DR WHEELOCK’S JOURNAL
Following a long critical tradition, the valedictorian speaks against College tradition.
Well, Wellesley hostessed ex-Smith Barbara Bush at its commencement, despite student complaints that the First Lady hadn't achieved enough on her own to deserve the honor. So the committee in charge of such arcane decisions at Dartmouth tapped ex-Smithie president Jill Ker Conway to address its 220th such occasion director of three corporations, trustee of four institutions, scholar, professor, and author of numerous books and papers, mostly on female history. And there were still campus protests, primarily that Conway wasn't prestigious enough, that seniors should have someone "whom they will remember when they leave the Hanover Plain."
As an old girlfriend of ours used to say, "Try and have anything nice."
Question: name the speaker at your Dartmouth Commencement. This task may be easier for the class of '90 when they're in their twilight years, as Ms. Conway was accompanied on the distinguished dais by Pulitzer Prize journalist David Broder of the Washington Post, whose syndicated column the local Valley News is occasionally perceptive enough to carry; by Stanford University's computer scientist Donald Knuth, who should feel right at home in the computer-land of Kurtz, Kemeny, and Kiewit; by Nobel Prize economist Robert Solow, among whose many other honors is the Seidman Award in Political Economy, named for outgoing FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman '43; and Cincinnati City Councilman Reginald Williams '76, the NFL's Man of the Year in 1986, a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year in 1987, and almost since his career began there, one of his adopted city's foremost citizens. (Our own favorite, although non-Commencement, memory of Reggie Williams, however, was near the start of his rookie season with the Bengals, when the Steelers' redoubtable Franco Harris tried his side of the line on three successive onslaughts and achieved a total of two yards.)
One memory the '90s will almost certainly take away was classmate Michael Lowenthal's forthright valedictory, on a topic as challenging today as that of two decades ago when Jamie Newton '68 suggested that his fellow graduates tear up their draft cards and move to Canada. "I am Dartmouth's first openly gay valedictory speaker," Lowenthal announced to the crowd. The straight-A student and Outing Club enthusiast said that, because of the College's homogeneous history, "I couldn't feel part of the Dartmouth tradition." But he is irrevocably part of it, as his speech followed a long institutional habit of righteous confrontation. Lowenthal called for the elimination of fraternities as a way to fight lingering racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Three hundred sevnty-seven advanced degrees were given out before Lowenthal began to speak, but none in social engineering, a lack that the valedictorian likely regretted.
democracies. He praised Czechoslovakia!! president and playwright Vaclav Havel as an intellectual who could not avoid political responsibility.
On the applause meter, retiring Mathematics Professor John G. Kemeny got almost as loud and long an ovation as new Doctor of Laws Reginald Williams. Lowenthal came in third. Jill Ker Conway's reception, on the other hand, was polite. "Don't surrender to the pressures of debt your personal debt and your financial debt," she said in a rather uninspired address.
The students' major objection over Conway's selection, however, was not her speaking ability but that they were not sufficiently represented on the committee responsible for Commencement speakers and honorary degrees. A similar complaint has also been loudly asserted by certain alumni who have felt that their voices have not been adequately heard. This discontent over "non-representation" and "disenfran- chisement" was squarely addressed at the spring meeting of the Alumni Council. Texan Murry Bowden '71 ("We're not in Robert's Rules. This is Murry's Rules.") moved the proceedings quickly and effectively and, in the end, oversaw the adoption of several fundamental changes.
To list them: (1) There will be fuller alumni participation in the selection of the seven Alumni Trustees. Instead of a single candidate put forward by the Council's nominating committee, a slate of three will be offered. Petition candidates may be added to the slate, as before, but with 500 signatures (approximately one percent of the alumni body) rather than 250.(2) The chairs of each search committee the Trustees' and the Alumni Council's will henceforth serve as ex officio members of the other. This will widen the exchange of information between the two bodies. (3) The Trustees themselves will determine an incumbent's continuation for a second five-year term, avoiding the need to submit to an expensive and potentially divisive challenge. Rather, (4) the Council will establish a College Relations Group which will be empowered to discuss alumni concerns with the Trustees and the President, and report reactions back to the alumni body. (5) To reflect the growing numbers of alumni in the more populous metropolitan areas, Council regional representation will be redistricted and enlarged from 23 to 28. And (6), so that graduating classes can embark on their alumni careers at once, starting with '90 the three youngest classes will each be entitled to an Alumni Council representative. When the smoke had cleared, the gavel had passed on to incoming president Bill Montgomery '52.
An innovation that might have intrigued the students was not even suggested to the Committee on Board Organization by one of its members, former Dean Thaddeus Seymour '49AD, retiring president of Rollins College. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Seymour has revived a whimsical Rollins tradition, called Fox Day, when he plants a three-foot-tall cement statue of a fox in the middle of the campus quadrangle. Placed at dawn, the statue is the official signal that all classes and tests are canceled that day. The college also throws a Fox Day picnic. "It's cheerful, it's uncomplicated," explained Seymour. "Moreover, it's the only decision in this increasingly collegial professionthat I get to make myself." He said he tried to institute a similar surprise holiday at Dartmouth, "but the faculty was so stuffy about it, the idea died."
A real live Fox, however, Edward A., 53, and a Cornell alumnus, has been appointed as the eighth dean of the Tuck School. He succeeds Colin C. Blaydon, who will return to teaching, writing, and consulting. Dean-to-be Fox, until recently the founding head of the Student Loan Marketing Association, is credited for having built Sallie Mae into the 39th-largest corporation in America. And ground was broken on May 4 for still another enhancement of the Tuck scene, Byrne Hall, a new classroom, dining, and student-work-area facility a major gift from the family of John J. and Dorothy Byrne and their sons John III '81, Patrick '85, and Mark '85, T'86. Jack Byrne, chairman and CEO of Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, has served Tuck in many ways, notably as past and current member of its board of overseers.
It's an accepted maxim of management, undoubtedly taught at Tuck, that whenever there's a change in headship there's going to be a problem. Such took place when Dick Jaeger '59 took a long-delayed baton pass from Ted Leland as director of athletics. Almost immediately came the departure for greener pastures of baseball's Mike Walsh and lacrosse's B.J. O'Hara and, cruelest blow of all, Dartmouth's winningest coach, Vin Lananna, of cross-country and track. Lananna chose the offer of one of the Ivies' losingest track and cross-country teams, Cornell. But wait: just before we went to press, Lananna changed his mind and stayed at Dartmouth.
Most of Lananna's victories were against schools which give athletic scholarships. No such recruiting advantage at Dartmouth. Four members of his '89 cross-country champions were writing senior theses during the season. One of them, All American Mike Donaghu, now a Nike employee in Beaverton, Oregon, got his job there with "International Subcontracting and Flexibility in Athletic Footwear Production," written under the supervision of Geography Professor Richard Barff. Donaghu says, "I don't know if Coach Lananna thought it was good for his team to drag into practice after getting up at 5:00 a.m. to work on a double-drive computer at Kiewit."
President Freedman would certainly think so. One of the priorities to emerge unscathed from his recent $2 million budget cut was the academic program, which has now become the major beneficiary of a $350,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, "for presidential initiatives to improve the College's efficiency through evaluation of the academic program and its planning." Concomitantly, an 11 member committee under the leadership of Dean of Faculty Jim Wright will begin a series of reviews of the current curriculum in all 37 of the College's graduate and undergraduate departments. The committee's conclusions should appear in the fall.
On a far lower intellectual plane, was Richard Hovey always serious? One of his little-known Songs of Dartmouth College, "Here's a Health To Thee, Roberts!" (anybody know who Roberts was?), bears quite a resemblance to one in the repertoire of Harvard's whimsical math prof-composer, Tom Lehrer. Hovey: "Here's to mine, and here's to thine!/ Now's the time to clink it!/ Here's a flagon of old wine/And here are we to drink it!" Lehrer: "Turn on the spigot/ Pass the beer and swig it/ And gaudeamus igit-tur." Observers of our times will note that in "Roberts," and the lines "Song that is the flow'r of love/ And joy that is the fruit/ Here's the love of woman, lad/ And here's our love to boot," Hovey's concluding two words have an entirely different connotation in this generation's campus argot.
Hovey-wise, the granite of New Hampshire has surfaced once again at the corner of Main and Allen Streets. In an ambitious $50,000 downtown beautification effort, the Hanover Improvement Society has paved that entire area with squares of the real stuff, straight from the quarry of James A. Browning '44, Th '45, just on the other side of Moose Mountain. Selectman and Dartmouth Bookstore manager (and abutter to the renovation) Dave Cioffi modestly averred, "It's the greatest thing that's happened to downtown Hanover in a century." (For second place, how about when Nelson Rockefeller '30 kicked off his campaign for the 1966 Republican Presidential nomination on Tanzi's steps, right across the street?)
One of the greatest things that's happened to this magazine in at least a year was its recognition by fellow editors in a national competition sponsored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The judges, who included the editor of Inc. Magazine and the publisher of Harvard Magazine, awarded Dartmouth's own with a gold medical for Best College Magazine. In similar competitions, the Alumni Magazine won a gold for staff writing and a silver for Best Feature Article. The winning story was February's "Dino Wars" by Sports Il lustrated writer Bob Sullivan '75. For the second year in a row, the Alumni Magazine also entered the competition for Best University Magazine, and for the second year in a row it never heard back from the judges. Are they trying to tell us something?
Fortune Magazine is certainly telling us something. It's telling us that Dartmouth means business. In a survey of where CEOs went to college, Dartmouth does pretty well, with 12 top execs execs in the Fortune 500. That puts us ninth (sixth among the Ivies). But when Fortune took the next step and ranked colleges by a size factor, Dartmouth moved up. Relative to the size of classes graduated in the fifties when most of today's CEOs were undergraduates, the College places fifth, behind Yale, Princeton, Washington and Lee, and Harvard.
And while we're ranking things, here's a list of the Top Ten Issues encountered by speakers on Dartmouth's alumni club circuit over the past year. College planning and expansion heads the chart, followed by college versus university, budget cuts, faculty research versus teaching, admissions, the Andrew Baker plagiarism case, faculty hiring and tenure, communications, The Dartmouth Review, and the Greek system. The list was compiled by tireless Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs Burgwell Howard '86. "All of these issues were covered by the Alumni Magazine with-in the past year or so," Burgie reminded us. "Either you guys are doing a good job of reporting or you're just stirring things up."
The Daily Dartmouth is certainly stirred up. During the spring term, Editor-in-Chief Kevin Acker '91 stepped down after being found guilty of sexual abuse. The Committee on Standards charged Acker with "sexually abusing and acting injuriously toward a female student" in a men's bathroom. Strangely, the incident was said to have taken place two years before, when Acker and his accuser were freshmen. The charges were not brought until Acker assumed the newspaper's editorship. Another woman brought a different sexual-harassment charge against Acker last fall. That charge was dismissed by Dean of Freshmen Diana Beaudoin. After resigning his position at The Dartmouth, Acker was replaced by Deborah Karazin '91.
