the sculpture somehow landed in front of the Admissions office. Its intent, at least by one account, is hardly obscured. In its current position it serves as blatant advertisement for prospective students: “We have finally resolved our Native American issues. You are welcome here.” But the combination of event, commission, location leaves one tasting only the bitterly commercial. Art for propaganda purposes has a long tradition. But that doesn’t make it right.

To my surprise the shirts first appeared in College residence halls a week ago, their bright tableau startling against the white walls. A part of a project that began 17 years ago with "Take Back the Night" in Hyannis, Massachusetts, several UGAs were asked to hang these shirts on their floors in order to raise awareness of the sexual assault issue at Dartmouth. Victims painted these shirts, and they are angry, self-consciously so. As the accompanying paper explains, they express "Feelings of anger, frustration, and pain."

Some of the inscriptions, however, seem needlessly inflammatory. One pink shirt proclaims "How long until the scales tip the right way?" with an accompanying picture of a balance, the symbol for male outweighing the one for female. Another asks "Why do men find it fun to FUCK a woman who can't speak, respond, move? Did you think I wouldn't remember?"

Yet with so much anger in a public space, how can one respond with anything but revulsion? Do these expressions add anything to the public debate? Or do they merely polarize an already polarized student body. In my opinion, this form of anger has no place in our living spaces, in our homes. Moral outrage always plays an important role when mobilizing people and affecting change. But the type of anger that alienates, that marginalizes, lashing out irrationally without being carefully tailored in both expression and intent, only undermines the causes it claims to pursue. Casting a black and white world in which only victims and perpetrators abound only stalls achieving legitimate goals. Affecting change on the issue of sexual assault must be done, but we must be careful of how we do it.

All these incidents have one thing in common. They represent easy solutions to serious problems. They are in a sense two-dimensional. On the surface they solve their problem, yet a host of subordinate issues wait beneath. But as we build for a better, brighter institutional future, we must care for how we do so. Those tough choices will, in the end, make all the difference.