Letters to the Editor

Would-be Candidates?

To the craggy old curmudgeons alumni of the late fifties and early sixties who just can't seem to move forward with the College, I bring good news. Complain as you will about trifles like coeducation, the replacement of the Indian with the Long Green as the official mascot, the covering-over of the Hovey Grill murals, etc. You cannot help but be cheered by the good news that McGovern is not being considered for president of the College. My ever-practical math-major wife gave me a momentary fright when she said, "What about Jimmy Carter? He's looking for work, too." Not to worry, however. Carter could never stand the cold.

Fitchburg, Mass.

[Shortly after Senator George McGovern'selection defeat in November, the Washington Post reported that he was "rumored to be inline for the presidency of Dartmouth College."Then again, in its annual spoof a few days later, The Dartmouth announced that Professor Jeffrey Hart '51 had been named the 14th president of the College. Ed.]

Non-candidate

I would appreciate your allowing me a little space in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE to announce my. withdrawal from consideration as the next president of Dartmouth College.

It is widely known that the basis of my program for Dartmouth's future is a belief that any college can achieve academic excellence, but not one college has ever achieved the goal of offending absolutely no human being.

As part of this policy I have advocated painting over the Orozco murals, since they are obviously anti-capitalist and anti-American.

This simple idea, which I proposed to protect the sensibilities of endangered minorities, has resulted in a volume of hate mail I find intolerable.

San Diego, Calif.

Vision of Life

I enjoyed "Orozco Feted" in The Bulletin for November. It was a real delight to escape from present day alumni and undergraduate complaints about Dartmouth to the days when Jose Clemente Orozco painted his murals in Baker Library.

I remember the little painter perched high on a ladder working vigorously with his one arm, covering the walls with his violent, passionate vision of life, history, and politics. It was said that he sometimes used members of my class as his models. I agree with Orozco's son that his father had great courage but that "Dartmouth has the greatest." The United States, like Mexico was born in revolution, but it took real courage to celebrate that great tradition in 1934. Remind all the critics of Dartmouth of the Orozco murals.

Newport, R.I.

Pornography

Bravo for Mary Ellen Donovan '76! Her article "Pornography in Our Time" in the October issue was insightful, balanced, and seriously thought-provoking, as well as (happily) well written. I strongly agree with her that "certain actions [such as pornography in America and elsewhere and the Nazi holocaust in Germany] are still reprehensible even when whole societies accept them, find them pleasurable, and call them good."

I would just add one comment, pointing to some hope for our American culture: In 1960-61, as Tucker Visiting Lecturer, I taught a course in management ethics at Tuck School at the time of the famous electrical price conspiracy cases. The country was aroused at that time about business ethics. But as the sixties wore on, interest soon subsided. Concern for business ethics seemed to be a fad.

But today, as we begin the eighties, concern for business ethics seems to be sincerely deepening both in schools of business administration and among management people. This time, I do not think it is a fad. So here is a note of hope, at least for one important part of our American culture.

Washington, D.C.

In her interesting article on pornography, Mary Eilen Donovan seems surprised at how many people lap up this stuff, and how this is increasing (with video cassettes, cable TV, etc.) at an exploding rate. She might well consult. Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog returneth to his vomit/So a fool returneth to his folly." (My apologies for this biblical bluntness to any reader having a pre-dinner drink.)

Regarding the Supreme Court, which has, in effect, given its imprimatur to pornography, one may well be somewhat startled by the following thought: The Court has declared so many fundamental laws unconstitutional in recent years that apparently we have been living under a substantially unconstitutional form of government since 1789, didn't know enough to know it, and were thriving under it. Now it remains to be seen (or obscene) how much better off we'll be under our new Court-decreed Constitution. The up-dated photos of good old Times Square do not look encouraging.

Miss Donovan's suspicions are probably justified that "we Americans as a society may be headed for big trouble." To a considerable extent we have the Supreme Court to thank for that, for it would seem beyond a reasonable doubt that the authors of the First Amendment did not intend thereby to promote the colossal business of pornography.

Newport, N.H.

Ms. Donovan is most provocative. I wonder, however, if she might not have gone one step further in her analysis of the roots of the pornography phenomenon.

Have we not also come full circle from a puritanical optimism to a pornographic pessimism? Puritanism's only reward, indeed the only reward for all philosophies of selfdenial, is a better future, i.e., heaven and not hell. Importantly, this better future is perceived as being of direct and tangible benefit to the individual who experiences the deprivations of self-denial. Self-denial which benefits another, perhaps a grandchild, is not, in general, persuasive.

I suggest that the pornographic climate will only worsen until such time as we can develop a creditable and broadly based optimism about the future. As long as the threats of nuclear destruction are matched by the anxieties spawned by environmental destruction, cancer, energy supplies, economic devastation, etc., I can see no reason not to expect ever more degenerate pornography.

Medford, Mass.

Thank you for printing the thoughtful article by Mary Ellen Donovan, "Pornography in Our Time." Ms. Donovan was a Dartmouth student several years after John Dickey's retirement from the presidency, but she certainly offers proof that she has attained those two qualities he espoused as goals for Dartmouth students competence and conscience.

As a member of the Dartmouth community, I for one will watch her career with interest.

Hanover, N.H,

Those of us who favored coeducation at Dartmouth have some cause to regret the change in the case of Mary Ellen Donovan '76, who authored the ALUMNI MAGAZINE article "Pornography in Our Time."

The liberation and enlightenment that we hoped to make available to women seem to have escaped Ms. Donovan, who would repeal the Bill of Rights and return us to preConstitution repressions.

She bemoans the collapse of "magazines of ideas," yet fails to give credit to mass circulation men's magazines for airing some of the most courageous ideas of our times: a forum for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., some of the most searching interviews now being published, critiques of our secret-police efforts, combating the anti-abortion hysteria, and most recently a look at one of our most serious and neglected problems, the deterioration of the human gene pool.

Using Snuff as a horrible example, she tries to make the case that erotic movies are mostly concerned with violence against women. Nonsense! Snuff was a bomb! If she saw it, she is one of the few persons who did. Men demonstrated that they couldn't be less interested in a film that resulted in the murder of women.

The truth is that there is less violence in erotic films than in the commercial stuff served up regularly by Hollywood studios and New York television programs.

She can fault men for being interested in sex films, but it is not violence that gets them it's the fantasy that all women are both attractive and willing.

What Ms. Donovan really favors is political, religious, and sexual repression. We can look at other countries to see the results of such policies.

Ireland only recently repealed its law against contraceptives, still represses abortions and divorces. Women are degraded to the role of childbearer only.

Russia has its own puritanical ways and little personal privacy. The result, disclosed in a recent study, is that 40 per cent of its women are frigid.

Ms. Donovan should have learned at Dartmouth that there are well-informed feminists around who have reached conclusions much different from hers. One is Dr. Mary Calderone, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, and the other is Dr. Lonnie Garfield Barbach, who authored: For Yourself: TheFulfillment of Female Sexuality.

Their conclusion: repression and censorship never helped anyone!

Vero Beach, Fla.

A discouraging trend in feminist writing is the use of ludicrous exaggeration. One example in Mary Ellen Donovan's article about pornography is her claim that "according to the F.B.I, . . . one out of three women will be raped in her lifetime." The F.B.I.'s "Uniform Crime Statistics" for 1979 actually shows that about one out of a hundred women will be raped in their lifetimes.

Another ludicrous exaggeration is Miss Donovan's claim that "ours is a culture in which expressions of hatred toward women are tolerated as expressions of hatred toward no other group would be. If you doubt this . . . [imagine] ... not films of women being beaten and raped, but films of Jews being clubbed and gassed." With due respect to Miss Donovan's vision of hatred toward women, there are still enormous differences between the fantasy expressed by sado-sex films and the horrible (pornographic) reality of newsreels depicting human slaughter.

Reality is in short supply in Miss Donovan's article on pornography. Of course, Miss Donovan has conveniently omitted any references to women enjoying pornography, but can she really be so worried that the true evil of porn is that it costs so much money to pursue "our, every onanistic whim"? We learn often enough that she feels "much of it is hateful and moronic," but so what? Is it possible that she has taken six pages to tell us she's against porno, but still doesn't have enough space to tell us why?

The problem with reading critical essays written by primitive feminist propagandists such as Miss Donovan is that the essays cannot be critical. Too many feminists are people with narrow religious beliefs that is, they believe certain ideas regardless and in spite of contrary evidence, and have no intention of discussing these beliefs rationally.

These feminists are particularly uncomfortable with issues that seem to threaten their beliefs issues such as the incredible power of human sexuality. That is why they so often attempt to gloss over the fundamental differences between men and women. It is because she is the feminist she is that Miss Donovan can write so voluminously on the subject and yet gloss over the central fact that pornography is in such notorious demand because it arouses and titillates so fundamental a passion as sex between men and women.

Can an article purporting to be a critical examination of pornography be written by an author who by her inclination excludes from consideration the very basis of pornography the steamy regions of eroticism, human sexuality, and distinction of gender? Cruising up and down 42nd Street in disgust at its rank displays, as Miss Donovan says she has done, is simply not qualification enough.

Concord, Mass.

Mary Ellen Donovan replies: Mr. Putnam may have a point (a highly debatable one) that it's ideas and ideas alone that sell Playboy and Penthouse, but about Snuff he's dead wrong. If Snuff bombed, it was because some influential women, Susan Sontag and Grace Paley among them, organized to have it removed from theaters soon after it appeared. That many men and women are entertained by the idea of women being murdered is beyond doubt; witness the recent success of Dressed to Kill. In my opinion, the fact that such fare is "regularly served up by Hollywood" is nothing to cheer about. For while Mr. Holzel sees "enormous differences" between sado-sex films and newsreels of human slaughter, there's a considerable body of research that indicates that exposure to the former numbs one to the horrors of the latter.

About Mr. Holzel's claim that I exaggerate: The F.8.1, and the Department of Justice report that a rape occurs once every three minutes, perhaps as often as once every 30 seconds, and there is some reason to believe that rape is on the increase. This means that in a single year anywhere from 180,000 to more than one million rapes occur and that over a 75year period the average (white) woman's life span somewhere between 15 million and 75 million rapes will occur. Keeping in mind that the female population of the U.S. is roughly 110 million, that the F.8.1, admits that most rapes go unreported, and that rape statistics do not include many forms of rape (e.g., "date rape"), I stand by my statement.

Mr. Putnam's horror at the idea of government censorship and repression and Mr. Holzel's appreciation for "the fundamental differences between men and women" I share completely. What I do not share is their belief that questioning what we do with our freedom is the same as opposing freedom. What most imperils freedom is the refusal to admit that with the individual rights afforded by our system of government come burdensome individual responsibilities.

Saturday Night Fever

I was disappointed by Dr. Steel's platform and even more by his selection. Anyone who makes the return of the Indian symbol and wah-hoo-wah a priority in the affairs of the College merits selection as a cheerleader perhaps but not as a trustee. And those affirming such priorities seem to me to be defending not Dartmouth traditions but their own prejudices.

It is clear from reading your letters pages that criticism of contemporary Dartmouth increases in direct proportion to the years since graduation. It is understandable but regrettable that each decade seems intent on freezing the Dartmouth ideal into a mirror of its own four years on campus.

It is for this reason that I disagree with Dr. Steel's adherents who want to see alumni given more participation in the guidance of the College. I think they should have less, and beyond a given point (say 25 years when all change seems to be opposed) no input at all. At that point give them seats on the 50-yard line and let them be heard but not heeded.

Nor can the memory of aging alumni be trusted for its accuracy. During the period when the introduction of women at Dartmouth was still in the talking stage, I vividly remember a heated discussion during a class lunch at the Dartmouth Club in New York. The verdict: 12 against, 4 in favor. One of the opponents who, during his college years had been a cruising Casanova ranging from Lebanon to Hamp to Boston on his weekends, delivered himself of the following: "If my son makes it to Dartmouth with girls on the campus, he will never experience, as I did, the simple pleasure of playing hearts with his roommate on Saturday night." And the man was serious!

Because he led the College through not only some of the most turbulent years in American higher education but some of the most meaningfully changeful years in Dartmouth history, Dr. Kemeny becomes a double target for such double-talk as that of my classmate from Delray in the September issue. In my opinion the significant fact is that Dr. Kemeny achieved his progress without deviating from Dartmouth's basic values: the quest for excellence, the courage to innovate, and the true challenge of a liberal education.

Yes, the Dartmouth of today is a far different college than I left in '34. And for this I believe that Ernest Martin Hopkins would be the first to salute John Kemeny.

Mission Viejo, Calif.

Ledyard and Cook

Peter Bridges' otherwise excellent article on John Ledyard, "A Triumphant Failure," in the October issue has a flaw. It repeats the now discarded assumption that Corporal Ledyard "stood in the Pacific surf by the side of Captain James Cook on the morning when Cook . . .

was stabbed and killed." This romantic interpretation of the dramatic events of that day comes from Jared Sparks, who, as Bridges comments, was sometimes "said to depart a little from facts."

On the morning in question, one corporal of marines did go ashore with Cook, but several accounts agree that he was killed also. Corporal Ledyard was probably on duty with a detachment on the other side of Kealakekua Bay and survived.

For full discussion of this point see the Pacific Northwest Quarterly for April 1963, pages 75-78.

Corvallis, Ore.

Better Next Year

Ira Holmes ["Wearers of the Green," November issue], though he admits he no longer finds it necessary to use his editorial discretion in putting the paper together, is still as much a part of The Dartmouth as Winter Carnival is a part of Dartmouth. The pride he takes in "his" newspaper should be a source of inspiration for us all. In wishing Ira good luck in the future, I note next year he is bound to have a fun time in the plant his niche in the basement of College Hall. For next year, not only will the oldest college newspaper in America be run by a female editor-in-chief, but also the managing and executive editors will be women. The newspaper and the College have come a long way over the past 20 years as Ira has guided The Dartmouth.

Hanover, N.H.

fHoward Morse, managing editor of The Dartmouth, refers to Ira Holmes's complaint thatthe newspaper has had too few women on itsstaff Ed.]

Or Other Impedimenta

With sad reluctance I have returned the 1931 card to Cliff McDonald (a stout fellow, great guy, and quondam roommate), indicating that apparent business conflicts will prevent attendance at our 50th.

Frankly, no matter how important these conflicts are, I would resolve them if the scenery were different.

A 50th reunion should be an important occasion for renewal of old and dear friendships and reliving happy days which now are just a memory. In order to promote all of that it seems clear that the reunion should be limited to members of the class without benefit of wives, widows, lady friends, children, grandchildren, dogs, or other impedimenta. Each of us should have a classmate or two to room with, and the whole affair should be geared to communing, reminiscing, and carousing by and among us.

It is recognized, of course, that many of the brethren are so apron-tied that departure, even for three days, from the lares and penates of hearth and home would be an impossible feat.

The proposed setup smacks not so much of a male college reunion as of a convention of Rotarians with a touch of Chautauqua.

Spending three days under the auspices of the present anti-intellectual administration, which, I feel, has dealt so many blows to the Dartmouth which we knew and loved, culminating in the Steel-Rasenberger scandal, seems almost apostate to creed.

It is common observation that the leadership of any badly administered corporation or institution tends to reflect its fumbling misdirection to its remotest members including, in this instance, even the football team.

Further discouragement and depression would set in as our aged eyes are saddened and dimmed at the sight of assorted young females receiving sheepskins, giggling, squealing, and mincing across a campus once dedicated and sacred to the chiefs and the braves.

Portland, Maine

Spud Remembered

Sorry! Your historian from whom the interesting article [November issue] on Ev Wood '38 and the summer Information Booth sprang boo-booed.

Ev is perhaps the third, but definitely not the second inhabitant of that booth.

Spud Bray, campus cop (the only one in his day) and former head janitor, was upon his official retirement from his College position (year unrecalled) the first fount of information in the first summer Information Booth. (Perhaps there were earlier ventures of which I am unaware.) In any event, Spud so served for a number of years, and Bud Weymouth '20 succeeded him.

Spud always suggested to his customers that they should not overlook "them muriels" in the basement of Baker Library. Earlier he also kept a lot of errant, but fundamentally worthy, undergraduates from the clutches of the dean.

Hanover, N.H.

Days Relit

While you made a "coup de theatre" on getting the cartoon from The New Yorker to use on the November cover, you missed the opportunity of bringing back fond memories of the alumni by not using the picture on page 29.

That picture relit all the days of going to the Harvard game and experiencing all the joys of winning or the depths of chagrin of defeat.

Winter Park, Fla.

[The photograph, by Kathy Slattery, showedband members old and young "tootling" athalftime of the Harvard game. See also the1945 class notes in this issue. Ed.]

Ragged Edges

What a beautiful mix you gathered in the October issue of letters, articles, reports, and ads. Well-spoken, contradictory, sophisticated, up-to-date, rich, self-indulgent, pandering, sensitive, dedicated, agonized, blind, mouths they are all there.

Our poet in residence concludes, after 50 years of rumination, and lovely expression of such, that acceptance of irrationality is all we stunned birds should anticipate (page 24). One of us statisticians has developed a model for discerning truth so accurate he feels impelled to tell another of us that he is ignorant and meaningless! Hear! Hear! (page 12).

You let us hear a feminist protest the degradation of women. She suggests the ugly generalization that the recent growth in pornography might "tell something about us" (page 40). She apparently believes reality out there requires of humans a particular kind of behavior. But to keep us balanced and void of enthusiams you make us also hear from a brilliant "Intellectual Athlete," who after getting so concerned about his discoveries he can hardly sit still, ends up by remembering the subjectivity of his model, with its inevitable anomalies. He doesn't really care what we believe just so we know there are at least two sides to the issue (page 16).

But others in the family care about the shape of things so dogmatically you tell us of their sacrifice to achieve certain goals. A Christian football player hears the Voice and gives self to serve Guatemalans (page 59).

Donors to the Alumni Fund certainly gave generously. They heard some voice. But does giving from our abundance say something about us as much as the pornography?

The advertisers think so. They know many of us can, after our giving, still collect and toy with baubles of the rich, or would-be rich, as befits gentlemen. "Peter Island offers nothing" . . . "Classic Oriental rugs," straight from the wealth of potentates, in their minds, of course . . . "We offer you ... a life of comfort and grace . . . small . . . discreet, personal."

Is it any wonder many of us children of Eleazar have exchanged the voice demanding (page 9) straight paths in the wilderness for muted, debatable, tentative discussion, waiting for the next experiment or vote before thinking we can know life's ethos? Our body language, our editorial choice, our economic commitments surely reveal our dedication to forever question, pose, pause, and assert hot only our right to opinion, but praise to Heraclitus. For since all is flux (page 24), talk and debate are the final wisdom. None of us is bad, none good, none wrong. None can be judged. Nothing is fixed or ultimate but our dedication to an independent life, rich, beautiful, discreet, full of comfort and grace; the Voice is gone with His straight paths and direct talk. Dartmouth's in town now. If you can't find us here look for us out on the mountain's ragged edges (page 19). What an issue! What a school!

Detroit, Mich.

Esther Nichols

Dartmouth graduates of the first 15 years of this century and others may be unaware of the ending of an era with the death in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 1980, of Esther Katharine Nichols, only child of Dr. and Mrs. Ernest Fox Nichols.

Dr. Nichols was, chronologically, a professor at Colgate, professor at Dartmouth, professor at Columbia, president of Dartmouth from 1909 to 1915, professor at Yale, and, at the time of his death in 1924, president of M.I.T.

Esther was born in Berlin in 1895, graduated from Smith in 1918, lived in New York City until the death of her mother in 1950, then moved to Washington where she most effectively reviewed publications for the Urban Land Institute. She and my father, Arthur "Nick" Nichols, class of 1915, were close cousins. Even after she reached her eighties, she continued to have a fantastic memory and sparkling wit. Her death came quickly in her own apartment after a pleasant and happy day.

Esther always had a fondness for Dartmouth and Hanover. She told me that one of her most recent and warmest remembrances of Dartmouth was a meeting with President Kemeny during which he asked her what it was like for her to be the president's only daughter in a community full of young men.

Esther's few remaining relatives met in Hamilton, New York, in September for her interment next to her parents. Her mother was born and raised at Colgate, and her parents were married there. Even with all the Colgate connections, I was pleased to see the monument at Dr. Nichols' grave which had been provided by Dartmouth.

If any Dartmouth people from the 1900-1915 era have remembrances of Esther, I'd be delighted to hear from them.

San Rafael, Calif.

The Symbol; etc.

Please refer to page 52 of the September issue, the top paragraph in the right hand column. Can't Brad Hills properly refer to William and Mary as the "Indians"? After all, that's what they call themselves. My reference is the William and Mary football yearbook edited by Bob Sheeran, their sports information director.

Franklin Lakes, N.J.

They don't allow the Glee Club to sing "Eleazar Wheelock" anymore. When Dartmouth won the intercollegiate glee club championship at Carnegie Hall in New York City the spring of 1929, "Eleazar" was our college song selection and it really won the championship for us. I know I was the leader of the Glee Club at the time.

I'm not the only one who thought that "Eleazar" was a fine song. Here is the text of a telegram that I received on May 22, 1929. It says: "A Dartmouth man wandered into a Cornei! party today and said that you were going to be on the air tonight stop If you do not sing 'Eleazar' the concert will be a failure and we will break up our radio Cornell Club of Southern California

Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

INot to put too fine a point on the matter, wehave been told several times that the Glee Clubitself not some external authority, decidedagainst singing the song. Ed.]

I have recently returned from Williamsburg where I saw the William and Mary "Indians" play Dartmouth's "Big Green" team. The football ticket had "Home of the Indians" printed at the bottom, and the band included in one of its numbers the rhythm of an Indian war dance. All this was a little disconcerting to one who valued the Indian symbol at Dartmouth.

It seemed as if, just to rub it in, the Charlotte Observer, to which I subscribe, had been publishing a number of fictional articles on the Revolutionary War, captioned "Letters from Jed." One of the characters in the story was an Indian, who eventually went to "Moore's Indian Charity School."

In a block, in heavy type, the following explanation was given for this article: "This is another in a series of Letters from Jed, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the battles which turned the tide of the American Revolution. The letters are from a makebelieve 15-year-old colonial, Jedadiah Torrence, to his mother in Huntersville (N.C.). The letters, although fictitious, describe real events. The Bethabara mentioned in today's letter was just northwest of Winston-Salem. Moore's Indian Charity School became Dartmouth." (My emphasis.)

Pray tell what is the matter with Dartmouth? Who has a better right to an Indian symbol?^

Statesville, N.C.

Thank you, Paul Veileman '7l, for reviving interest in my FADDIS ad of May 1979. You term yourself a "professional statistician" and deplore the mathematical deficiencies in my alumni survey. Other non-believers, including my own classmate Art Kneerim, have made similar objections in the letters column of our alumni magazine. Heretofore, I have not bothered to reply.

There is really only one reply to the detractors of my statistics: If you do not believe that the overwhelming majority of Dartmouth alumni favors the return of the Indian symbol - and particularly "wah-hoo-wah" and our beloved song, "Eleazar Wheelock" why don't you persuade our president and a true mathematical genius to design and conduct a survey of his own?

P.S. I still have a few copies of the FADDIS report left, and if any latecomers are interested, just send a card to the small New Jersey town beiow, where as a result of the truly phenomenal response to my FADDIS ad, the post office personnel know me quite well.

Bernardsville, N.J.

The ALUMNI MAGAZINE welcomes comment from its readers. For publication, letters should be signed and addressed specifically to the Magazine (not copies of communications to other organizations or individuals). Letters exceeding 400 words in length will be condensed by the editors.