LETTERS

Loner Admissions

Initially, I congratulate you and your staff on the Magazine's vigorous new format and content.

In reading Victor Zonana's "Welcoming the Loner," I took a hard look back at my own undergraduate days at the College. With the rosetinted glasses removed, it was apparent to me that the most difficult times were those of tension between the role of student (whose "business here was learning," according to John Dickey), and the expected role of athlete and party animal. Subsequent visits to the College often give me the rather wistful impression that, too many times, I made unwise choices between those two alternatives.

So, put me down as one who endorses President Freedman's initiative. Students can only be comforted by the knowledge that their individuality is valued. There will be plenty of time for joining later.

Wyomissing, Pennsylvania

Compliments on a provocative and timely article by Victor Zonana on admissions. President Freedman's notions of the "loner" have a certain romantic appeal. Maybe we can even build a special dorm for loners (all single rooms, no need for a social lounge, no telephones, small windows, thick walls, indirect lighting). But let's also recognize the muchmaligned "traditional" Dartmouth student-you know, "the gregarious, party-going, intelligent but not intellectual" man or woman.

Allow for a moment that there is truth in this silly generality and then congratulate Dartmouth for producing people like this. Many experts on global industrial economics say that the United States is handicapped by its inability to foster teamwork and group cooperation in the workplace. We are good at producing egocentric, brilliant, self-motivated individuals who cannot relate to the needs of a group and who cannot implement their brilliant ideas. Other cultures, particularly Pacific Rim countries, concentrate more on developing interpersonal skills and teamwork values.

The comments of Karen Avenoso '88 imply that there is something sinister about enthusiastic participation in groups. But where is the evidence that group involvement "discourages autonomous, independent thinking"? My personal experience is just the opposite: being part of a group, whether it be social, professional or religious, does more to challenge my standards and push my thinking to new levels than does my private brooding behind closed doors.

San Francisco, California

I personally found the September issue the first interesting one since I graduated in June 1976 (insult intended). I particularly enjoyed and was provoked by the essay "Is Dartmouth Still Dartmouth?".

I get the feeling from the article that the Dartmouth officials are not sure which direction the College is heading. This is particularly comforting to me because any direction, liberal or conservative, is the wrong direction. I also get the feeling that Dartmouth officials measure their success by the number of famous alumni that graduate. If the future of the College depends on the Alumni Public Familiarity Index perhaps more funds should have been expended on convincing Brooke Shields to accept Dartmouth over Princeton.

New York, New York

Fraternity Stranglehold

Allow me to congratulate you on the September issue. "Welcoming the Loner" made me feel that I and many of my classmates would never make the grade there now. Even if one had a few "loner" tendencies, which I now admit I did, you sank or swam with the fraternity system's stranglehold on campus social life. You had to be One of the guys to get anywhere, and I and most of the others conformed. Maybe delayed rush delayed forever? is a good idea.

Cleveland, Ohio

Looking Good

Bravo on the facelift! I especially liked "Syllabus" and hope it will become a regular feature. With President Freedman's welcome emphasis on the life of the mind, this feature will help me better understand what's happening in the classrooms of the College. Who knows? The magazine may become a vehicle of ongoing and continuing education.

Keep up the good words!

Athens, Georgia

I am both surprised and delighted by the changes you have made in the DAM!!

Hammond, Louisiana

The new format is terrific. Both the College and the Magazine seem to have entered a Renaissance. Keep it up.

Austin, Texas

Snow Job

The changes in the revamped Alumni Mag seem to be little more than cosmetic, reflecting only the editor's desire to put his own imprintperhaps the new President's as well on the publication. The crux of the matter is content communication. The evident communication in the new Mag is that change at Dartmouth is happening, always has and always will. Those who fight changes are just not with it. That's history. If you have good sense you'll just stand there and let the tanks roll over you. It's bigger than all of us just you wait and see.

Well, gang, I simply can't buy that. It's my opinion that we are getting a well-orchestrated snow job. Oh, it's just possible that history will prove that what is happening is right sim ply because it's happening. In my view, dynamic change is a vital factor in life but social and intellectual manipulation is not. I am deeply concerned when the scenario for the future suggests that everything must be changed, everything transcended. I find value in tradition, identity and uniqueness. I do not think Dartmouth College needs to express its leadership by following patterns expressed by the more obvious, better publicized or traditional leaders the Big Three universities, if you will. Or sociological pressures if you must.

I do not oppose change. I welcome fresh air, new talent, new viewpoints but I want the alumni of the future to nurture a sincere desire to be part of what Dartmouth repre- sents. I am opposed to a whole new set of manipulative demographics. Opposed to standing around with my hat in hand begging for a fresh crop of reluctant, cheeky applicants.

Providence, Rhode Island

Embarrassing Statements

Reporting on the controversy involving the administration and the Dartmouth Review, your articles show a puzzling tendency to exclude information and evidence damaging to President Freedman and favorable to the suspended student journalists.

You inform alumni that the Dartmouth administration regards the Review's suit as "frivolous." You abstain from noting that John Steel, Dartmouth trustee and defendant, has said: "These are very serious charges and the current administration in my opinion will be hard pressed to defend its position." New Hampshire governor John Sununu, another defendant, has said publicly that he believes the student reporters were treated unfairly by the administration.

The three most prominent civil libertarians in the country have criticized Dartmouth's animus toward free speech. You mention the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union's decision not to take the Review case but refrain from citing public statements of Morton Halperin, Washington director of the ACLU. "The charges against these students have to do with speech ...They are being punished because people on campus find offensive the content of what they're writing in the magazine."

Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School says: "I strongly disagree with much of what appears in the Dartmouth Review ... but I believe that a great university should tolerate all manner of expression, written and oral, that contributes to the marketplace of ideas, as the expression at issue in the Dartmouth Review case certainly does. As one who has long fought against efforts by universities to punish speech which is deemed 'vexatious,' 'inciting,'or any other characterization which purports to take it outside the ambit of protected expression, I must continue to oppose university censorship ...Dartmouth College has no right to silence the Dartmouth Review."

Nat Hentoff, columnist for the Village Voice, writes in the Washington Post, "The sensibilities of Dartmouth's faculty and administration must surely be among the most fragile in the nation ...The idea that minorities must be protected from hurtful words and images is profoundly patronizing as if these students are incapable of fighting bad speech with more powerful speech of their own."

In addition, the Student Press Law Center, a non-ideological group which monitors campus censorship, has issued a press statement: "We are extremely concerned about incidents on the Dartmouth campus which we believe reflect a growing wave of campus censorship inflicted under the guise of fighting racism."

No doubt these statements rass the College's official position but I feel you have the responsibility to inform alumni so they can make up their own minds.

Alexandria, Virginia

The statements quoted by Mr.D'Souza,a founding editor of the Dartmouth Review, are clearly in the realm of opinion,not "information and evidence."In thenews reports we chose mostly to conveythe facts of the case and to summarizethe opinions of the Dartmouth Reviewstudents and administration spokesmen.Watch future issues for debates about freespeech on campus and about the Dartmouth Review itself Ed.

Behold Obnoxiousness

The full-page ad in the September issue on the Dartmouth Review draws a fine line "between expressing obnoxious opinions and expressing opinions obnoxiously." It then goes further to draw from that erroneous statement that "laws and local ordinances" may define what is obnoxious behavior and thus limit speech. Wrong. Free speech is just that, as a moment's reading of the First Amendment will show. Obnoxiousness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Under the ad's definition, any local group which did not wish to hear a particular form of thought could simply frame a "local ordinance" to prohibit it. Indeed, that is exactly what has happened at Dartmouth.

It is obnoxious that the coeducation celebration will have the radical Angela Davis as its keynote speaker along with a gaggle of radical feminists. It is obnoxious that a newcomer president would slap the collective face of the most loyal alumni in the country by considering us as beer-swilling louts and openly stating that a new type of Dartmouth undergraduate is needed. It is obnoxious that the only people found guilty of any crime worthy of longterm suspensions are conservatives while outrageous behavior such as several months' occupation of the campus by illegal shanties, invasion of offices, takeover of the library and so on is winked at because their cause agrees with the thoughts of the discipline committee.

In short, it is obnoxious that the "Freedman Vision," as Dean Shanahan biblically puts it, views the alumni with such contempt and it is ludicrous to think we will accept it.

Kansas City, Missouri

Enough, Already

Is there to be no end to the freshman-level bull session on the Dartmouth Review, the Hopkins Institute, Professor Cole and all that? Absurd theater, as David Graulich's letter described it. And it's making a laughing stock of a "Dartmouth education"; witness the Institute's latest ad, with its list of 17 directors from classes going back 63 years.

There's an old saying that you can't tell time from inside the watch. The Institute is imprisoned by its abstractions: "intellectual" (six times), "excellence," "principles," "discipline," "morals," "culture," etc. a semantic wonderland of sacred cows in a bloodstained landscape referred to as the "cultural and intellectual heritage of Western civilization."

It calls up Gandhi's answer when asked what he thought about Western civilization: "I think it would be a good idea."

Chevy Chase, Maryland

Virus I.D

I want to voice my wholehearted support for classmate Donn Alan Tenney's innovative "Aids Idea (September Letters). I would recommend only two helpful modifications: that the wallet-sized certificate be required not just voluntary; and that said certificate be carried by all virii rather than by humans.

Most of the humans (gay or straight) I know can be less than totally responsible about having proper and accurate documentation at the appropriate time. The same, I'll have to assume, may be said of your average "needle doper" although I'm less familiar with these folks.

A truly progressive idea like this usually entails some risk. (I can foresee an underground industry developing to provide rogue HIV with forged flu virus certificates.) But I'm confident that once the bugs are removed from the equation, our situation should be back to normal.

Tucson, Arizona

Bandleader Bio

To assist me in writing a biography of bandleader Jan Savitt (1907-1948) I would like to hear from anybody who remembers the appearance of the Savitt band at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival of 1944.

Fort Myers Beach, Florida

Indian Solution

Please allow me to add a very strong AMEN to W.R.J. White's summer letter calling for an actionoriented creative solution to the Indian issue. For hundreds of years, the American Indian has demonstrated nobility and wisdom which Dartmouth has usually ignored or mocked. Isn't it about time we affirmed and celebrated the qualities too long denied by our disgraceful conduct historically and currently?

I hope "someone up there" was paying attention.

Gainesville, Florida

Bloom's Perspective

Allan Bloom's The Closing of theAmerican Mind accurately presents a major problem for Western society and traces its roots.

Members of the classes with their fiftieth reunion on the horizon had an opportunity to experience Bloom's perspective. Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy was delivering two lectures each week with the same historic references, projecting into the future the current state of knowledge and identifying the problems that are now history. The equivalent of the law of gravity for the social sciences had not been discovered. The freshmen were required to learn European history and they experienced a course called evolution which put the sciences in perspective but was soon to be dropped in the name of academic freedom. There was economics without Samuelson's time-ignoring graphics of the supplydemand equation, and a new discipline, sociology, not yet recognized at Swarthmore and some other conservative institutions.

The Alumni Magazine's May debate follows the direction of Saul Bellow's apology to the community of scholars, turning the sword to a safe target.

Frankfort, Michigan

Cause Ads

In answer to your May editorial, "Why We Run Cause Advertising," perhaps this should be reevaluated by the Board of Trustees in an attempt to eliminate all but product advertising in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

Toledo, Ohio

Magazine Competition

I have just read the summer letter from Maxwell Field '33, TU '34, in which he shared his own personal preference among recent spring issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine, the Princeton Alumni Weekly and the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

My husband, a Yale '76 with a graduate degree from Princeton, was actually the one who alerted me to Mr. Field's letter. He was rather incredulous as he much prefers the Dartmouth magazine to that of his own alma mater. Though he never went to Dartmouth,himself, he reads our magazine practically cover to cover and, heaven forbid, if he should get his hands on a new issue before me, I often have to beg him for it after many minutes have passed! And we don't even receive the Princeton publication.

Lake Forest, Illinois

Alumni Dissension

I reside in a fairly remote section of central Oregon. Of our four falltime resident Dartmouth alumni families, two have recently discontinued Alumni Fund support due to reservations about College policies. Of the two alumni who have helped me regularly in admissions interviews, one has politely declined farther involvement for reason of similar concerns including, additionally, the declination of a particular local applicant this spring who was regarded as the catch of the year for the entire area and has been welcomed at Stanford.

Irrespective of who is right and who is wrong, it is apparent that the College and our alumni cannot afford the continuation of the adverse publicity and alumni dissension without risking wounds that will not heal. It is time for the College to get its act together before.it is too late!

Sunriver, Oregon

Have been, an Alumni Fund agent for the class of '37 most of my life and as the years go by it is increasingly difficult to get contributions. A recent letter from a classmate is typical of the feelings of more and more people in my class:

"I have tried to give regularly to Dartmouth, though our contributions have been small. Lately, however, I have been increasingly disenchanted by what is happening in Hanover....It is sad that the Dartmouth we knew under President Hopkins has been lured down the slippery path of liberalism urged on by a majority of wrong-minded professors ....I am going to give what support I can to those organizations that seem to understand the situation until the College is again an unbiased institution of higher education."

When or if this will stop nobody knows, but the point is the class of '37 would appear to have increasing problems for gifts to the Alumni Fund as years go by.

Fairlee, Vermont

Gay Alumni

In response to recent events at the College, items in the Alumni Magazine, and attempts by the Hopkins Institute to squelch diversity, we are writing to update readers about Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alums.

We have grown to 500 members in the United States and abroad. We have been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education among other periodicals.

D-GALA has several goals:

• Improve the quality of life for Dartmouth lesbians and gay men. The Edward Carpenter Foundation was established with a large bequest from an alumnus for just this purpose.

• Dispel ignorance and misinformation about lesbian and gay people.

• Sponsor lectures and provide a job network for graduating students.

• Prevent Dartmouth College from becoming the last Ivy League school to follow in Yale's footsteps in having a Lesbian and Gay Studies Center.

We urge all students alumni/ae and friends to contact us for more details and to write us with responses to this letter. All replies will be kept confidential.

Laurie Marin Nick Newman For Dartmouth GALA

Does the solitary individual belong on a campus of joiners?

STATEMENT of ownership, .management and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685). 1. Title of.publication: Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.(PutlicaiOn no. "148--i 5601. 2. 3 Frequency of issue: September through Summer with combined Winter A. Number of issues published annually: 9. B. Annual subscription price: $20.00. 4 Location of known office of publication: 4 West Wheelock Street. Hanover. NH 0*55 5. Location of the headquarters or general business office of the publishers: Dartmouth College. Hanover. NH 03755. 6. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NK f)3755, Editor, Jav Heinrichs, - West Wheelork Street,Hanove', NH 03755; Managing Editor. Lee Michaehdes. 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover, NH 03755. 7. Owner (if owned by a corporation, its name and address m ust be stated and | also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 'percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given, tu nod by a partnership or other umncoipoi itc - ifm l ameanc acid ;ss as well as that of each individual must be given): Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH 03755. 8, Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders,owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities:-none. 9 The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months. 10, Extent and nature of circulation. Average no Single issue during nearest preceding to filing 12 months date A. Total no. copies printed (net press run) 44.12! 45.600 B. Paid circulation 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter 22 - 45 2. Mail subscription's 42,675 -, 44,500 C. Total paid circulation 42,697 44,545 D. Free distribution by mail, carrrier or other means. Samples, complimentary, and other free copies 824 628 E. Total distribution (Sump of C and D) . 43.521 45.173 F. Copies Not Distributed 1. Office use, left-over. unaccounted for, spoiled after printing 600 427 G. Total (sum of E and F-should equal net pres runs .shown m A.) 44.121 45,600 I certify that the statement;, made by me above are correct and complete. —JAY HEINRICHS, Editor