DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

The provost wants feedback, and alumni want an environmentally sound College.

When I want your opinion I'll give it to you," Walt Disney once said to moviemaker Cap Palmer '23. Provost John Strohbehn and his planning committee appear to have the opposite attitude. Now halfway through an 18 month look at the College's future, they have released a 70-page interim report—we described it in last month's column. Strohbehn has now announced that copies are available for alumni. "We want feedback," Strohbehn said in a recent press conference. "The report we turn in to the Trustees next June will hopefully include that feedback and comment."

If you're not one of the 6,000 most active graduates who have been sent copies in the mail, write to the Office of Alumni Affairs. The zip code, in case you've forgotten it, is 03755.

There doesn't seem to be any truth to the rumor that the report advocates doubling die size of the student body. While the number of undergraduates has doubled since 1925, we didn't find anything in the document that calls for an additional increase in the near future. An "outer boundary" of 6,000 undergraduates, as Strohbehn puts it, was given to an architectural consultant to leave options open to future administrations for the next 50 years. The report says, in effect, that the College probably won't grow larger than that; it could conceivably get smaller than it is today.

Robert Sullivan '75, a writer at Sports Illustrated, was on campus recently to research a story for us. We won't tell you what it is (why spoil a surprise?), except to say that it's scheduled for the February issue and involves death, violence, cold-blood edness, international controversy, and Dartmouth. Bob also attended two important conferences held at the College earlier this fall. One, called "Arctic Week" kicked off a new Arctic Institute at Dartmouth. The other was a symposium that launched a new Environmental Network among Dartmouth alumni. We asked Bob to describe what he saw. He writes:

As anyone knows who has ventured by the Hanover Inn's weather devices en route to 8 a.m. class in Februaryjust to see how damned cold this cold really is—Dartmouth would be a most suitable place for an Arctic studies institute. And as anyone knows who's mushed to class through mud season or been late to class because of the intoxicating beauty of Hanover's fall foliage, Dartmouth is well placed to be at the forefront of nature studies and natural concerns. So it was appropriate that during the first week of the term, the College rededicated its efforts in two different, but not unrelated, directions. Arctic Week at Dartmouth saw a host of workshops, exhibitions, lectures, and fancy dinners staged in honor of the College's new Institute of Arctic Studies, an offshoot of the John Sloan Dickey Endowment for International Understanding. Meanwhile at the Ravine Lodge at Mount Moosilauke, some 100 alumni, students, administrators and faculty members gathered for the College's first-ever Environmental Issues Sym- posium. The dinners there were, if hearty, less fancy.

Arctic Week not only heralded the founding and future of the Institute but it celebrated the tracks Dartmouth has already laid in northern snow. Through the years there have been a few alums who found Hanover not quite cold enough, and some of the clothing and artifacts from their Arctic explorations were on display at the Hood Museum. Oran R. Young, director of the Institute and co-author of the recently published The Age ofthe Arctic, pointed out that another Dartmouth/Arctic endeavor predates the new course of study. Last year Young, working through the Endow- ment, helped form the Working Group on Arctic International Relations, which brings together more than a dozen prominent individuals from universities and institutes in eight Arctic-rim nations. The group has already convened twice, and a third meeting is planned in the Soviet Union in January. "A lot of things are happening now that are making the Arctic undeniably a center of attention, " said Young. As a staging area for U.S. and Soviet nuclear submarines and bombers, it has military significance. As an area with vast oil deposits, it is of economic significance. As a place newly under environmental stress—from those oil operations, from the prospect of global warming, from increasing encroachment by the southern hordes—it is a region of the moment. Young said courses offered through the institute will further examine these issues.

The focus at Moosilauke was on wildlife and wilderness...and acid rain and global warming and ozone depletion and solid-waste disposal and pollution in the U.S.S.R. and the great job of recycling being done at Dartmouth and the environmentally sound operations at Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream across the river and the improved work of the federal EPA and, well, just about everything, since it seems just about everything will be part of environmentalism in the nineties and beyond. For a symposium focusing on such a dire topic, the gathering was remarkably upbeat. This was due primarily to the large turnout, and to the enthusiasm for making the College an institutional leader as society heads into an ever more fragile ecological age.

To the final group of panelists, which included members of the faculty and administration, Network members expressed a hope that the College would reaffirm an environmental mission for itself, and would lead by educating and also by deed. There was no dissent.

Nota Bene

• The Arctic Institute and Moosi- lauke symposium weren't the only environmental affairs at Dartmouth this fall. The campus also hosted an international national conference on the effects of development on indigenous cultures around the world. Tribal representatives from Brazil, Canada, Malaysia, and Sweden spoke about their struggle against destruction of their land and cultures.

• A brochure just printed by the College gives some current facts for the statistically minded. Operating budget 1989-90: $224 million ($148 million undergraduate college). Endowment: $632 million (as of June 30). Financial aid: need-based, 43 percent of all students; total awards $21.6 million in 1988-89. Most popular major in 1989: English. Number of faculty in Arts and Sciences: 311. Foreign study: 65 percent of under- graduates participate in 29 programs in 15 nations.

• If you're an alumnus, you probably already know this: each month the College mails out an average of 5.5 pieces for every alum. Some 75 people at Dartmouth work on public relations or publications. A College committee is studying ways to fight the paper explosion. One hopes it will find an efficient way of issuing its report.

• Tuck School Dean Colin Blaydon announced he is stepping down after this academic year. He leaves when the school is on a decided upswing. A Business Week survey of B-school graduates ranked Tuck first in the nation. Applications for the school's latest class were up 25 percent.

• Jay Wright, a MacArthur "genius grant" Fellow and author of seven books of poetry, has joined the African and Afro-American Studies Program as a visiting professor. "I hear in Wright something of Robert Hayden, a touch of T.S. Eliot...but the undoubted precursor is Hart Crane," wrote the critic Harold Bloom in an afterword to Wright's 1987 book Selected Poems.

• Another fraternity is in dutch with the deans. Officially under "suspended recognition" for one year, Alpha Chi may not serve alcohol except in private bedrooms. The punishment comes after the administration obtained a two-year-old videotape of a hazing ceremony in which upperclassmen and pledges allegedly violated College alcohol policy.