Dartmouth Authors
Booting Out
Judson Hale '55, editor-in-chief of "Yankee" magazine and "The Old Farmer's Almanac," has just written a remarkable memoir of his family including his mother, a professional opera singer, and his father, who spent the family fortune to found an ideological community in Maine.
"Is it true you were thrown out of Dartmouth for vomiting on the dean of the college?" is a question I'm often asked these days. I used to refer to the incident humorously in speeches to various organizations around New England. I stopped doing so after a 1975 live television talk show in New Haven, in which the host up and asked me whether or not I had had an alcohol problem at Dartmouth. That somehow didn't seem so funny.
Yes, it's true I was expelled for throwing up on Dean Joseph MacDonald. But that was only part of the problem. I threw up on Mrs. MacDonald, too. And over fifty other people, I'm told. All in about thirty seconds.
Baboon's Memory
Marianne Alverson, administrative assistant with Dartmouth's AsianStudies Program, spent two years in the bush of Botswana with her twoyoung sons and her anthropologist husband Hoyt—dubbed "Modise" bythe Tswana people. Alverson's book, "Under African Sun" (Universityof Chicago), contains this exchange, in the language Setswana, betweenMontsho, a hunter, and Hoyt Alverson.
Montsho, who generally manages propitious arrivals, walks in just as we divide the last of the biscuits. I want to hold my breath as his odors waft about.
"Modise," Montsho complains. "How my arms hurts!" "Why does your arm hurt?" "Because all night long, I was sleeping like a baboon." "How does a baboon sleep?" "A baboon sleeps on his arm."
"Why does a baboon sleep on his arm?"
A baboon sleeps on his arm so as not to forget where he left his food supply. You see, he sleeps on his arm which is pointing to his food, so that when he wakes up, he need only follow the direction to which his arm points."
Montsho's face brightens. He reaches for another biscuit and continues, "Of course, when I woke up this morning, my arm pointed straight to Modise's place!"
Saddled with Love
Robert H. Guest, a professor at Tuck since 1960, has written "anautobiography on the light side" titled "As Luck Would Have It" (RobertH. Guest). This passage appears under the heading, "Some Early Stirrings."
My fifth grade teacher, Miss Johnson, was beautiful. She had such lovely hair and soft brown eyes. I could feel a strange tingling of emotion with her sensuous reading of "Black Beauty." Was it she or the horse? I still don't know, but there was a stirring of some kind.
Measuring Failure
The fertile industry of computer program development has spaivnedthe highly technical field of software reliability measurement. One of itsleading experts is John D. Musa '54, a supervisor of software quality atAT&T Bell Laboratories. He is the author, along with Anthony lanninoand Kazuhira Okumoto, of the textbook "Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application" (McGraw-Hill). As this passageshows, the field already has a language all its own.
There have been at least two interesting side benefits of software reliability modeling. The conceptual framework provided by a good model yields greater insight into the software failure process. The processes of defining just what constitutes a failure and of setting a failure intensity objective have both been salutary in stimulating the customer and developer to communicate.
California Dreaming
The English tradition of common-law rights collided head-on with theHispanic sense of community when a new breed of settlers came toCalifornia in the nineteenth century. Law Professor David J. Langum'62 of Sanford University establishes the setting for the clash of centuries-old values in "Law and Community on the Mexican California Frontier"(University of Oklahoma).
Americans have romanticized Hispanic California, mentally populating it with kindly padres, submissive yet well-cared-for Indians, dashing horsemen, dark-haired women with flirtatious eyes and flowing skirts, all accompanied by guitar music and roses of Castile. It is mostly myth. Spanish California in fact was an underpopulated military frontier. Were it possible to be transported back in time to a Spanish California community, or to a Mexican California community for that matter, most Americans would find it to be dusty, dirty, flea-ridden, and squalid. California's strength was its largely homogeneous population, Mexican mestizos from the middle and lower classes, with a small seasoning of native Spaniards and blacks. There was some intermarriage with the native Indians, which contributed even more to the homogeneity of society. The Californios were loyal to the crown and never swore fealty to Mexico until Spain had abandoned the field of combat and the revolution had been won. This early homogeneity of population was to have an impact on the later California legal system.
Doctor, Educate Thyself
While calling for more emphasis on the humanities in preparing physicians for practice, Charles E. Odegaard '32, president emeritus of theUniversity of Washington, critiques the entire American educationalsystem. This is from "Dear Doctor: A Personal Letter to a Physician"(Henry J. Kaiser Fatnily Foundation).
No matter what one's specialty may be, advanced education in the university has made it easy for each of us to become an idiot-savant, a wise fool, an ignoramus about much and a savant or scientist about little. Despite the advantages that abstraction and specialization have brought to us in many particulars, they also expose us to the risk of failing to recognize and deal with context and interrelationships. The risk of an ever narrower perspective is epidemic in the university.
Pragmatic Revolutionary
A person cannot change society by will alone, wrote Maurice Mandelbaum '29, professor of philosophy and the humanities at Johns HopkinsUniversity. In "Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory," publishedshortly after he died, Mandelbaum examined the kind of knowledge neededby the revolutionary.
It is probably not necessary that those seeking to institute social change should at the outset have a clear vision of what their goals are to be: they may simply be aware of an unmet need, or of a situation so oppressive that it must be changed. In the course of their action, however, they must proceed pragmatically, taking into account the nature of already existing institutions, and adapt their tactics to that which they are in a position to change. This will involve both an understanding of the unfulfilled needs and the temper of the people as well as an understanding of the ways in which their society's institutions are structured. Contrary to what has often been claimed, past history is not the best source of such knowledge. What is needed is an analysis of the actually present situation.
Coy Empire
Did the Soviet Union have designs on Cuba in the early days of theCastro regime? If anything, the opposite was true, argues Richard E.Welch Jr. '45, professor of history at Lafayette College and author of"Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution,1959-1961" (University of North Carolina).
The Soviet Union, for its part, was less the pursuer than the pursued. Concerned with sustaining the "spirit of Camp David" and fearful that overt Russian support might lessen the appeal of Castroism in Latin America and inspire U.S. military intervention in Cuba, Kruschchev was wary of linking Russian prestige with a bearded Robin Hood whose revolution stood outside communist discipline and control. Kruschchev could see advantage in encouraging Caribbean revolutionaries to take a posture of defiance toward the United States; an America distracted by developments in its immediate sphere of influence was less likely to cause problems for the Soviet Union in other regions. But Kruschchev would tread cautiously as long as Castro's success appeared uncertain.
Show Tuning
The trade show has become an American industry, spawning a rapidlygrowing specialized profession among the people who organize conventions and manage exhibits for them. In "Exhibit Marketing: A SurvivalGuide for Managers," Edward A. Chapman Jr. '55 describes how tradeshows breed more trade shows.
The banking industry has its own meetings for communications and computer specialists. The same is true in the department store industry. The National Retail Merchants Association meeting does not stand alone. There's the NMRA Electronic Data- Processing conference as well, and discount retailers have their own show. The computer industry itself, first supported by large general-interest computer technology conferences, is subdividing. A proliferation of new, special-interest trade shows is emerging as the influence of the older large shows, such as the National Computer Conference, seems to decline.
Battle Theater
William S. Lind '69 is the coauthor with erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Hart of "American Can Win: The Case for Military Reform"(Adler & Adler). This passage from their book is part of a section onproblems with military training.
Although combat is characterized by the unexpected, most of our training exercises follow rigid scripts, called "scenarios." Everyone knows long in advance what will happen, and what his unit is to do when. Detailed operations orders of great length—orders so long they would be useless or worse in combat—are written up, with units often judged by how long their "op order" is. Most of the big exercises that make the newspapers, like "Solid Shield" in the United States, "Reforger" in Europe, and "Team Spirit" in Korea, are scenario exercises. They are better training for putting on an opera than for combat.
Stretch of Faith
Leonard W. Doob '29 is Sterling professor emeritus of psychology andassociate director of the Southern African Research Program at Yale. Inhis latest book, "Slightly Beyond Skepticism: Social Science and theSearch for Morality" (Yale), he uses the social sciences to answer thefundamental question: is a universal morality possible?
A historian [F. Baumer] who traced the rise of skepticism in religion from the seventeenth century to the present has noted that "in many cases" that doctrine has been "accompanied by some form of believing." My own skepticism is likewise accompanied by a belief that there is something slightly beyond skepticism enabling us to cope with existence.
Also Received
"The Wildflower Gardener's Guide" (Garden Way), by Henry W.Art '66, chairman of biology at Williams College.
"The Aviators' Guide to Modern Navigation" (Tab Books), by DonaldJ. Clausing '68, an aviation writer who has owned and operated his owncharter flight business.
"Handbook of Endocrinology" (CRC Press), Volume II, Parts A andB, coedited by Harold M. Kaplan '30, professor, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.
Judson Hale, author of "The Education of a Yankee" (Harper &Row).
