On Halloween weekend last year, a Dickinson student was dressed as Colin Kaepernick- blackface and all [Editor’s Note: this claim to blackface cannot be confirmed].  In the Fall of 2015 another Dickinson student wore a sombrero at an “around the world” party and posted a photo on Instagram with a caption making reference to green cards. By the time the current first-year class graduates in 2021, both of these ugly parts of Dickinson’s history will be largely unknown to the student body and will survive on campus only in the memories of faculty and staff.

Dickinson needs to better help students remember its past. This college is not just what we experience during our short four years on campus- it evolves. With one quarter of the student body being replaced every year, real change is hard to notice and landmarks on our own college timelines are quickly eroded. The Dickinsonian is a good resource for looking at current events, but it is difficult to use it as a glance into the past. Not every week has a landmark event, so sifting through past editions is not an easy way to learn about events that we hope to not repeat.

I recently spoke with a faculty member who said that they’ve seen the same scandals happen at Dickinson over and over again during their time here. The Halloween incident and the around the world party are just the two most recent. George Santayana famously wrote “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I am not confident that Dickinson will remember the two scandals I mentioned because I do not know what scandals have come before. If we have no knowledge of our past, we are unable to shape our future. More scandals are to come.

If we can find a way to make the less favorable parts of Dickinson’s past more accessible to students, we have an opportunity to make good out of bad by learning from our troubled past. Maybe we should invest our time and energy into creating a living timeline- something that can be edited and updated over time so that with each successive year, new Dickinson students will have a longer history to look back on. First-year students will be able to look further back in time than to what the seniors can remember. With more knowledge of our past, George Santayana may suggest, we will learn from it and avoid making the mistakes that past generations of Dickinsonians have made.