DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL
Campus opinion ranges from pro-war to con-war to pro-let's-get-it-over-with.
We write this only a few hours after Saddam Hussein ran out of borrowed time, a fact of which our nation's air armadas are still reminding him. The campus has been having its share of demonstrations, though none so vehement as those last year for divestment, or the recent "Rally Against Hate." Some protesters blocked Ledyard Bridge during morning rush hour, and fake body bags were dropped in the snow on the Green. On the other hand, even while George Bush was still giving the order to strike against Iraq, the Daily Dartmouth ran an editorial titled "A Call to Arms." The editors accused the College's educational efforts on the war of being "shamelessly one-sided." The editorial concluded if Saddam Hussein failed to pull out of Kuwait that it was "the moral, political, and military responsibility of the nations aligned against Iraq to use all necessary means to expel him from Kuwait."
A teach-in on January 17 at Webster Hall was far from one-sided. A microphone was passed around among about 100 students and professors. The opinions expressed, pro-war, con-war, prosanctions, pro-let's-get-it-over-with, were not very different from those of the man or the woman on your street. One student we talked to could have sat in at the legendary Hanover Inn Kaffee Klatsch and no one would have noticed the difference. President Freedman issued a somber statement that expressed concern "for those brave men and women whose task it is to bear the brunt of battle."
Included among those ranks is Stephen String fellow '91, who requested temporary leave of absence to accompany his New Hampshire Marine Reserve unit to somewhere in the Persian Gulf area. Leigh Hubbard '92 is also going over—and they may meet Donald LaValette, Louis Labelle, or Walter Schwarz, all of Buildings & Grounds, and now possibly on their way east, via Fort Devens.
The College is taking special stepsincluding allowing participants in overseas programs to cancel at any time—to assure the safety of 200 students now in foreign lands. Unworried, however, is Asian Studies Chairman Gene Garth waite, who left on January 15 for Teheran to work with Iranian scholars on a research project. He said that he did not expect to have any trouble getting space on his flight nor any undue hostility, for "Iranians draw a clear distinction between their government and individual Americans."
campus opinion of them was at their time of tenure, eventually acquired "good old" as part of their cognomen. Anyway. Dean of the College Edward J. Shanahan steps down, as of July 1, to succeed Charles F. "Doc" Dey '52 as president and principal of Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious preparatory school in WalHhgford, Connecticut. A dean's exposure to student life is at the most elemental level, namely behavior, and Shanahan's eight years at Dartmouth—amid fraternity and sorority imbroglios, on the cutting edge of discipline and in student counseling—have swung between the turbulent and the productive. It is hoped that he now joins that pantheon who, whatever
Martin Luther King Day, celebrated on January 21, ends an impressive weeklong series of lectures, films, music, special events, and other features on the life and message of the civil rights leader (who spoke at Dartmouth in 1962). Among those speaking or performing: Harvey Gantt, the Charlotte, North Carolina, mayor who gave Senator Jesse Helms a scare last November; choreographer Bill T. Jones and his company; jazz pianist and composer Billy Taylor; Reverend William Sloan Coffin; civil rights veteran leader Diane Nash. Dean of the Faculty Jim Wright authorized classes to be cancelled that day and rescheduled later in the week.
Director of Admissions Karl Furstenberg announced that applications for early decision had increased by eight percent over last year, an indication that recent negative publicity about the College might be having far less effect than expected. Average SAT scores of the 362 members of '95 accepted were up to 1308; minority students up, by four percent; legacies, more than double last year's total. We heard that the coaches were also pleased to get a good share of their top studentathlete candidates.
On exhibit at the Hood Museum now and through February are TheCircuits Prints by the modern painter Frank Stella, who was artist-in-residence at the College in 1963 and whose enormous shaped-canvas Shards 111 covers an entire wall of the second floor of the Museum. The colorful prints resemble Shards in their whorls and tape-like shapes, looking almost electrically charged.
From Hopkins Center came the announcement that it had just received its largest-ever grant, $175,000, from the National Endowment for the Arts: a fond to develop and promote the works of Native American writers for the theater. The Center's Director Lynn Britt and Director Gitta Honneger of the Yale Repertory Theater together organized the project and secured the grant.
As you read this by your fireside, defying frost and storm, the Carnival torchlight parade will be passing down Wheelock Street. The theme for 1991 is "Atlantis: A Winter Under the Sea," which the committee chose, according to The Dartmouth, "after weeks of heated and hilarious discussion." Lest another reasonably old tradition fail, we hope that "Winter Carnival" (21/2 stars—New York Daily News) will be shown despite news of its cancellation. The movie is part of Dartmouth's extracurriculum, with a 1939 Joe College script on which Princeton's late F. Scott Fitzgerald could get no farther than the bar of the Hanover Inn, but which was salvaged by Budd Schulberg '36 and Maury Rapf '35.
We expect that more relevant comment on Fitzgerald is among the literary treasure unearthed in a ceremony at Baker Library on January 29. Seven wooden boxes, striped in green (for Dartmouth), were to be opened to reveal Baker's share of the papers of H. L. Mencken. The New York Public Library and Baltimore's Pratt Library have similar boxes, which according to Mencken's instructions were also to be opened that day, 35 years after his death. Why Dartmouth? Because the College already has one of the best collections of Menckeniana in the country, assembled during the tenure of legendary Comp Lit professor Herb West, and particularly by one of his students, the late Dick Mandel '26. And, according to Special Collections Librarian Phil Cronenwett, Mencken thought that in case of nuclear war, Hanover would be one of the last places to be attacked. Cronenwett also observed that "Mencken was probably the most un-bucolic writer of this century and would never, ever even have visited here under his own power."
Very much under her own power will be former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, who arrives on February 1, as the next Montgomery Fellow. The state's first woman governor will be on campus for four months to meet with students, join with faculty to teach courses, and lecture to general audiences. She will be much in demand for her experience in the fields of education, environment, community planning, and women's studies, as well as the more obvious areas of government and history.
The community was shocked early in December that Religion Professor Arthur Hertzberg, who is also vice president of the World Jewish Congress, was one of ten people on a "hit list" targeted by the supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the vehement anti-Arab who had just been assassinated in New York. Both the Hanover Police Department and the campus security office have "taken steps to assure his safety," and both were very much in evidence when on January 10, as one member of a panel on the Persian Gulf crisis, Hertzberg appeared, to admonish the Israelis and Palestinians to stop rehearsing the brutalities that both sides have committed, and instead find some path toward accommodation.
Review-watchers will recall that after the paper's masthead incident, the editor apologized profusely until one of the paper's off-campus advisors took over for him at his press conference and announced that they had asked the Anti-Defamation League to investigate and prove beyond a doubt that the Review was a victim of "sabotage." Unhappily for it, the ADL's team of six lawyers, after 300 hours and three months, released their report that "unquestionably" it was an anti-semitic act, almost certainly committed by a Review staffer, and that the paper has been "grossly insensitive to certain segments of the population, including the Jewish community" and that such behavior created "an environment which condoned and even encouraged" the suspected culprit.
Perhaps predictably, The Review claimed a big "victory"—based possibly on the fact that since the ADL didn't go as far as did President Freedman in its accusations of bigotry, it was therefore, as the paper said in its release, "a true vindication of us concerning antisemitism," and "Freedman is going to have to answer for his falsehoods." News Service Director Alex Huppe, noting that Esquire cited The Review for a "Dubious Achievement Award" for 1990, commented, "Next thing you know it will claim it won a national award."
We were browsing through our Catullus just now and thought this line was somewhat applicable: "Omnia fanda nefanda malo permixta furore" "Right and wrong confused and all at odds."
Certainly at odds with the College is Alpha Delta, so much so that the fraternity has opted for a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences with the administration. By breaking all ties with Dartmouth, the house gives up campus services such as insurance, coverage by campus police, and maintenance. But the brothers clearly think independence is worth the price. They unanimously decided on separation after the College found the house guilty of hazing and suspended it for four terms. "We feel that we were mistreated during the adjudication process," said President Jed Collins '92 in a public statement. Residential Life Dean Mary Turco responded by telling the Daily Dartmouth that the process was "fair." She noted that, following an appeal, the probation period had been reduced a term from the original punishment. The house was forbidden from holding parties or allowing students to rush the fraternity in the meantime a ban that the brothers thought could wreak economic havoc on the house. Going independent sure hasn't hurt membership: AD tied for first in the number of pledges (32) last month.
Men's soccer coach Bobby Clark, whose Ivy champs lost only 1-0 to powerhouse Rutgers in the Northeast Regional Finals, was voted Division 1 coach of the year in December, on top of his honor as New England coach of the year and, as we write this, is in the running for national honors.
Sports Illustrated has gone overboard to feature Dartmouth athletes in its last few issues. First, on Bob Kempainen '88, now pre-med at the University of Minnesota, beating eight-time national champion Pat Porter in 1990's TAC cross-country championships. Second, on Diana Golden '84, world-class disabled skier, who lost her right leg to bone cancer at age 12, won her first U.S. Disabled Ski Team title as a sophomore, then 18 U.S. and ten world tides—including, at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, the gold medal in the women's disabled giant slalom, a demonstration event. Third, professional adventurer Ned Gillette '67, planning a camel caravan across the Sahara from Morocco to the Red Sea. (Gillette, you will undoubtedly remember, was the cover boy of this magazine's April 1990 issue.)
Geologist C. Page Chamberlain and geophysicist Leslie J. Sonder of the Earth Sciences Department have suggested (in a recent Science magazine article) that the prehistoric subterranean heat that formed the granite of New Hampshire, and of adjoining New England states, was the result of radioactive elements which caused ordinary rock to melt and in cooling, crystalize into the stuff which we like to think also inhabits our muscles and our brains.
Plenty of it must have been the share of Stephen Brown '91, of Lake Oswego, Oregon, who was honored with a Rhodes Scholarship, Dartmouth's 58th, on December 9. Brown, who will spend two years at Oxford, also received a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, for students with an interest in public service. He studied Russian in Leningrad and history at the London School of Economics in 1989, and also found time to row on the Dartmouth varsity lightweights who were second in the nation and also competed at Henley last year.
Last-minute reminder: this is the first time ever that there will be three nominations for Alumni Trustee, not just a single candidate. Watch your mail for the slate—Tony Frank '53, Bill King '63, and Stan Roman '64 (plus any petition candidates, whose nominations must be in the Office of Alumni Affairs by February 17) with the qualifications and brief statements from each. Under the new multiple-ballot system, you may vote for any one, or more than oneany you believe are fully qualified to undertake the duties of a Dartmouth Trustee. We cannot too strongly urge you to vote, with both your head and your heart, to reaffirm your faith in the College and those who guide it, and your belief in Dartmouth's traditions and its educational mission.
In the silence ere we part, these familiar lines, which became partially prophetic this past football season:
"If I had a daughter, sir, I'd dress her up in green
And put her on the campus to coach the freshman team."
One of the managers (not coach) of the Green freshmen last fall was Missy Blackman '94, granddaughter (not daughter) of Coach Bob Blackman '37H.
