CUTTING BONE

College budgeters face tough choices.

Last spring, Director of Financial Services Edwin Johnson '67 voiced concerns that the effects of many years of budget cuts were beginning to show (see "Making Ambitious Ends Meet" in the April issue). By mid-September, Johnson predicted an initial budget gap of between $2.5 and $3 million for fiscal 1990 and worried that potentially painful cuts were on the horizon.

If Dartmouth has tightened its institutional belt for so long, why hasn't the budget gap decreased? According to Johnson, part of the answer is that the rate of increase in revenue has actually decreased when inflation is factored in. In addition, the College has been hit with large unforeseen expenses such as a substantial Blue CrossBlue Shield increase and potentially hefty legal fees for defending the College from lawsuits, including those recently filed by staffers of the Dartmouth Review.

Until now, the College managed to avoid major cuts by trimming the fat—whittling away small percentages across the board. This year, Johnson feels a different tack must be taken. "Many areas that had been coming in under budget for years were on target last year," he says. "Any padding we once had was essentially gone. If we try to trim any more fat, we may end up cutting into bone."

"In the past," Johnson notes, "cuts have been discussed in terms of choice between which programs to add. Now, in order to balance the budget, it may not only be what we add, but also what we eliminate."

Johnson's early tabulation of the gap (months before the budget was to be presented to the Trustees) is the result a new top-down budgeting process whereby Johnson starts with the current budget and meets with other College officials to determine program demands. He then assumes reasonable inflation factors for items such as anticipated revenues, taxes, insurance, fuel costs, and tuition. He also adds in known and unavoidable one-time costs. The bottom line shows the money that is needed and the money available. A key figure determining the College's next budget is the gap. Determining the figure this early allows time for the development of thoughtful, creative fiscal strategies based on policy considerations rather than expediency. Raising tuition is one option, but Johnson says that the Trustees would like to see smaller tuition hikes.

Beaming the President

This February, President James O. Freedman plans to "visit" with alumni around the nation via satellite and closed-circuit television. At 8:00 p.m. on February 1, Freedman will deliver his first State of the College address and then spend 40 minutes answering questions phoned in by alumni. The Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley will provide a studio audience in Alumni Hall. David Orr '57, senior associate director of Alumni Affairs, expects that as many as 40 alumni clubs across the country will screen the telecast. For a list of clubs participating, call Orr at 603/646-2258. Alumni who own satellite dishes and want to watch at home should call Orr's colleague, Burgwell Howard 'B6, assistant director of Alumni Affairs, at the same number, for instructions.

Souring Inferno

At Dartmouth Night, the athletes spoke, the Glee Club sang, the band played, and the crowd bellowed the alma mater. The only tradition that failed this year was the fire, which sputtered to a halt before the structure collapsed.

The College was urged by state air pollution officials to burn wood free of creosote, which produces air pollutants. The '92 firebuilders happily started a new tradition by writing their names on the blond-colored wood. But the ties had not been seasoned, and a bulldozer knocked down the charred remains the following morning.

Top Ivy Givers

Alumni Fund Director Henry Eberhardt '61 doesn't take too seriously the annual claim of Kentucky's tiny Centre College that it has the nation's highest percentage of alumni donors—75.4 percent. "Schools use different methods to calculate the percentage," Eberhardt says.

The United Press International recently ranked Dartmouth third in alumni giving behind Centre and Williams College. The College still ranks first among the Ivy League schools in the percentage of alumni who give money to their alma mater. It received funds from 65 percent of graduates, compared with secondplace Princeton's 58 percent.

Cross-Century Inventors

The challenge: build a device that would travel exactly 50 feet, make a 180-degree turn and come back to the starting point. Two Dartmouth seniors have succeeded, using nineteenth-century mathematician Jean Fourier as a collaborator. In the process, they won a student design competition sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Peter Monaco of Mountain View, California, and Christoph Mack of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, earned the award with their Fourier Gearbox, a self-propelled, self-steered vehicle designed and built for an engineering class. Inspired by Fourier's analysis of wave pulses, the vehicle made its appointed round in a continuous-wave motion.

Missing Mural

Workers recently found a forgotten Humphrey mural rolled up in a corner of the attic of Thayer Dining Hall. Painted in the late 1930s by illustrator Walter Beach Humphrey 'l4, the murals illustrate the song "Eleazar Wheelock" written by Richard Hovey '85. The paintings show the College founder providing rum to scantily clad and apparently drunk male Indians while nearly naked Indian women look on.

In the "rediscovered" panel, an Indian maiden stands demurely near a tree, watching a snarling bear, an elk, a fox and a bluejay as autumn leaves fall.

The seven controversial murals, which cover the walls of the Hovey Grill in Thayer have been kept under cover since 1983 following protests by native Americans and others who found them offensive. Officials at the Hood Museum where the mural is being kept, say they don't know where in the Hovey Grill the mural would fit or if the artist had simply made it as a "practice" mural.

Bones Gate Ejected

Last spring, after an alcohol-laced Bones Gate "Tea Party" sent three students to Dick's House, the College yanked the fraternity's official status for a year and forebade it from having alcohol in the building. Four months later, a College official found beer in the Bones Gate basement, and the separation became a divorce.

The deans announced that the 80member house is officially excluded from rash and will no longer have any College services, including cut-rate insurance, campus security, trash pickup and snow removal. The local fraternity is the first to be permanently cut off from Dartmouth. The house's officers have appealed, claiming they were unfairly singled out in an administrative effort to destroy the fraternity system.

Comparing Grime

Almost 98 percent of Dartmouth students feel safe on campus at night compared with 77 percent of students at other schools, according to a USA Today survey released in the fall. Some 1,500 Dartmouth undergraduates responded to a questionnaire that led to a series of October stories on campus crime. Acting Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco discounted the survey, saying it was conducted "unscientifically."

By taking action now, College officials say they can draft a thoughtful policy that will close the budget gap that Win Johnson projected.