From a reader:

I graduated from Dartmouth.  I love the place.  I see its flaws.  I think it needs Christ.  Yet the approach taken by the Student Assembly president in his convocation speech (see below) seems VERY misguided to me.  Am I a weak-kneed Catholic who just believes in tolerance?  Or is this a justified reaction on my part to what seems to be the wrong place at the wrong time?

What I take to be the Student Assembly president’s speech is here:

http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2005/09/20/noah_riner_06_welcomes_class_of_09.php

(Here is the version on the college website:  http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/09/20c.html

Reaction is here:

http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2005092101010

And here:  http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2005092202010&sheadline=&sauthor=&stext=riner

Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. In the Garden of Gethsemane, just hours before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed, "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That’s character.

Jesus is a good example of character, but He’s also much more than that. He is the solution to flawed people like corrupt Dartmouth alums, looters, and me.

It’s so easy to focus on the defects of others and ignore my own. But I need saving as much as they do.

Jesus’ message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn’t have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God’s love: Jesus on the cross, for us.

In the words of Bono:

[I]f only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. …When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s—- and everybody else’s. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that’s the question.

You want the best undergraduate education in the world, and you’ve come to the right place to get that. But there’s more to college than achievement. With Martin Luther King, we must dream of a nation – and a college – where people are not judged by the superficial, "but by the content of their character."