Three Review Students Are Suspended After Confronting a Black Professor

Following a confrontation with a music professor, three students have been suspended for as much as a year and a half. Chris Baldwin '89 and John Sutter '88 received suspensions until the fall of 1989, and John Quilhot '9O was ousted until this fall. A fourth student, Sean Nolan '91, was given a year's probation. The students all work for the Dartmouth Review.

While black students were calling the incident racially motivated, Dartmouth Review editors said it was a freedom-of speech case. The four students say they are considering filing a lawsuit.

The students were charged with disorderly conduct, harassment and invasion of privacy after they approached Professor William Cole following class in the Faukner Recital Hall on February 25. The February 24 issue of the Review contained an article that consisted of an edited transcript of part of Cole's Music 2 class. A student unaffiliated with the paper had secretly recorded the class and given the tape to the Review editors. The article alleges that Cole spent a significant portion of the class lecturing on poverty and racial issues instead of music. Another story in the same issue quotes Cole in one of four telephone calls the Review staffers made to his home and office. The professor allegedly refers to the staffers as "white-boy racists."

After calling Cole repeatedly in an attempt to have him make a statement for the paper, the students entered the professor's classroom carrying a memo that spelled out the publication's policy on editorial replies. (Cole had filed a libel suit against the paper several years ago, accusing the editors of failing to solicit a rebuttal.)

The following picture of the incident emerged from testimony by witnesses:

•Baldwin, Sutter, Quilhot and Nolan went to the Faulkner Recital Hall after the class was dismissed. Although Cole repeatedly ordered the students to leave, they stayed in the classroom. The students say Cole engaged them in argument after asking them to leave.

• Nolan lagged behind as Baldwin, Sutter and Quilhot confronted the professor. Quilhot photographed Cole, Baldwin tried to present him with the written statement, and Sutter asked for an apology for remarks that Cole had made about the paper's staff. Sutter also tape recorded the conversation.

•Cole told Quilhot to stop taking his picture and then reached for the camera. While Quilhot continued photographing, the flash unit fell to the floor and broke.

•At one point during the confrontation, Sutter was face to face with Cole demanding an apology. During the hearing, the professor was asked if he felt threatened.

"Oh, absolutely," he replied. Asked if Sutter actually made physical contact with him, Cole said, "He touched my senses because he invaded my space with his cigarette-smoking bad breath." Cole said he was careful to avoid touching Sutter because "I felt he wanted me to physically assault him. I wasn't even thinking about it."

•Cole reached for a tape recorder that was running in Sutter's pocket, and then ordered the student to turn the machine off. Sutter complied.

• The most controversial piece of testimony came from Luzmila Johnson '88. She testified that as the four were leaving the classroom, she heard Sutter say, "We have to get rid of incompetent niggers like him." Sutter strongly denied making the statement and complained that posters bearing the quotation were used to advertise a campus rally. During the hearing, Dean of the College Edward Shanahan closed a line of questioning that continued to explore Johnson's biases. The dean noted that Sutter himself was the first to mention the quotation in the hearing, and that the alleged remark was not part of the charges before the committee.

The day after the incident, the College filed charges against the students with the Committee on Standards, the disciplinary board. The four students later filed a complaint with campus police about Cole's conduct. The charges have been brought to the dean of the faculty.

Before the hearings began, the AfroAmerican Society presented President James O. Freedman with a list of demands that included the immediate temporary suspension of the students. (Dean Shanahan refused, citing insufficient grounds.) Some 200 people rallied in front of Parkhurst in support of Cole. President Freedman was the first to address the crowd, calling for "civility, tolerance and respect for others" while avoiding a direct reference to the Cole incident.

Freedman also defended free speech. "If the president were not to defend the right of every person to speak—however unpopular, provocative, and offensive that speech may sometimes be," Freedman said"Dartmouth would be diminished as an academic institution devoted to the passionate exchange of ideas."A second rally several days later attracted some 400 people, and students picketed stores that bought advertising space in the Review.

Members of the press (including the Alumni Magazine) were allowed to attend the disciplinary committee's hearing, as were students and faculty and the charged students' parents. The Review students were not permitted to have their lawyers present; College lawyers also stayed outside the hearing room. The committee consists of three faculty members, three students and two members of the administration, along with Dean Shanahan, who serves as chairman. The students and faculty were elected by their constituencies, while the administrators were chosen by former President David McLaughlin. The administrators include Louise O'Neal, senior associate director of athletics for intercollegiate programs; and Carl Thum, director of the Academic Skills Center.

Shanahan accepted the committee's recommendation for punishing the students. "There is no appeal in the process," he said, although he noted that the students may ask for "reconsideration" by the same committee. (When this was going to press, the students had requested reconsideration.)

All four students were found guilty of disorderly conduct because they refused to leave the classroom after Cole told them to, and because of other alleged transgressions during the encounter. All but Nolan were found guilty of harassment for beginning and continuing a confrontation with the professor. The invasion-of-privacy finding was given to Quilhot and Sutter for photographing and recording the incident. Baldwin was found guilty of the same charge because he told Cole early in the meeting that he was not recording the professor but failed to report that Sutter was. The student code of conduct forbids recording and photographing people if they have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy. The Review students argued that they were acting as journalists in the incident and that the recital hall is a public place.

Cole and the Review have a history of conflict. In 1983 the paper ran an article that called Cole's Music 2 class "the most outrageous gut course on campus." Cole sued for libel and settled out of court in 1985. The settlement consisted of a joint statement, the Review stood by its story.

In a related incident, in March a federal district court dismissed a case brought against the College by the Hanover Review Inc., publisher of the Dartmouth Review. Several former editors-Teresa Polenz '87, Frank Reichel '86 and Deborah Stone '87—also participated in the suit, which was an aftermath of the shanty incident two years ago.

Experienced director

Judith White, newly appointed as director of Dartmouth's Women's Resource Center, does not lack for experience. She helped establish a similar center at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. The university had been coeducational for just 15 years before White arrived.

If this sounds familiar, wait: Greensboro was an all-female school before it went coed. Its Women's Resource Center was created in 1981, according to White, to "reclaim some space for women on campus."

White says she wants the Dartmouth center, located in an apartment in the Choate Cluster, "to be a place where women and men from across the campus can gather together to talk about issues of sexism, changing gender roles and other issues that effect both sexes." The question of men's involvement in the Dartmouth center is "moot," she says, because "the center will be not only a resource for women, but a resource from women. And men have always used resources from women's experiences."

White, whose academic focus is modern British literature and women's studies, has an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a master's from Columbia and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. She plans to move to Hanover next in May.

Admissions Influx

Following a call by President Freedman and the Trustees to boost the College's 39 percent female enrollment, admission applications show a 13 percent hike among women. In addition, applications from blacks are up 26 percent over last year.

"We now have a pool of women applicants [3,853] almost as large as when Dartmouth was selecting 800 men for each class," says A1 Quirk, dean of admissions. "It's a large enough pool to help us achieve parity." Quirk credits the tone set by President Freedman for the increased interest in Dartmouth among women and blacks.

Tuition Rises

The Trustees announced a 6.4 percent increase in tuition for next year. This rise, plus a hike in room and board fees, brings the price for one year at Dartmouth to $18,199. By comparison, next year Princeton will cost $17,967 and Brown $18,048.

Tuition at the Amos Tuck School and the Thayer School will rise to $14,000 and $13,335, and the Dartmouth Medical School's tuition was set at $18,100.

Spanish Carnival

Two Dartmouth seniors spent their last Winter Carnival weekend in a Holiday Inn in Kearney, Nebraska, running Spanish drills for rural high school teachers. "I was a little bummed at missing Carnival, but I got over it," says Lanei Chapman of Los Angeles, who conducted the fast-paced language drills with Natale Hilaael of Akron, Ohio. Both are trained in the reknowned language-learning method developed by Dartmouth professor John Rassias.

In many rural Nebraska high schools, students' only access to foreign-language study is by a state-run video program augmented by teleconferences. Many of the classroom teachers do not speak a foreign language. The idea for the Dartmouth program came from William Ramsey '34, a member of the Nebraska Board of Education.

Making Time

In the wake of Gorbachev's U.S. visit, Leonard Rieser '44 traveled to Chicago and turned back, by three minutes, the hands of the Doomsday Clock that symbolizes the threat of nuclear war. Rieser, director of the John Sloan Dickey Endowment for International Understanding, is also chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The 41-year-old clock—a creation of the Bulletin—now reads six minutes to midnight, or doomsday.

Japanese Studies

Dartmouth is the only Ivy League school without an undergraduate language-study program in Japanese. The reason is economics. "No one questions that Japanese should be offered at Dartmouth," says Associate Dean of Faculty Gregory Prince. "We just don't have the resources in hand." This summer the College will solicit money for a program. Prince expects strong finanical support because of President freedman's commitment to international education.

The College has had a limited exchange with Keio University in Tokyo since 1976 and is investigating the possibility of other exchanges with Japan. This winter the Amos B. Tuck School of Business Administration formed a joint MBA program in international management with the International University of Japan. "The Tuck School program is a very big step," Prince said. "It gives us credibility in Japan which could help an undergraduate program develop."

Jock School?

Although as many as 1,900 students enroll in gym classes each term, Kenyon Jones, associate director of athletics, suspects many Dartmouth student bodies are not up to snuff. "There's a difference between taking a class to learn a specific skill and being fit," he says. "It's a myth that everybody is a super jock on this campus. I have a feeling we are no better than national norms and the national norms are horrendous." Jones will soon know if his suspicions are true: his department has just launched a computer analysis of five years of data on the physical fitness of students.

Older alumni, who as freshmen had to climb a 20-foot rope, scale a six-foot wall and swim 50 yards in 60 seconds, should hear Jones out before they boast of their fitness levels. "That [test] didn't measure fitness as much as strength and general motor ability," says Jones. In contrast, today's freshmen are encouraged to take a fitness test that includes measuring body fat, flexibility, handgrip strength and aerobic fitness.

New Engineering Degree

Thayer School of Engineering students anticipating a career in management can now get a boost up the corporate ladder with a new professional master's-degree program. The two-year program, which will begin next fall, will teach traditional engineering science, especially design, but will also include courses taught by Tuck School faculty in marketing in high-technology environments, managing technical personnel, and economics.

"There's been a lot of press about industry's need for more managers with a better understanding of production and engineering," explains Daniel Lynch, director of Thayer's graduate programs. "This program can lay the groundwork for breaking down some of the walls that exist between engineering and management." A $250,000 gift from the Ford Motor Company will be used to develop courses and bring to campus professionals whose careers have combined management and engineering.

Clean Slates

"E" grades no longer will blemish the transcripts of Dartmouth intellectuals who fail to meet their physical-education requirements. The faculty voted to eliminate the incomplete grades because "they detracted from what looks like a good academic record," according to Thomas Bickel, College registrar and professor of mathematics.

Physical education requirements—three terms of pass-fail phys-ed and a swimming requirement—remain, although ten percent of students fail to meet them in their freshman year as required, says Kenyon Jones, associate director of athletics. "Although the classes must be taken to graduate," commented Jones, "for students who have managed to stretch it out over a three- or four-year period, I suppose their transcripts were not the nicest looking things in the world," Jones says.

Inside Outside

The college has made it into a top-ten ranking once again—this time in "Outside" magazine's list of colleges that offer a good education and exceptional outdoor resources. Four New England schools—Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Hampshire and the University of Vermont—made the list.

The article, which appeared in the magazine's January issue, stressed that academies remain the priority for most Dartmouth students." The story's clearly objective author: James B. Meigs '80.

Music Master

If all goes according to plan, in the fall of 1989 the College will offer a master's degree in electro-acoustic music. The new degree, which is the College's third non-science graduate program, will require students to take psychology, computer science, physics and engineering courses.

"We know of no other master's-level music degree that requires the breadth of disciplines, offers the range of faculty and provides the depth of state-of-the-art equipment that this one will," asserts Jon Appleton, professor of music and architect of the new program. Appleton notes that five schools, including Stanford and MIT, offer doctorates in electro-acoustic music, "but their programs train people to be reseachers; we're training people who will be able to work in the music industry as software and instrument designers, recording engineers and music producers."

In the works: Some 40 Dartmouth students are building a solar-powered car to competein Switzerland this June. The Thayer School's "Green Solar Racing Machine" is one oftwo American entries in the six-day, 250-mile Tour de Sol. Before the European trek,Dartmouth will hold a grudge match against MIT, the other American entry. Picturedabove is Peter Robie '67, and Frank Miele '87.

We've moved: Last month the Alumni Magazine migrated to new quarters in EleazarWheelock's mansion just across Wheelock Street from College Hall. The telephonenumber is the same, but our mailing address has changed to Dartmouth AlumniMagazine, Wheelock House, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover, NH 03755.