DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

The College gets a new chem building in '92 and 900 '95s get a new "sense of place."

Most visible evidence of Dartmouth's intellectual future is the new $26 million chemistry building, which will round out (for the moment at least) the Sherman Fairchild Physical Sciences Center. The Trustees have just named the building Burke Hall, after their recent chairman, Walter Burke '44, former business associate and close colleague of Sherman Fairchild, and who during his tenure on the Board was instrumental in most of the College's milestone developments of the last decade.

Now just a forbidding gray cementwalled presence behind Steele Hall, and flanked on two other sides (also for the moment, we fear) by demurely white sorority houses, Burke Hall will be completed in 1992. Since the Shattuck Observatory, the easternmost bourne of the Fairchild complex, dates back to 1852, there will stand 140 years of dedication to the study of our physical world and its wonders. It is not true, however, that the redoubtable and even legendary "Cheerless" Richardson served generations of us as chemistry professor for the majority of those 140 years.

We have a special affinity for Burke Hall, not for any proficiency we ever achieved in chemistry, despite Andy Scarlett's and John Amsden's ministrations, but because the very first paragraph we wrote when taking over this column concerned its ground breaking. Now, upon the completion of these state-of-the-art instructional facilities including a multi-million-dollar organic chemistry laboratory and thanks to a $300,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the chemistry department will add six doctoral students to its small but nationally distinguished Ph.D. program, which has existed since 1966.

One of the College's great strengths, one that can hardly ever be overemphasized, is what John Dickey called "a sense of place." More than 900 new arrivals of 1995 have just experienced all the good things that the outdoor life can contribute both to your sense of self and your kinship with your fellows hiking and rock climbing, kayaking and canoeing, fishing and biking, all ending up in a blaze of song, laughs, relaxation, and the traditional feast of green eggs at Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. We heard that one indomitable '95, though confined to a wheelchair for the past few years due to a high school auto accident, insisted that she go along, on a canoe trip and we have no doubt that this will have turned out to be one of the more inspiring of the 100 or more freshman trips.

The New York Times had a long preLabor Day article, "New Greetings for Freshmen As Life and Campus Change" without a single mention of the College whose tradition of introducing freshmen to its "sense of place" goes back to 1935. It did mention, however, Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, which "allows its students to bring their horses with them and keep them in stables not far from the dorms."

From where we write this, we can hear the sounds of football practice on Chase Field, where a turnout of 124 are doing their their stalwart best to convince Coach Buddy Teevens '79 and his staff that they and only they are the ones to make the final cut. No predictions but in the offensive line, the lightest man is at center, 255 pounds, and the equipment manager had to send out for an extra dozen XL shoulder pads.

Sports Illustrated says, on the other hand, that "Dartmouth is a defense-oriented ball-control club that could simply wear out the rest of the Ancient Eight." But in words that have a familiar ring, after a recent pre-season scrimmage against Columbia, Teevens said "we need work." Be here for Dartmouth Night, October 25, and the Cornell game at 12:30 the following day, which should be the Ivy game of the year. Incidentally, did we see that the Princeton game, November 23, is only the third time this century that Dartmouth's final game has been played in Hanover? It is also just a rumor that the DCAC (now called the DCAD the second "D" is for "department") is foresightedly accepting applications for the position of 12 th man.

Last year's 14-2 soccer team, New England champions and national quarter-finalists, are now ranked 16th in the nation by Soccer America, but Bobby Clark's lads expect to wind up much better than that. The women booters, too, hope to turn some of all those 1990 one-goal losses into one-goal wins.

Back to football for just a second how about Jeff Kemp '81, coming in for the injured Dave Krieg and quarterbacking the Seattle Seahawks over two impressive weeks?

Those good folks who brought you Gary Hart in 1986 will feature another star-studded troupe on January 19, when the Democratic debates will again be held in Hanover, joitly sponsored by Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire. We may be the first to bring you this word, and of course, the participants other than this issue's cover man and Senator Tom Harkin are notyet officially committed. A bit closer to a more current news scene has been Professor of Russian Deborah Garretson, who in her spare time is an interpreter for the State Department's Russian language division. (You saw her fleetingly in last month's issue, on the job, between Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev). Garretson began in 1985, at the start of the START treaty, at times, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "on assignments where only four people were in the room a top U.S. official, a top Soviet official, and two interpreters and it is likely she has been in on diplomatic secrets that would make a historian salivate. But interpreters, of course, cannot discuss anything they hear."

Last month you also saw the awardwinning chair designed, and built at the Hopkins Center workshop, by engineering student Kristin Morrow '92 for her grandmother, who like many people with disabilities had trouble rising from the ordinary chair. But we didn't explain how it works: when the sitter shifts his or her weight forward, the chair rocks forward also and then stays in that position, taking the stress off the knees, legs, and arms that usually handicaps elderly people when getting out of a chair.

The Hood Museum comes up this month with its own version of what were considered the technological, scientific, artistic, and aesthetic wonders of another era. More than 300 such items from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "The Age of the Marvelous," have been collected by guest curator and Associate Professor of Art History Joy Kenseth. A feature of the exhibit will be a "room of arts and wonders," typical in wealthy homes of the time, and thought to be the forerunner of the modern museum.

Also beginning this month: nine weekly lectures on the theme of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, under the auspices of the Humanities Institute. Philosophy Professors Susan Brison and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong will bring to Rockefeller Center a distinguished group of national authorities on a variety of Constitutional questions and interpretations. This particularly timely series (December 15 will mark the 200th anniversary of when Congress declared the Bill of Rights in force) will be introduced by President Freedman, and will later be published in book form.

And more than timely, if that's possible, was the symposium held just before the dedication of the new Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, convened by this magazine's May cover man, the Med School's Jack Wennberg and featuring six outstanding figures on the controversial subject of national health care.

Subtitled "Reallocating vs. Rationing Medical Care," the panel, which included former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop '37, attempted to chart the course between the availability and the cost of personal health-care services today, between the affordable and the compassionate and universally expressed dissatisfaction with the current disproportion of allocable health and medical facilities. We were particularly struck by a term we had first encountered in the May issue, "outcomes research," a new field of study which we'll lamely try to describe as "when you were sick, and you had the chance to make your choice of treatment, what exactly did the doctor or hospital do to make you better and how successful was it, and at what cost?" And can this information then be organized to enable the medical world, and the insurance companies, and the drug industry, and our government, to better meet our nation's health needs?

It was standing room only at the Center Theatre. At home, you would have had trouble calling your doctor, although we did hear at least seven beepers go off during this most illuminating two-hour session. Dr. Koop himself had a busy weekend an autograph session for his hook, Memoirs of America'sFamily Doctor, being drawn in a onehoss shay by a huge Percheron at the head of the parade from the old medical center to the new; and as a warm and reminiscent keynote speaker at the sumptuous dedication itself.

We didn't know 'til now that Baker Library owns an original copy of the John Eliot Bible, the first Bible printed in America, in 1663 or that missionary Eliot, a true precursor of Dartmouth's founder, wrote the Bible not in English but in a form of the Algonquian language, in an attempt to convert the natives to Christianity. The Bible was the model for a graphic arts workshop in Baker's basement, in which distinguished bibliographical scholars, archivists, and printers attempted to produce works of similar quality and durability, using the same materials as did their colonial predecessors.

Not that far back, but within the memory of many alumni and untold thousands of patrons, a Hanover native founded Lou's Restaurant, in 1947 and ran it for 30 years. To enumerate Lewis Bressett's countless services to this community would take us well off this page, except to say that he was honored as Hanover's most distinguished citizen in 1967 and given an honorary degree by the College in 1986. In 1959 he suggested that the town have an honorary mayor to officiate on all gala occasions, and that that worthy be Harry Tanzi, to serve for life. Lou has just been named to succeed Tanzi and for life. (Tanzi was reputed to have saved all bounced checks from alumni, presenting them at reunions, and giving the Alumni Fund the money. Bressett says, "Alumni have nothing to worry about from me. I tore those checks up long ago.")

Still another outstanding group met on campus a few weeks back about 20 former Fulbright scholars, and one Fulbright scholar-to-be. Most distinguished guest of all, however, was the one-year-older son-in-law of the host Senator Fulbright himself.