Dateline Hanover

Nearly three years ago, when I decided to write a regular monthly column in the pages of this magazine, I had no idea about the difficulties I would encounter-some of them germane to the profession of writing, some of them particular to the business of writing with a six-week lead time-all of them relevant to the demands of reporting to an audience of Dartmouth men and women, some of whom read the Magazine from cover to cover, many more who read class notes and obituaries, peruse Letters to the Editor, and flip through the rest of the magazine as time permits.

A major problem has been determining which issues to discuss and how to approach them in a manner that is balanced and accurate given that six-week lag. The events of the past three months have made this task even more critical because we have been widely covered in the media and because "news" has been "breaking" almost daily. Indeed, in the past six weeks we have made the front page of The New York Times and have been featured in Newsweek, Time, People, TheWashington Post, the CBS Evening News, and the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. One alumnus, vacationing in Switzerland, sent us an article that appeared there in a local paper. The article, treating the attempted destruction of several shanties on the Green by 12 Dartmouth students, featured as a callout-a line of type blown-up to grab the reader's eye-a quotation from a Dartmouth biology professor comparing the students' attack on the shanties on the Green to Kristallnacht. I was astonished when I read his comment: Kristallnacht and the Shantytown raid are not one and the same. Imagine how Europeans old enough to remember that night or knowledgeable of the horrors of Hitler's rise to power must have reacted.

This is not to condone what 12 undergraduates did-it was an inexcusable act of violence which has shamed the College-but the hyperbole of that comparison struck me as irresponsible in its own right. All 12 students, incidentally, have been suspended from the College, four of them indefinitely, by the Committee on Standards.

The furor on campus following the attack-the occupation of Parkhurst Hall (again), the cancelling of classes by the faculty, the campuswide moratorium to discuss racism, bigotry, and intolerance at Dartmouth, a separate symposium on divestiture, and the arrest of 18 students by the Hanover police-ted us to pull the cover story we had originally slotted for this issue and replace it with coverage of these extraordinary events. I suppose the letters we will get on the cover alone will be as predictable as the letters SportsIllustrated gets following its annual bathing suit issue; at least the Indian will be out of the spotlight for a while.