DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL
A new book about Dartmouth makes a barrel of soup out of one bean.
Chairman George Munroe '43 has led Dartmouth's Board of Trustees through one of the most introspective periods in its history. The basketball-star-turned-businessman has pushed hard to get the group to spend less time on day-to-day affairs and more on global issues of higher education and Dartmouth's future. It seems especially appropriate that when Munroe retires from the board next June, he will create the first vacancy to be filled under a new election system.
Instead of the traditional single candidate, the Alumni Council will present a slate of three candidates for election by alumni. More candidates can be put forward by petition, as before.
In the meantime, if you'd like to suggest a nominee, write Emily Bakemeier '82 (28 Deerberry Lane, Monmouth Junction, NJ 08852) by November 6. She is chairman of the Nominating and Alumni Trustee Search Committee, a group that is charged with recommending candidates.
In Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, which we think was suggested to us way back then in Sociology 15 by the patriarchal John Mecklin, one particularly memorable paragraph (we just looked it up again) said, in part, "In the disturbance caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries." We were most recently reminded of it when we read The Hollow Men by Charles J. Sykes, a book commissioned (for $30,000) by the Hopkins Institute. Sykes starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. After a stirring condemnation of the politicization of higher education, he tells us once again about the student excesses of the sixties and seventies (not excluding Dartmouth) in which dissident groups, often encouraged by radical faculty members, trashed the very campuses whose policies were dedicated to the study of how to right the wrongs the students were protesting.
The book will be criticized, however, for frequently making a barrel of soup out of one bean. For example, it implies that leftist excesses are a continuing condition of American higher education, that the inmates are taking over the institution. On a major related theme—that traditional studies of Western civilization are giving way to inconsequentials such as feminism and Eastern cultures Sykes cites critic after critic in support of his argument, but neglects to quote any who point out that such a position might educate students to live in a society that has already passed them by.
The Hopkins Institute gets its money's worth with Sykes's instant replays, mostly in the words of the Review and its former editors, of the controversies over the Indian symbol, the Hovey murals, the shanty incident, safer-sex kits, William Cole nothing is omitted.
As Abraham Lincoln was reputed to have written, when a publisher asked him for a favorable book review, "For those who like this kind of book, this is the kind of book they will like." Anyway, Dr. Wheelock finds it hard to take seriously any comments about Dart mouth by a writer who persists in misspelling his name "Eleazer."
To one extent or another, almost every one of my (that is, Dr. Wheelock's) 15 successors has wielded his own personal chisel on the Dartmouth profile. This occurred to me a few weeks ago when I learned that James O. Freedman had just spent his 1,000th day in the Wheelock Succession. It would take two pages to list all the achievements to date that have happened on this president's watch, in front of a shifting backdrop of campus events far less significant, though more provocative of publicity: strengthening the governance of the College, fundraising, recruiting top faculty and administration, improving student life, developing the curriculum.
What he may best be remembered for, however, is having set in motion, 18 months ago, the College-wide Planning Steering Committee (PSC) whose final report has just been reviewed by the Trustees. An "executive summary" of the 147-page PSC report will be released, we hope, before the end of this year. And we further hope that much will be excerpted from those pages which reaffirm Dartmouth's traditions inspirational words which every one of us should read and read again.
Many alumni have had news of the resignation, after 17 years at Dartmouth, of Music Professor Cole. We may now see an end to the seven-year running battle between him and the Review, the sources of which may be lost in the mists of time, although the echoes may persist a while longer. "The sordid affair encapsulated academe's increasing dilemma," said the Boston Globe: "how to maintain free speech and freedom of the press while trying to inoculate college life from the offcampus viruses of bigotry and discrimination. " The professor, who henceforth among other projects will work to promote, encourage, and commission works by minority musicians, wrote, "I wish I were leaving under more favorable circumstances. I know many people will feel that the forces which are part of my leaving Dartmouth have won a major victory. However, this problem is no longer for me to wrestle with. It is a problem for Dartmouth to wresde with."
The problem has brought the College to the mat before. See this month's cover story on whether the media have done a decent job of refereeing.
On a happier occasion, a happier letter, from the former/present men's field events coach Carl Wallin, who resigned last May: "lam delighted to return to Dartmouth. My family and I have been part of this community for 21 years, and after exploring opportunities at colleges around the country, we have decided that Dartmouth is the place where we want to spend our next 21.1 would like to express my gratitude for the continuing support and affection of so many students, faculty, administrators, and alumni. There definitely is a Dartmouth family."
Thanks, we imagine, to each team's "Friends of "organization, both the field hockey team and the men's soccer team have done pre-season practice sessions overseas. In the land where men and women once paid the supreme penalty for wearin' of the green, Coach Mary Twyman's stickers spent 12 days sharpening their skills against club teams from Galway, Cork, Kilkenny, and Dublin in hopes of regaining their Ivy championship form of 1987 and 1988. And Scottish-born soccer coach Bobby Clark also took his team for 14 days of exhibition matches on his native heath.
In their sojourns overseas, neither team came up with anything so tangibly unusual, however, as what history major Rachel Stark '9l found this past summer, on a seven-week archaeological dig in the Ashkelon region of Israel a golden calf, dating possibly from 2000-1000 B.C. Stark was part of a Harvard expedition in the area. She modestly told The Dartmouth's reporter, about her brief moment of fame, "I was surprised I got this much attention at all."
As we passed McNutt on a beautiful late summer day, we saw not one but three groups of anxious parents, high schoolers trying not to look too wideeyed, littde brothers and sisters in hand, starting out on sightseeing tours of the campus—and we scanned faces to see if we might tell which, if any at all, of those high schoolers might be returning as members of the class of 1995. Such is now just one of the problems and it entails a bit more than just scanning faces—of Dartmouth's new director of admissions, Karl M. Furstenberg, just arrived after 13 years of handling the same job at Wesleyan.
In a recent article in a Wesleyan campus paper, Furstenberg noted, "The shift in emphasis [in admissions] has gone from selection to recruiting. Many years ago selective colleges just sat back and received applications that came their way and then spent considerable time picking a class. Now, effort, energy, and resources are being spent trying to generate an applicant pool." He also said, "In competition against 'the big four 'Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard we don't do particularly well, and for that matter neither does any other institution.' It won't be too soon that he will be able to refute that statement completely, as it concerns Dartmouth. But it will be one of his major challenges to modify it somewhat. For at present, of the "crossadmits" between Dartmouth and the four, the Green gets 15 percent or fewer of the decisions. (We do better against Columbia and Cornell 66 and Penn 69).
To say that Furstenberg hit the ground running is no understatement. We have heard that he is an indefatigable jogger and biker. And to one staffer who asked him how considerate he may be toward the coaches' recruiting pleas, he replied, "Don't worry about that too •much. I was a hockey player."
Speaking of new students, the editor of this magazine recently led seven '94s on his third freshman trip, this time through the Pemigewasset Wilderness in the White Mountain National Forest. "Anyone with any fears that Dartmouth is recruiting soft and effete students should have seen my group," he reports. "They climbed 4,600-foot Mt. Carrigain with ease, and I got all of them to immerse themselves completely in a 60-degree mountain stream." Along the way they happened across a band of Harvard freshman whose leader bragged that more than 300 new Crimson students were going on trips this year. "That's wonderful," replied our editor. "Triple that number and you'll catch up with Dartmouth numerically."
In our last column, we mentioned the suspension for sexual abuse, and lawsuit for reinstatement, of Kevin Acker '91, former editor of The Dartmouth. Acker, you will recall, was suspended for having assaulted Christine Hwang '91 two and a half years ago. Hwang said that Acker had followed her into a bathroom stall, kissed her, and fondled her beneath her clothing. Both admitted that they had been drinking at parties during the evening.
A hearing was held in Grafton County Superior Court on August 28, and in mid-September Judge Harold Perkins ruled against Acker's claim that the College had treated him unjustly. Dartmouth's actions in the case were "fundamentally fair," the judge said. Acker will stay suspended until January 1, when his record will be wiped clean.
Meanwhile, two aspects of the case have emerged that assume the outlines of Greek tragedy. One, though the College is hardly in business to persecute or annoy its students, in this age of sexual freedom and differing views of what constitutes abuse of it, it still must bear responsibility for enforcing its stated rules of conduct. (As Newsweek reported, "Acker's punishment was mitigated in light of 'the overall am- biguous nature of the encounter and the lack of clear communi cation... on the part of both parties.")
And two, we are struck by how an honors student, a double major, and a prospective applicant for a Rhodes scholarship could so easily jeopardize, or at least temporarily stall, a career of much promise.
