Letters

Unchanged Brain

I read with some amusement winter's Undergraduate Chair, in which Jay Fogarty '88 describes the fear of intellectual deficiencies that come with the day-to-day-job. If I can avoid drooling, let me with the best of intentions tell him to cheer up. After 50 years in a day-to-day job I find my intellectual capacity is greatly expanded over my undergraduate days, but my reading ambitions are unchanged in that I still know what the Emancipation Proclamation was and who signed it. For instance it did not free the slaves, it freed the slaves in the confederate states.

I enjoyed Mr. Fogarty's article but I assure him it is possible to be out in the world and still stay mentally alert.

Kansas City, Missouri

Do It Over

The winter cover story, "If I Could Do It Over," caused both reflection and introspection. I have asked myself the same question on several occasions. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, most of us probably would have differed in our curriculum selection—less career-related and more knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Every time I visit Hanover for reunions I wonder why I didn't take more advantage of the outdoors. I think it's Dartmouth's greatest asset. When talking to high school seniors about Dartmouth, I always suggest they visit the campus. I hope you'll run the article periodically with interviews of different alumni.

Kansas City, Missouri

Birth Defects

A death, perhaps most poignantly that of a child, can be moving. Many who read the winter article, "The Loss of Jacob," by Peter Dorsen '66, were surely touched by his story of the death of his son Jacob Emanuel. It is a terrible and sad thing to have a baby born only to recognize that he or she will soon die, as did Jacob.

Dr. Dorsen calls the fatal defect "hydranencephaly." The more common name for this birth defect is anencephaly. It is due to failure of the upper end of the neural tube to close. Anencephaly is always lethal.

I have witnessed the births and deaths of hundreds of Jacobs. After studying as a French major at Dartmouth, I chose not to work in languages and literature but to go into medicine. As a pediatrician and medical geneticist, I have sadly seen all too many tragedies involving too many good families like the Dorsens over the past three decades. It is just as awful each time. Of a hundred babies born, several will be abnormal and have a major malformation such as anencephaly.

There are clues sometimes. One is subjective but I feel it should never be ignored: maternal premonition of trouble. If a pregnant woman is anxious about the baby, this is a sign of trouble. The trouble may be psychological but that is real, too. Or it may be a sixth sensing of a major congenital malformation.

The family history provides clues, too. The loss of two children to birth defects in the family is an objective clue to an increased risk of trouble. It warrants preconceptual and prenatal genetic counseling.

The age of the parents is another clue. As is well known, the risk of trisomy 21 (Down's syndrome) rises with the age of the mother. What may be less well known is that the risk of many other birth defects goes up with the age of the father.

We all of us like to believe, as Dr. Dorsen did, that there are "no reasons ... to fear an abnormality in our own child." That belief is a necessity to endure nine months of waiting. However, this belief is denial. For the past two decades, prenatal genetic counseling has become increasingly available. Prenatal diagnosis of lethal defects like anencephaly and of treatable defects has been developed.

The Dorsens have revealed their courage in telling the story of Jacob. They have revealed even more courage in moving ahead after Jacob's death and in being willing to "make another baby" who thankfully is fine. Their love in remembering Jacob is important but living life is important, too, as the Dorsens have shown us.

Scottsdale, Arizona

Positive Change

I am upset when my name is put on mailing lists for which I have no use. Unfortunately, Dartmouth's alumni directory attracts more right- than left-leaning mail to my door. This led to my extrapolation in the summer Letters of what I might find in future mail, but it was not meant in any way as an ad hominem attack. I regret others' assumptions in the October issue that my extrapolation was a direct comparison between the Hopkins Institute mailing and Mein Kampf.

I tend to read more closely any mail which seems associated with Dartmouth. Thus, my dismay was greater when I found I had no use for this mail from the Hopkins Institute. I promptly discarded it after expressing this to the editor, who addressed my point: the mailing list should not have been taken by the Institute or used for any other mass mailing not sanctioned by Dartmouth.

I do recall enough of the mailing to feel I'd sooner expect to find and hope to see an end to certain "ideals" at a college in Johannesburg than I'd like to see them "renewed" at ours in Hanover. Since the letter, I have become acquainted with a thriving university with a large minority population. The town even has much of the herbivorous food that the Hopkins Institute letter eschewed finding in a freshman's dorm. I guess I just don't see what is negative in these and other points made in the Institute's letter.

And, if I may put into a more positive context phrases from Institute Secretary Avery Raube's letter in the summer issue: authors of the mailing do not realize that the nature and character of society has changed and—almost as seriously—that this change has emerged without study, without design and without official approval. In other words, Dartmouth must keep up with demographics and society's expectations of a finer institution of higher education.

Berkeley, California

Basement Record

I have survived the bombastics regarding the Indian, the Review, Issueless Issues, etc. However, I am outraged by the remarks of Daniel P. Collins '82 in the November issue of our beloved magazine.

To intimate that he holds the record for time spent in the basement of Zeta Psi is ludicrous. I am and always have been the unchallenged holder of that dubious honor.

Marco Island, Florida

Turning the Tide

I have given to the Alumni Fund every year since I graduated, and I don't intend to stop now.

However, my accolades go to James A. Donovan '39 for his letter in the winter issue regarding what has happened to Dartmouth in recent years.

I certainly hope that the tide will turn now, within reason.

Wayland, Massachusetts

James A. Donovan's letter is astonishing. Perhaps the school should inject less athletically inclined students with steroids. How about torching Kiewit? Why leave such a mammoth trace of the twentieth century?

Mr. Donovan's final blow: that the alumni exert financial pressure to instigate change. Is he suggesting that only the wealthy be allowed to attend Dartmouth?

Watertown, Massachusetts

Lei-Up

With all the crankiness that has been vented in the letters section of this magazine over the last few years it is a pleasure to write with some good news about the College.

In December 1987 the Dartmouth Club of Hawaii had the good fortune to entertain the Dartmouth men's basketball team on their trip to the Islands to play the University of Hawaii.

The team is composed of young men from a variety of backgrounds from all over the country. The majority have passed up full-ride scholarships to Division I basketball powerhouses and have made significant personal sacrifices in order to receive a Dartmouth education and to play for Coach Paul Cormier and his fine staff. That they whipped Hawaii in convincing fashion is less important than the fact that they are gentlemen in the best sense of that word and excellent ambassadors for Dartmouth.

Coach Cormier has performed a minor miracle. He has turned the 5-21 team of three years ago into a serious contender for the Ivy championship. His team is fun to watch because it plays with so much enthusiasm and unselfishness. As a result of his success, Cormier undoubtedly will receive tempting overtures from bigtime basketball schools. I hope President Freedman will do whatever it takes to keep Coach Cormier in Hanover.

Honolulu, Hawaii

Discovering Columbus

I wish to reassure my fellow alumnus who wrote in the winter issue, lamenting our Country's missing out on the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America in 1492, that proper celebrations are in the works.

Two years ago, President Reagan appointed the Commission for the Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee. This commission has determined that a gathering of the world's "tall ships" would be a fitting recognition of Columbus's maritime achievement, and asked Operation Sail (which I chair) to stage this event on July 4, 1992. The same group who ran this show, and said "never again" in '64, '76 (Bicentennial) and '86 (Statue of Liberty) are on board again for '92.

It should be great!

New York, New York

Dartmouth Honesty

This is the story about a very honest man who received his education at Dartmouth College and Harvard University.

On our way to the Dartmouth-Harvard game last fall, my wife Myra's favorite Cartier gold bracelet—my first gift to her—loosened and was lost. She didn't realize this until halftime, at which time the game seemed grim as well. After losing the game and losing the bracelet, we dejectedly drove home to New York City.

Two days later I received a call from a gentleman who had obtained my office number from the Harvard police. After greeting me with the joyful news of having found the bracelet, he said he would return it on one condition only: I had to tell him which school I was rooting for at the game. I nervously answered, "Well, I actually attended both schools, Dartmouth undergrad and Harvard Med . . . but my loyalties were with Dartmouth."

He proclaimed, "The bracelet is yours." He, too, was a Dartmouth man who had gone to graduate school at Harvard. Thank God!

I thanked him profusely and offered a reward for his altruism, honesty and effort. "Well, if you insist," he answered. And so the Jimmy Fund received a gift in the name of Glenn Pruszinski, Dartmouth '74, Harvard Divinity School '75.

I believe both schools won that Saturday.

New York, New York

Disturbing Observations

In the last two years, I have returned to Hanover seven or eight times to visit my son in the Class of 1990. Two observations struck me as somewhat disturbing in a generally good and solid setting.

The first problem was the apartness, and I use the English term rather than the government-sanctioned "apartheid," of the black students from those of other races. It seemed rather clear that for whatever reason, black students would be seen walking together, but very rarely with a white or Asian American student. Whites, Asians and Hispanics, on the other hand, seem to mix on a generalized basis.

Whether this is a product of the absence of a support system in the North Country or whether the College is unknowingly fostering this result by making available separate living and social arrangements, I cannot help but think how much better a place Dartmouth would be for the entire student body if a committee of faculty, alumni, students and administrators could be formed which could strike a sensitive balance between black students' need for expression as blacks and the obvious need for them to be a part of the Dartmouth community in a fuller and richer sense.

The other observation which struck me was the failure, or seeming refusal, of students to fill the many job vacancies advertised in store fronts and around the College itself. If the country is going to be facing more difficult economic times, then it seems to me that Dartmouth might do well to consider husbanding its resources and insisting that those students who seek financial aid packages obtain employment during their years at Dartmouth. Most of us have to work to afford the other things we seek.

Baltimore, Maryland

Nearly all financial-aid students do work. Thehelp-wanted signs are indicative of one of thelowest unemployment rates in the country.-Ed.

Significant Test

One sentence from one class out of my four years in Hanover best expresses what Dartmouth contributed to the more than 60 years since I was there. It was in John Mecklin's class in Social Ethics: "The trouble is," he said fervently, hands out with fingers extended, "we live our way into our thinking instead of thinking our way into our living."

To me that statement is the most significant test of whether we have achieved what Dartmouth exists to further.

Now I wonder whether any other alumni who took Mecklin's Social Ethics remember his making that quote or anything else about him.

Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania