Circling the Green
• President Emeritus John Kemeny, whose active title now is Professor of Mathematics, received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Western Michigan University in February. The degree was conferred during a two-day visit to the university as WMU Foundation Fellow. He gave the Foundation lecture on "The Computer in Society" and also delivered a convocation address on "The Computer in Education." He was kept busy with other scheduled events, including a colloquium lecture to the mathematics faculty and students, a meeting with university administrators to discuss "The Computer in University Administration," and a meeting with Computer Club students.
• Professor Stephen G. Nichols Jr. '58, chairman of Dartmouth's department of French and Italian, has been named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the academic year 1983—84. As one of just 12 American scholars chosen annually by Phi Beta Kappa, he will visit and lecture at a dozen or more colleges and universities. Professor Nichols, who is also a member of Dartmouth's comparative literature department, will lecture on interdisciplinary relationships in'art and literature, focusing mainly on the Middle Ages. A book of his, published by Yale University Press in January, was followed more recently by a University Press of New England volume coedited by Nichols and Dartmouth colleague John D. Lyons, professor of French and Italian. It is a collection of essays on theories of art and literature in the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
• The general trend in the number of applications to Ivy League colleges is reported to be down. Dartmouth to a modest degree experienced the trend this year, with 8.000 applications compared with 8, 300 last year, in round figures. Alfred T Quirk '49, dean of admissions and financial aid, interprets the figures as a normal fluctuation rather than a lasting trend. Over the past five years, he points out, Dartmouth's application list has varied from 7,300 to 8,500. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have all reported declines in the number of applicants this year, but Brown is up substantially, 11,770 to 13,250, and Cornell is up by 200.
• To encourage women students to learn about and consider pursuing careers in business, the College in 1976 established the "Women in Business" program, under a grant from the Mobil Foundation. An average of three top business women visit the campus each academic year. The most recent visitor was Joan Spero, vice president for international corporate affairs at American Express, who met with students and gave a public lecture on international business. Earlier visitors under the program have included a vice president of General Motors and the publisher and editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. Interest in the program is very high, according to Susan Deßevoise, associate director of the Office of Career and Employment Services, who is in charge of it.
• University Press of New England, which is located in Hanover and has Dartmouth as one of its supporting members, is one of three American university presses to receive a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. UPNE was awarded a grant of $90,000, to be matched by $270,000, for a total of $360,000. The grants were announced in Washington recently by NEH Chairman William J. Bennett. Of 275 proposals, grants were awarded to 84 cultural and educational institutions in the United States. Besides UPNE, university presses at Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania were among the successful applicants.
According to Thomas L. McFarland, director of the consortium of universities publishing under the New England imPnnt, the Press will use the funds to establish an endowment for books in the humanities, an area of publishing extremely to budget cutbacks. With nearly 75 Per cent of the UPNE list in the "humanities, McFarland is optimistic about the Press's ability to continue to publish actively in this area.
University Press of New England was formed in 1970 and will publish 30 new books this year. Members in the consortium are Dartmouth College, the host institution; Brandeis, Brown, Clark, and Tufts universities; and the state universities of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
• The main auditorium of Webster Hall, which has had only sporadic use for some years, is now being scheduled by the College Registrar as a classroom. Its new status was inaugurated in late February when the Office of Instructional Services and Educational Research demonstrated a new large-screen color television project system. The new facility in Webster was made possible by a $7 5,000 grant from the William J. Bryant Foundation in its second important contribution to the expansion of Dartmouth's television capabilities. The foundation earlier funded the acquisition and installation of the College's satellite receiving antenna. The new large-screen projection system will be used in courses utilizing computer programming displays and video illustrations of various kinds. It will also make Webster Hall an alternate viewing area for overflow guests at such large-audience events as Commencement.
• Alan F. Petrich of Woodstock, Vt., has been named manager of the Dartmouth Faculty Club, which will be one year old next month. He recently was a restaurant management consultant in California, his native state, and is a former president of Great Restaurants, Inc., of Santa Barbara, a seven-restaurant chain. Petrich will find Hanover a congenial spot for his varied talents. He is a professional singer who has performed in musical theater and opera, he teaches voice, and he is a golfer with an eight handicap and a licensed pilot.
• Richard Colman, a sophomore from Brooklyn, N.Y., will soon have the rare treat of seeing a play of his produced in an Off-Broadway theater. His play, ThirdStreet, will be seen at the Circle Repertory Theater, 7th Avenue and 4th Street, from April 13 to May 1 during the Young Playwrights Festival.
Colman's play, written a year ago while he was a freshman, captured the Frost Award as the outstanding student play of the year. He also entered it in the New York City-based Young Playwrights Festival competition. From among some 100 entries, his play was selected as one of four by authors 18 years of age or younger to be performed.
Colman, who is working in New York this spring as an intern with Mobil Oil Corp., will be in the city to help coordinate the production of his play. His ThirdStreet is to be directed by Michael Bennett in his first theater project since the Broadway hit, Dreamgirl.
Oleg Troyanovsky, the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United Nations, came to Dartmouthon March 4 to give his first address on a U.S.college campus. Some 400 persons who couldn'tget into Hopkins Center's Spaulding Auditorium heard him via closed-circuit television inAlumni Hall. Ambassador Troyanovsky,speaking on "Nuclear Disarmament and Soviet-U.S. Relations," declared that "total disarmament would be acceptable to us" and paintedthe Russians as a peace-loving people who hatewar from bitter experience. His recurring themewas that the Soviet Union wants peace andnuclear disarmament and that the UnitedStates is the villain in the arms race. The ambassador, who attended Swarthmore, spoke excellent English and appeared to be at home in acollege atmosphere. When asked why he hadchosen Dartmouth for his first campus appearance, he replied that it was the first college thathad invited him.
