Postscript

A little more than three years ago when I came back to Hanover to become the 8th editor of the Magazine, people asked me two questions all the time: Was this a fulltime job; and Did that mean I would be moving back to New Hampshire. The answer to both was Yes, and I tried to address the matter in my first editorial, "Settling In in Hanover." In my naivete, I had burdened myself with the task of writing a monthly column this in addition to learning the ins and outs of pulling together the various strands that nine times per annum results in the appearance of this journal. Over the interim, I've learned a lot about publishing, enough to know that I want to spend more time writing and editing, less on the dayto-day chores of running a small business with an exclusive clientele of 43,000 bright and vocal readers.

If I were to pass along some advice to my successor, it would be along the following lines. Try to figure out what strange sort of beast an alumni magazine is and then plunge in and try to discover the unique nature of Dartmouth - its storied past, how it has changed over the last two decades, and perhaps most important, where it's going tomorrow. No alumni magazine can compete successfully with the newsweeklies, or for that matter, with the newsdailies, in bringing its audience up-to-theminute, in-depth coverage of campus news. That was one of the major lessons of Shan- tytown. But it can communicate the breadth and scope of the more enduring news sto- ries (which Shantytown certainly was) as well as the more prosaic, everyday accounts of how Dartmouth continues to carve out a leadership role as a small, first-rate univer- sity.

Over the last year in particular, Dartmouth has been characterized in the media as something of a dinosaur behind in race relations, a bastion of bad-boy behavior, torn by confrontation and inner turmoil, suffering notable declines in applicants for admission at a time when the other Ivies are making significant gains. There have been some distortions in the press and on TV. But on the whole, the fourth estate has done a better job than most of us might expect. For as Dartmouth men and women, we take this College to heart in a way most college grads don't. Andrea Frankel '86, a writer for The Dartmouth, surprised me a couple of weeks back by citing George O'Connell's "The Dartmouth Disease," an article we ran into the fall of '83. She had thought it was a snow job the business of spending four years of your life trying to get out of Hanover and the rest of it trying to get back in but now that she's a senior . . . Perhaps you remember how it felt to be a senior spending your last term in Hanover just when Nature was paying you off for six or was it seven? long months of winter.

All of which brings me to a question alumni ask now that I'm on my way out of Hanover: Does the Magazine really have any editorial independence? Well, if you just ran "The Good News" and, with as much going on at Dartmouth as there is today, you could quite easily fill the Magazine with that, you'd have the proverbial house organ, a promo piece with no editorial cachet, and worse, no sense of the push-and-pull essential to a college striving to maintain a competitive edge in our rapidly-changing, "hi-tech" society. It's a matter of balance, of trying to tell the truth straight-out without taking a stand on the issues, no matter how passionately you feel about them.

Shortly after I arrived in Hanover for my "post-graduate" education, I received a memo from a dean commenting on my use of the Baker Tower weathervane (above). He suggested that I discontinue its use, as it might be offensive to certain members of the community. Then the Editorial Board got into the fray, suggesting a likeness of the tower on Dartmouth Hall as an appropriate replacement. I never wrote that dean back. I was sorely tempted to, for his memo was emblazoned with the Dartmouth shield, visibly showcasing a couple of barely-clad people wearing feathers. I politely thanked the Editorial Board for its opinion; the tower smacked too much of Alumni Fund symbolism for me. Call it pigheadedness I'd only been on the job a few months and was feeling very much the embattled editor. But no matter. That was about as far as tampering with the Magazine's editorial freedom ever got. Oh, I had words with any number of people every now and then about a cover or the space we did or didn't give a story or why we ran some of the nastier letters, but who in this business doesn't? It would be a blander magazine without the feedback.

No one said this job would be easy. It hasn't been. But it has been an experience, a pleasure, a headache, a rare privilege. Aveatque vale.