Faculty

President Kemeny delivered the principal address at the midwinter Commencement of the University of New Hampshire and was awarded an honorary LL.D. degree by UNH's new president, Dr. Thomas N. Bonner. He also holds honorary doctorate degrees from Princeton and Columbia Universities and Middlebury College.

A description of computer-assisted instruction of the Russian language, utilizing the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System developed at the Kiewit Computation Center, was presented at the annual convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Chicago by George Kalbouss, Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Literature.

Following his talk, two of his students, Chris Brewster, a senior from Indianapolis, Ind., and Steve Toll, a junior from Newtown, Conn., assisted Professor Kalbouss in a demonstration on a computer terminal connected to Kiewit more than 600 miles away. The demonstration of student-created programs was the first of its kind at a national Russian-language convention and is part of a long-range project in Dartmouth's Russian Department to create a national network of computer centers and terminals via time-sharing which would make standardized computer-assisted instruction available to high schools and universities across the country.

Three promotions of faculty have been announced by Leonard M. Rieser, Vice President and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, following action by the Trustees.

Chauncey C. Loomis Jr., author and photographer-explorer, has been promoted to Professor of English. Professor Loomis, whose field of scholarship is 18th and 19th century English literature, has undertaken expeditions ranging from the jungles of South Africa to the frozen wastes of the Arctic, and is currently in East Africa gathering material for a new book on the European settlement of Kenya for the period 1892-1971. He is scheduled to return to Dartmouth for the spring term.

His most celebrated earlier journey was in 1968 to the Arctic, where, at Polaris Promontory, Northwest Greenland, he led an expedition on an historic sleuthing mission. There he found and exhumed the remains of Charles Francis Hall, a 19th century arctic explorer, and found evidence that that controversial personality had been poisoned to death while seeking to reach the North Pole and had not died of natural causes as official reports had indicated. Professor Loomis' investigation of the 100-year-old mystery is described in a book, Weird and TragicShores, published last year.

In other action, Colette L. Gaudin, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and an authority on the French poet Gaston Bachelard and the imagery of Emil Zola, has been reappointed with tenure; and Edmund D. Meyers Jr., director of Project IMPRESS, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Sociology, also with tenure.

Professor Gaudin, who was born and educated in France receiving the C.A.P.E.S. degree from the Sorbonne in 1950, joined the Dartmouth faculty as a lecturer in 1961, after having taught in France and the College Marie de France in Montreal.

She is the mother of Laurent Gaudin, the Dartmouth freshman whose victory in the slalom gave the ski team the head start it needed to confound the experts and regain the Carnival Cup at last month's 62nd Winter Carnival (see this month's cover photo).

Professor Meyers, a 1960 graduate of Union College in Schenectady, N. Y., with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, has done significant work in developing social science computer systems and in applying quantitative techniques to survey data. He has two books in the process of publication, one on computing in undergraduate curricula and the other on time-sharing computation in the social sciences. As director of Dartmouth's Project IMPRESS, he has helped to make immense amounts of census and other survey data available via the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) for independent analysis and research, advancing techniques of random retrieval and adding a new dimension to the study of social science by undergraduates.

Dr. Lester B. Salans, Associate Professor of Medicine who has been studying the causes and effects of excessive weight and diabetes for nearly ten years, has received a "research career development award" from the United States Public Health Service to continue his vital study of obesity and diabetes. He was also notified that the National Institutes of Health had given a grant of $247,836 for his research during the next three years.

Commenting on Dr. Salans' work, Dr. Thomas P. Almy, chairman of the Department of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, said, "The problem of obesity is probably the most important aspect of the field of nutrition as it affects the health of the population of the United States. It is related importantly to the high and increasing frequency of diabetes, hardening of the arteries, coronary heart attacks, and numerous other conditions."

John A. Menge, Associate Professor of Economics, is putting his economic theory to work in the highly practical and demanding arena of politics and government. Elected to the New Hampshire legislature from Lyme, Professor Menge relatively quickly emerged as a tax expert when, after analysis, he predicted the disappointing results the state eventually experienced with a business profits tax. Last month, at a special session of the legislature called to deal with the State's revenue problems, he co-authored a 32-page bill that would create a state income tax to finance primary and secondary education costs. Interest generated in the proposal prior to its presentation to the General Court prompted the House clerk to authorize a printing of 2200 copies of the complex bill, or 1000 more than are normally printed.

From a Dartmouth point of view, there is additional interest in the initiative since Professor Menge's bill was put forward as an alternative to a different state income tax plan championed by Dartmouth alumnus, Governor Walter R. Peterson '47.

After 20 years on the Dartmouth faculty with only two working leaves of absence, Leonard M. Rieser '44, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is going to be on leave mixing scholarly business with pleasure.

He will be gone for a terra and a half, from March 8 to July 31, with trips to Mexico, England, Europe, and possibly Africa interrupted three times by returns to Washington to "explore aspects of the role of science in this country and elsewhere" and to fulfill his responsibilities as president-elect of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While in England, he will also visit educational institutions and his counterparts in the British Association. Dean Rieser took six weeks of leave in 1967, and his only full sabbatical was a research period at the California Institute of Technology in 1956, four years after he joined the Dartmouth faculty as a physicist.

Dean Rieser will turn his responsibilities as Dean of the Faculty over to Government Professor Frank Smallwood '51, the Orvil E. Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs, currently servinging as Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. As the acting dean, Professor Smallwood will also take over the 18th century sawbuck table which Dean Rieser uses for a work desk and which is believed to be the "oldest surviving souvenir" of equipment used by Eleazar Wheelock, founder and first president of Dartmouth. The table was used by Wheelock and his pupils when he ran Moor's Charity School for Indians in what is now Columbia, Conn., and on recovery was given to the College by Henry O. Cushman, 1887.

Noye M. Johnson, Associate Professor of Geology at Dartmouth, is co-author with two other Ivy League professors, of an article appearing in the March issue of Ecology and presenting a new cause of concern over urban pollution of the atmosphere.

Working with F. Herbert Bormann, A.M. '63, Professor of Forest Ecology at Yale, and Gene E. Likens, a former member of the Dartmouth faculty now a biologist at Cornell, Professor Johnson has found that , rain over vast rural areas of the northeastern United States has become 100 times more acid than normal.

The cause, according to news reports anticipating the publication of the magazine article, is believed linked to sulfur dioxide air pollution from distant cities and could include basic changes in the soil and life forms in northeastern forests.

The research, begun at an experimental forest area in the Hubbard Brook area of the White Mountain National Forest and repeated in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, appears to parallel similar findings in Europe, suggesting that certain forms of air pollution once regarded only as local dangers to human health could have effect "on the whole ecosystem, an interplay, a relay of effects."

In the article, Professor Johnson and the co-authors wrote that increase in the acid content of rain appears to coincide with the varying rate at which people burn sulfur-laden heating fuel.

In the air, the three writers explained, sulfur dioxide apparently remains suspended for one or two days and is carried to distant points. Meanwhile it is being converted into a component of sulfuric acid, while a similar process is converting oxides of nitrogen—an element in auto exhaust—into a component of nitric acid. These chemicals then fall to the ground as rain.

"The ecological effects of the change are yet unknown," the three write, "but potentially they are manifold and very complex and difficult to isolate from other induced changes which also are accelerating. The data indicate basic changes are occurring in land and water ecosystems resulting from acidified rainfall.

"Effects may range from changes in leaching rates of nutrients from plant foliage, changes in the leaching rates of soil nutrients, acidification of lakes and rivers, effects on metabolism of organisms and corrosion of structures. The effects of increasing acidity on aquatic life may be very serious."

Daniel Lindley, assistant professor and acting chairman of the Education Department, spoke recently to the National Council of Teachers of English in Las Vegas, and the address is scheduled to be published shortly in The English Journal. He also spoke on "The Future of Schools" over Boston's CBS affiliate, WEEI, and will keynote a meeting of the New England Association of Teachers of English in the spring. These "outside" responsibilities seem only to enhance the work in education at Dartmouth, as undergraduate enrollment in preparation for teaching has been almost doubling each term lately. This term approximately 300 students either are preparing to teach or are practice teaching on or off campus.

One of the most impressive Winter Carnival snow creations in some years wasthe campus "City of Oz" with its built-in toboggan run, designed by RichardD. Bangs '73 of Setauket, N.Y., who also did the 1972 poster.