Faculty
As in past years, several members of the Dartmouth faculty put theories to the practical test by running for state office in New Hampshire and Vermont during last month's elections. They scored three wins against two losses.
In Vermont, Frank Smallwood '51, the Orvil E. Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs, actually outpolled President Nixon in Windsor County to win a seat in the Green Mountain State's Senate. Running on the Republican ticket, he polled 12,936 votes to 12,420 for Mr. Nixon. For Professor Smallwood, an authority on urban problems and also chairman of the board of trustees of Vermont State Colleges, the election campaign was in part a sabbatical leave project, from which he acknowledges he has learned a lot "not in any textbook."
On the New Hampshire side of the river, David J. Bradley '38 (D), author of No Place to Hide, former Dartmouth skiing great and now lecturer in effective writing and speaking at Tuck School, and David C. Nutt '41 (R), Research Associate in Geography, were elected to the state's General Court or House of Representatives.
On the short end of the count for a state senate seat in New Hampshire's fifth district was Robert H. Guest, A.M. '63, Professor or Organizational Behavior at Tuck, who lost in a challenge to Republican David H. Bradley '58 of Hanover, former Big Green quarterback who has maintained close Dartmouth connections as an attorney for the College.
A victim, in part, of a redisricting was Economics Professor John A. Menge (D) of Lyme, one of the state's leading tax reform authorities, who missed reelection by only 20 votes.
Of faculty interest also is the election of Marion Copenhaver, wife of Biology Prof. John H. Copenhaver Jr. '46, to the New Hampshire General Court. She proved to be Hanover's top Democratic vote-getter in the race for the General Court.
Four faculty members had key roles in Dartmouth Conference VII, an unofficial dialogue between leading citizens of the Soviet Union and the United States on major issues of concern to both countries, held on the campus for four days earlier this month.
Rapporteurs at three of the sessions of the conference were Wayne G. Broehl Jr., Professor of Business Administration at Tuck School; George Kalbouss, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature and Language and a former director of Dartmouth's summer Russian Study Program; and David T. Lindgren, Assistant Professor of Geography.
Among the 20 eminent American scientists, businessmen and government leaders who met with a similar group from the Soviet Union was Gordon J. F. McDonald, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Environmental Studies and Policy and director of Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program. Among the topics discussed at the conference were trade, environmental protection, and measures to reduce international tension.
The conference, sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, is the seventh since the first one was held at Dartmouth in 1960. Since then, it has been held at irregular intervals at other sites, alternating between this country and the Soviet Union, but has retained its name as the Dartmouth Conference. The seventh conference marked the first return to the Dartmouth campus.
Complementing her husband's contribution to East-West understanding, Mrs. Nancy Lindgren designed, turned and fired in her own kiln stoneware patio lanterns as gifts from the Kettering Foundation for all the participants. The lanterns, designed for candles, featured depictions of Dartmouth Hall and St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, symbolizing the home countries of the two groups.
The intensive language training methods developed by John A. Rassias, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature, will be developed for "export" under a grant of $52,380 to Dartmouth from the Esso Education Foundation.
Professor Rassias, director of the College's program of foreign language study abroad, has been working since 1968 on the project, which involves methodology, materials presentation, and techniques in language teaching, under an original grant of $48,000 from the foundation.
The foundation, now eager to see the results of his work disseminated as widely as possible, is encouraging Professor Rassias to produce professionally a 16 mm. film, demonstrating the methodology, philosophy and evolution of the language training program both at Dartmouth and its foreign language center in Bourges, France. In addition, he will write a monograph explaining the philosophy of his language teaching techniques, which he calls "a radical approach to an old problem—teaching languages."
Professor Rassias, a recent recipient of the E. Harris Harbison Award for gifted teaching from the Danforth Foundation, is also the co-author of a book which for the first time structures a conversational approach to learning demotic or popular Greek.
For the second time in two years, Jon Appleton, Associate Professor of Music and director of Dartmouth's electronic music studio, has been named an ASCAP award winner for achievement in music.
This time Mr. Appleton, who is also a composer, was selected by an independent panel of distinguished authorities for the award in recognition of the critical acclaim that greeted his composition, "Bremen Town Musicians," a charming concerto for toy instruments, at concerts in 19 cities across the country during the past year. The concerto is scheduled to be played again in March at Bowdoin College by pianist Richard Bunger who commissioned the work.
In 1970, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) also presented an award to Professor Appleton for the orginality of a then newly released record of his electronic music compositions entitled "Appleton Syntonic Menagerie."
A second ASCAP award winner this year is Ronald Perera, now teaching music at Smith College, who spent the academic year 1970-71 at Dartmouth as a visiting professor and co-authored with Professor Appleton a book on electronic music, entitled The Development and Production of ElectronicMusic, to be published next year by Prentice-Hall.
Another Dartmouth artist cited recently is Varujan Boghosian, Professor of Sculpture, whose one-man exhibit at the Alpha Gallery in Boston last month (November) was hailed by art critics. Referring to Professor Boghosian's assemblages of "found" objects into montages keyed by titles to the Myth of Orpheus, Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe wrote, for example, that "his art transforms dolls, boards and pennies, which lose their identity and accumulate new dimensions of poetic mystery."
The board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has elected President John G. Kemeny a Fellow of the association in recognition of his contributions to the advancement of science as a mathematician and computing authority. Coincidentally, President Kemeny's 13th book, Man and theComputer: A New Symbiosis, has just been published by Charles Scribner's Sons. The book is based on ideas and concepts he enunciated a year ago when he gave the three "Man and Nature Lectures" at the invitation of the Museum of Natural History in New York.
In the realm of bookmanship, James W. Fernandez, Professor of Anthropology, is at work on a book about his field studies in Spain last year on the impact of technological change on two pastoral communities in the remote Asturian Mountains.
Professor Fernandez, whose previous work on the role of change amid traditional societies in Africa has resulted in several articles and monographs, is convinced his studies have relevance to a fast-changing and sophisticated modern society troubled by the implications of Toffler's Future Shock.
By a careful comparative analysis of the differing impacts of change on two relatively simple Spanish communities in adjoining mountain valleys, he hopes he may throw more light on the disquieting and complex forces at work in America and the West.
In both communities, economic and other pressures are forcing wage-earners to shift from their traditional livelihoods raising cattle in the mountain pastures to burrowing deep in the earth to mine recently discovered coal deposits. One community has adapted to the change and remained intact and vital, while the other is breaking up under the pressure to adjust their ways of life, and Professor Fernandez is now analyzing his data to find clues as to why. In gathering his material, he lived with the cattlemen and their families in the mountain homes shared with their cattle, climbed with them to the high summer pastures, and scythed hay for winter fodder. He also awoke at dawn to go down into the mines, and worked with the miners in 60-degree seams no more than 18 inches high to experience their lives as well.
As a side project, he became fascinated with the Asturian Mountain cow, one of the earliest domesticated cattle which now seems threatened by the changing environment, and Professor Fernandez is working on ways to protect and improve the breed. His research while on sabbitical leave was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.
Benjamin I. Page, Assistant Professor of Government, has been awarded a research training fellowship by the Social Science Research Council for the current academic year. The fellowships are given annually to a "small number of individuals who have shown unusual aptitude and commitment" to underwrite special preparation for innovative careers as social scientists. The fellowships are designed to cover research training outside the normal scope of doctoral programs in the scholar's field.
Robert E. Huke '48, Professor of Geography and chairman of the department, was a member of the Commission on College Geographers who met last month in Miami in one of a series of workshops intended to improve the teaching of geography at the college level. For the commission, established by the Association of American Geographers under a National Science Foundation grant, Professor Huke prepared a seven-page working paper defining the discipline as a way of getting a handle on the problem.
And in mid-December, he will change both pace and locale, traveling to the University of Nebraska to conduct a remote demonstration of the use which the Geography Department at Dartmouth makes of the computer in teaching.
Using a teletype terminal connected by long-distance telephone lines to the Kiewit Center at Dartmouth, Professor Huke will demonstrate two different computer games—one on land-use developed by Geography Professor John Sommers '60, and another on rice- growing which he developed—and several other computer-assisted-instruction (CAI) programs which he also authored. The games and CAI programs typifying the many uses the various departments are finding for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), have attracted widespread interest among geographers.
Gregory S. Prince Jr., an assistant dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, has been named Acting Affirmative Action Officer for the College.
In his new position under an interim appointment, pending selection of a full-time Affirmative Action Officer, he will monitor and assist in the implementation of Dartmouth's Affirmative Action Program for equal opportunity employment. Mr. Prince, a scholar in American studies and former Director of Dartmouth Summer Programs, will continue as an assistant dean of the faculty.
Like any good coach, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics likes to "go" with a winner, as often as possible. Of its eight regional meetings this academic year, the Council has prevailed upon Ernst Snapper, the Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics, to speak at three of them—in Tuscon on February 17; Philadelphia, March 16, and Charleston, S.C., April 6. He will speak on the "Euclidean Group" in Tucson and Charleston and "Transformational Geometry" in Philadelphia.
For Prof. James A. Sykes, concert pianist and authority on the Romantic period of music, the busy rhythm of his life has scarcely skipped a beat during this year of leave before his retirement in June.
Following visits and appearances in Luxembourg, Paris and London, Professor Sykes traveled to Bucharest, Rumania, to give three piano recitals at the new Cultural Center there last month (November) under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency. It was his fifth overseas tour for USIA or the State Department since 1952, and he featured modern American as well as classical music in his concerts, ranging from an all-Schumann program through the jazz of Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, Jelly Roll Morton, and Gershwin to serious contemporary music of America, including that of Charles Ives, Aaron Copeland and Robert Martin whose "Birthday Song" was dedicated to Sykes.
In an interesting example of mutually reinforcing town-gown cooperation, several members of the Dartmouth faculty are cooperating with the Dresden (Hanover and Norwich) School District in a series of courses to prepare a sizable group of teachers and teacher aides for teaching environmental studies at all grade levels from first to twelfth.
Among the faculty contributing to the teaching program are Biology Profs. William Reiners and Harold Allen and William Ballard '28, the Sidney E. Junkins Professor of Biology Emeritus; Earth Scientists Robert Reynolds, Robert Decker, and John Lyons; Historian Jere R. Daniell II '55, and Gary Potter, a doctoral candidate in biology.
President Kemeny is teaching a Freshman Honors section of mathematics this termto 16 men and 5 women of '76. He reports no noticeable difference in competenceor in promptness in keeping up with assignments.
Warner Bentley, Director Emeritus of the Hopkins Center, receives from EricForsythe '69, Instructor of Acting and Directing, a plaque which has been placednear the entrance of the theater which bears his name. The occasion was the 10thbirthday party of the Center, hosted by President and Mrs. Kemeny.
Robert M. Burrill '5O receives from College Secretary J. Michael McGean '49 thegavel awarded the Dartmouth Club of Cape Cod as Small Club of the Year at ClubOfficers Weekend last month. Burrill, now Liaison Officer, is a past president ofthe club. For details of the meeting, see page 34 of this issue.
