Letters

Good Work

How lucky I am that the summer issue contains great stories about our retiring and incoming presidents, an informative story on the fraternity situation, and great news about sports championships. I'm sure it will be better read than ever, and some people

may even hang on to it as a keepsake! Further, I appreciate the greater objectivity in reporting on the College the magazine offers under your leadership. It is more valuable, and also more interesting. I like your accounts of the lives of unusual alumni/ae. Maybe because of my own mind set I think accounts of public service are good to feature as something of an antidote to the excessive materialism of this age.

Buffalo, New York

Just a brief note to congratulate you on the summer issue. The cover started the whole issue off on the right foot. I applaud your choice of letters and the list of presidential perks tickled me, especially about the noisy neighborhood.

I detected a new vitality and a positive approach without the sense of the Magazine being a propaganda organ for the administration. Keep up the good work!

Coralville, lowa

I simply want to convey my warm compliments for the all-around quality of the summer issue, which strikes me as among the best in recent memory.

I suspect it was not an easy task to balance the most informative profile of incoming President Freedman with equally thorough and informative coverage of Commencement and reunions, the Trustees' report and recommendations concerning the fraternities, the outstanding accomplishments of Dartmouth's varsity baseball team, and the several other regular departments—and still time the whole project for arrival (at least in my mailbox) just a day or two before Dr. Freedman's inauguration. Nicely done!!

As a sometimes-journalist and communications professional, I think I can appre- ciate the effort and skills required to create a magazine of distinctly superior quality and attractiveness, and I congratulate you for your efforts. I'll look forward to succeeding issues with genuine anticipation. Keep up the good work!

Acton, Massachusetts

My professional admiration and warm congratulations on the comprehensive and very able coverage of the beginning of the Freedman presidency, and of Dave McLaughlin's "forward look," in the summer issue.

I thought the article on President Freedman and the accompanying boxes were informative and thorough. A particularly fine job.

Washington, D.C.

The latest issue is a superb publication. Dr. Freedman is indeed well qualified for the tasks ahead, which are formidable.

It is now clear the Alumni Magazine is going to be a solid pedestal in the administrative structure. We wish you well and look forward with eagerness to future issues of the D.A.M.

Glens Falls, New York

Bad Work

The coverage of the College's 1987 Class Day and Commencement ceremonies published in the summer issue was rather awful. No, it wasn't rather awful, it was just plain terrible.

The text accompanying the two-page "photo essay" appears to have been taken, entire, from a press release. Could it be that neither Professor Hennessey nor Senator Bradley said anything worthy, of report?

Were the valedictories of Messrs. Henrie and McLaughlin deemed too pedestrian (or perhaps too inflammatory) to be summarized for alumni?

Honoris causa citations are, often, a difficult literary form; however, excerpts might nicely have indicated why the College chose to honor some of those new members of the tribe (no pun).

Happily, there awaits next year.

Pasadena, California

Although I much appreciated the profile of President Freedman in your summer issue, you might have improved your review of the McLaughlin presidency with the text of his valedictory to the seniors, which was also one of his farewells to the college family.

In the same vein, Mark Henrie's valedictory should have been recognized by the inclusion of his address. I also missed the text of the citations of the honorary degree recipients (as well as their pictures). I was particularly delighted that the College honored Dr. Nthato H. Motlana and two superb authors, Barbara Tuchman and Norman F. McLean '24, but the texts of the citations are always good indicators of the College's standards of excellence and a source of inspiration for us.

I hope your next summer issue will provide me space for the food-for-thought features that a good Dartmouth commencement can provide and that those of us who cannot be there can savor.

Manchester, Maine

Intolerant Committee

I enjoyed the summer issue, particularly the article on James Freedman. It appears that the search committee has chosen well.

The article quoted from a Freedman speech to the Dartmouth faculty earlier in the year that "tolerance of maddeningly different points of view is essential to the maintenance of a community of scholars and to the passionate exchange of ideas." This remark contrasted starkly with a quote from Professor James Wright's Committee on Residential Life in the Special Report which suggested that those who support what the committee opposes "have no real understanding of the nature of the College and probably have no real business being here."

Perhaps Professor Wright missed the speech. Even so, he and the committee he chairs should know better than to preach such intolerance to views different from their own, particularly when it is done under the guise of preaching tolerance.

I'm sure the fraternity -system needs work, but these attitudes aren't appropriate for dealing with the problem. If Freedman believes in what he says, he should insist that his appointed committees tolerate different views from all members of the Dartmouth community and that they not be allowed to "banish" those which don't strike their particular fancy.

Menlo Park, California

Hart Slandered

I would like to have recorded my objection to the slanderous attacks on the person and character of Professor Jeffrey Hart which appeared in the summer issue. Those who would associate Professor Hart with the likes of Hitler, Mein Kampf, and Joe McCarthy display the characteristics of desperate and frightened little men.

Professor Hart is an illustrious alumnus of Dartmouth College and an outstanding professor of English at the College who has taught for 25 years, written seven books, countless columns and articles and is a thoroughly civilized and good man. I wish him well as well as the important work he seeks to do at Dartmouth College.

Harvard, Massachusetts

I write to protest a number of letters published in the summer issue about the Hopkins Bulletin and Jeffrey Hart. I have known Professor Hart as a scholar and a friend for some years now. Nothing in his professional or personal life could possibly justify comparing him with Adolf Hitler, as did two of your correspondents. Such language diminishes the level of discourse in the Dartmouth community and debases your journal.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Washington, D.C.

Apparently for at least two Dartmouth alumni, the Nazi holocaust doesn't mean much. It has come to denote nothing more severe than political opinions which irritate them.

Charles Fryer '51 compares English professor Jeffrey Hart to "John Birch, Joe McCarthy, and Adolph What's-His- Name." M.H. Cohen '80 compares Hart's writings to Mein Kampf.

While Dartmouth alumni can agree or disagree with Hart's conservative beliefs, I think we can all unite in condemning statements which trivialize the indescribable suffering of six million Jews. Further, it is not too much to ask that Fryer and Cohen apologize in public for the consequences of their loose language on a good man's reputation.

Washington, D.C.

Harmful Institute

S. Avery Raube argues that encouraging "penetrating and dispassionate examination of all points of view" is what makes a full-fledged liberal arts institution.

Perhaps this is the goal of haloed scholars studying at the cosmic Dartmouth campus in intellectual nirvana. I would point out that we happen to be talking about an earthbound institution run by and for human beings, creatures given both brains and hearts.

Some things cannot be examined "dispassionately," nor should they be. Examining our loyalty to the College, our choices of lifelong mates, or the College's selection of a symbol are examinations which necessarily involve passion. To attempt "dispassionate examination" is to embark on a dishonest path.

I never thought that my liberal arts education was even attempting the goals Raube suggests. But then, I attended the college within the last 20 years, after Dartmouth's fall from grace.

Which brings me to a passionate point: I am insulted by Raube's rhetoric. From his opening ("President Hopkins was thoroughly imbued with the principles of free societies"), he takes a condescending tone. He claims knowledge superior to that of the rabble of benighted alumni: writers who oppose his institute "probably don't know that the nature and character of Dartmouth have changed." The College which I know and love as it is is no longer adequate as a liberal arts institution and needs renewal, he writes: he degrades my experience by degrading Dartmouth.

So long as Raube, the Hopkins Institute and the Dartmouth Review continue to treat alumni, students and faculty with contempt and disdain, they will continue to receive the slights and disdain which they seem so surprised to receive. The paradoxical service they have done is to prove that passion, like reason, cannot be ignored.

Richmond, California

Mr. Raube's statement in the summer Letters is claptrap, cleverly worded to provide camouflage for activities that are harmful and even vicious. It is a classic whitened sepulcher: from a distance it appears fair, but up close, it stinks.

Mr. Raube calls for "the expression of all points of view." What could be more liberal than that? But academic institutions are not towers of Babel. They exist, rather, to try, through the disciplined application of human intelligence, to approach ever more closely the objectively true and the morally and ethically valid. Biology departments need not teach "creation science," because creationism is false by all known scientific criteria. (Faith in special creation is another matter; but biology departments do not teach religion.) Astronomy departments need not spend time on a "penetrating and dispassionate examination" of the Ptolemaic viewpoint. Professors of sociology may properly discourage arguments for the validity of racism in their classrooms, because racism is based on false premises and is morally repugnant.

Mr. Raube favors the "fundamentals of a liberal arts education"—which sounds good until one realizes that this is code for a narrow Eurocentrism. It is a "liberal arts education" that ignores totally the diversity and complexity of the modern world. Professor Jeffrey Hart, who is associated with this new institute, is famously nostalgic for the 19505: the bland, narrow-minded, conformist, racist, bomb-rattling, McCarthyite good old days. Privileged whites, stand up for your heritage! Everyone else can sit in the back of the bus.

It is true that many of the issues that rocked the campus in the 1970s created more sound and fury than light. I wish, for example, that the outraged opponents of the Hovey Grill murals had had more of a sense of humor and more appreciation of the modest virtues of kitsch; I wish they had seen the murals as something to be laughed at, not plastered over. What is most significant here, however, is that Professor Hart and his disciples hitched their wagon to alumni support on these issues in order to gain financial and other backing for activities that are deeply destructive to the college so beloved by those same alumni.

For the past decade, the Dartmouth Review has been engaged in tearing Dartmouth College apart at the seams. In the process of trying to "return" the College to an imaginary never-never land of bygone days, the editors have brutally made life miserable for many members of the student body: women, blacks, Native Americans, gays, and anyone else who disagreed with either their message or their methods. While calling for a "collegial atmosphere" of open enquiry, they have launched the ugliest possible ad hominem attacks on members of the faculty. Their tactics have stifled the very free enquiry they pretend to espouse.

Three years ago I resigned from my tenured position on the Dartmouth faculty. One of the reasons I did so was that the poisonous miasma of Hartite doctrine spreading across the campus, and the administration's weak and ineffectual response to that threat, had, finally, cut too deeply into what had once been the pleasure of teaching there. But my affection for the institution that I served for 13 years remains undimmed. I write to call upon those who love Dartmouth to be vigilant against the new threat of the so-called Hopkins Institute. Beneath its cloak of fine-sounding phrases, it is poised to strike again at the College's heart.

New York, New York

Misfits and Weirdos

I have just received Volume 1, No. 2 of "The Hopkins Bulletin" welcoming the new president, James O. Freedman. He certainly will have his hands full, and I don't envy him the job, as the College struggles to repair the damage done by Presidents Dickey, Kemeny, and McLaughlin (in descending order).

For over 30 years, I have donated time, energy, love, and money to the College. I have been a Dartmouth recruiter out in the trenches where it really counts, and where people get their first impression of the College.

For the past 20 years, in Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, and Florida, I have conducted a labor of love working with guidance counselors, principals, teachers, parents, and applicants in college nights, college countdowns, and seminars. I have taken pride in interviewing men, women, white, blacks, Hispanics, and even one native American among the 200 would-be freshmen I have encouraged to attend Dart mouth. More than two dozen people have graduated from the College or are now attending it as a result of my direct efforts.

After this year, however, all of this effort is likely to come to an abrupt halt, as will my annual giving, which has already tapered off. The reason is that I no longer feel proud to be a Dartmouth alumnus, and can no longer share enthusiasm for those who wish to enter the College.

Any administration which allows women to throw bloody tampons at its president, individuals to curse and insult visiting Israeli dignitaries, men to graduate in wom- en's attire, and which gives recognition to and allows funding of all sorts of gays, lesbians, weirdos, anarchists, militant women's libbers, etc. but will not permit a room on campus for such a distinguished speaker as Michael Novak, is not allowing freedom of speech.

In order to have freedom, the liberating arts, and intellectual challenge, all sides must be heard on a fair and equal basis. TheHopkins Bulletin and The Dartmouth Review are precious for the preservation of the First Amendment. When moderates and conservatives are not allowed to speak, some of the precious freedoms which the bleeding heart liberals think they alone have the right to exercise and cherish die along with ours. The preservation of Dartmouth's ideals, customs, traditions, and two centuries of heritage demands that these people be allowed to express their views.

Here in Florida, one of our largest statefunded educational institutions, with a considerable enrollment of minority groups, proudly displays the Seminole Indian emblem at all major sporting events and public meetings, many of which are nationally televised, and yet Dartmouth people may not use an Indian emblem, even though Dartmouth was founded as an Indian school. Nor may their moms and dads and grandparents and friends attend an august and dignified Commencement in peace without rabble rousers ruining the solemnity of the occasion, hard earned after four years of work and study.

What was even more upsetting was to read the insipid drivel of the letters to the editor in the summer issue of the AlumniMagazine penned by bird brains who label anything as Fascist or Hitlerian which they do not understand or espouse. If Neo-So- cialist, narrow-minded, leftist pinko liberals are to dominate all of our thinking without letting the other side say even a word, then perhaps our diplomas are indeed worthless, and the fellow who ripped his up upon graduating had the right idea after all. Let's take up a collection to send M.H. Cohen '80 on a one-way trip to Communist Albania so he can see the ultimate result of his narrow-mindedness.

I pray that our new president will be able to restore some dignity to the College so that we do not have to explain away shanties on the Commons, free sex kits, coed dorms, the "Outrage" or pea-brained liberals who cannot tolerate any point of view other than their own, etc. to the anxious parents of would-be applicants or to the young people themselves. We have lost some very topnotch applicants and brilliant minds to other Ivy League and prestigious institutions because the applicants do not even feel safe to live on a campus which is festering with so many dissatisfied misfits, weirdos, and violent revolutionaries.

Satellite Beach, Florida

Issues Vote

For many years I have been reading the letters and articles and listening to the pros and cons of various Dartmouth issues. Let me cast my vote for the following:

Change the first line of our alma mater to "Here's to Dartmouth, give a rouse . . .

Change the title to either "Here's To Dartmouth" or simply, "The Dartmouth Alma Mater."

Restore a dignified Indian as a symbol of Dartmouth, honoring our Native Americans and our heritage in doing so.

Recognize history and art without fear of intimidation by uncovering Rollins Chapel stained glass windows and Hovey Grill murals.

Give our new president our wholehearted support as he assumes the mantle of this distinguished office.

Recognize and reaffirm the spirit of Dartmouth that recognizes the best in everyone, the freedom to differ yet holding mutual respect and, as John Dickey would say, the Dartmouth fellowship in which there is no parting.

Of course, I think these steps would make everyone happy, or should anyway. But then that is my view. Whatever the words of the alma mater or the tune, what- ever the symbol, I want to be numbered among the "loyal sons—and daughters—of Dartmouth."

Harrisburg, Virginia

Admissions Failure?

I noted the concern expressed in the summer issue by my good friend, Dean of Admissions Al Quirk, that 38 percent of the class of '9l will be female, similar to recent years but below the 40 percent peak for the class of '87. Stanford, which has been coeducational since 1891, was 45 percent in 1985 and dropped to 42 this year. Stanford Undergraduate Dean Jean Fetter says in the November 1986 issue of the Stanford Observer that Harvard and Yale enroll about 40 percent women and Princeton 35. It seems to me that rather than being "disappointed" by our male-female ratio, we should be pleased that we are similar in this regard to comparable institutions.

Franklin Lakes, New Jersey

Fraternity Substitutes

Allow me a comment on some statements in Lee Michaelides' Special Report on fraternities in the summer issue.

The Board of Trustees has said, "We have not yet succeeded in reducing the fraternity system's dominance of social life on campus. " As long as Dartmouth or any other small college is located in a small community, composed as it is by definition of a population of still-maturing young people, away from home, yet still reflecting the society of their upbringing, so will the fraternity social system persist. People not only will discriminate, that is, choose their companions, but they have the inherent right to do so in our form of democracy.

If you would change things, only the admonition of one of Dartmouth's most illustrious alumni, R. Buckminister Fuller, L.H.D. '68, will work. He recommends that we "reform the environment, don't try to reform man." In other words, substitute dorms for the frat houses, build a student union, make dorms coed as per demand, and so forth.

Providence, Rhode Island

Dartmouth What?

I was dismayed to read in the summer Letters that an alumnus was so oblivious of College history as to ask that Dartmouth call itself "Dartmouth University." "Dartmouth University" was the name the State of New Hampshire imposed on the College as part of its seizure of the school which led to Daniel Webster's celebrated argument before the Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College case. Dartmouth has since remained a "College" as a proud reminder of its independence from state control.

As those of us who help in recruitment and see the College's promotional materials know, Dartmouth rightly takes pride in being the only "college" in the Ivy League. Comparatively speaking, Dartmouth has better managed to avoid the bloated bureaucracies and administrative indifference to students common to many large universities. Precisely because "it is a small college" can we say that "there are those who love it."

Fort Smith, Arkansas

"It is, Sir Maxwell Field '33, T'34, a small college, but there are those who love her!" (Adapted from Webster, presently turning over at 574 RPM six feet under.)

Silver Spring, Maryland

Middlebury's SATs

The summer "College" section contains a small inaccuracy. Middlebury College has not joined Bowdoin and Bates in dropping the SATs from our admissions requirements. As is the case with the Dartmouth admissions staff, we consider the standardized test to be useful when used properly. What we have done is offer three test options and allow the students to select one. A student may offer the traditional SATs and three of five Achievement Tests in different subjects or the ACTs.

SAT bashing has become such a popular pastime that most of the media have seen fit to offer a misleading headline. I thought you might like to keep the record straight.

Congratulations for producing an excellent alumni magazine!

FATHER OF KARL '84 AND CHRISTIE '89

Restore the Traditions

In welcoming President James Freedman to the Dartmouth campus, is it not possible to retain (and restore) all of the Dartmouth traditions that are both memorable and meaningful to the College's alumni?

Venturing into the North country, an area once dominated by American Indians, we learned to love the mountains and forests as we followed in the footsteps of Eleazar Wheelock. Our Indian classmates, although few, were among the most respected students with whom we fraternized. My late close friend, Don McBirney of the Class of 1930, was particularly beloved and respected because he was part Indian.

If not irreverent or disrespectful, it is at least inconsiderate to deprive those of us who came to love and respect the traditions of Eleazar Wheelock and the American Indian of those rights. It is as if Dartmouth is adopting a practice of some totalitarian states of rewriting history. To pretend that the American Indian is not part of our heritage, that Eleazar Wheelock never lived or that Dartmouth athletic teams were not cheered on to victory by a wah-hoo-wah is to distort elements that have deep and enduring meaning to many Men of Dartmouth.

It is indeed a travesty to yield to a charge such as that voiced in the summer Letters by Richard Porter '70, who maligns Eleazar Wheelock by intoning "God Bless and reform his prejudiced soul ..."

Dartmouth has a rich heritage which has grown in enlarged perspective as the nation has grown. I have joined most other Men of Dartmouth in welcoming women to the Dartmouth family. Perhaps it is time for a new college song to add to the many already included in our Song Book. Perhaps it is time also to accept the new college cheer for the "Big Green" men and women of Dartmouth. But developments such as these do not justify repudiating or abandoning Eleazar Wheelock, the Dartmouth Indian, the traditional Wah-hoo-wah or other elements of our rich and historic heritage which are cherished (yes, and revered) by those of us who proudly claim Dartmouth as our alma mater (and pater).

MEMBER, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Washington, D.C.