DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

Where in the College begins the search for Dean of Whatever-You Want-to-Call-It.

As you see from the cover, this is the Alumag's Nostalgia Issue, and if you don't really enjoy it to the very last item, you are suffering from an ob struction in your lachrymal ducts.

Innocently enough, on the heels of the departure of Dean of the College Ed Shanahan to the headmastership of Choate, the administration announced that it had changed the tide of the office to be occupied by his successor, to "dean of college life." It seemed to us that this merely confirmed a condition that had existed for some time. There is now a dean of the faculty, and he does not report to the "dean of the College" but to the provost, as does Shanahan.

However, a friend in faculty administration offered this possible scenario: If the new title devalued the prestige of the position, it would then diminish the significance of those under its supervision, namely, the undergraduates. And what would emerge to fill the vacuum, then, would be graduate study, research-oriented, grant-minded faculty, and all the rest. Thus that dread eventuality from which we all recoil in horror, Dartmouth University.

We personally felt that was a pretty long reach, but fortunately President Freedman himself came to the rescue in his closed-circuit telecast State of the College address on February 5. He replied to a questioner that both deans were equal in status and that he had twice resisted pressure from the faculty to subordinate one to the other.

Less than a week after he spoke to alumni, the president chose to compromise, changing the title yet again to "dean of student life." (The Dartmouth's editors couldn't resist the needle: "An added bonus that's what Harvard calls its dean.") Returning to the telecast: speaking simultaneously to 36 Dartmouth clubs around the country, the president summarized 1990, its problems and achievements, most of which have been recounted here, and in friendly fashion answered a number of continuing concerns of alumni, real and imagined, which should have been recounted here.

Autumn's Ivy League championships have turned to winter's season of discontent. The hockey and basketball teams can put the puck into the net and the ball into the basket all right, but not frequently enough to emerge from their respective Ivy cellars. One bright spot is women's hockey, skating at the top of the League, undefeated at this writing. The first line of Parish, Ulion, and Jacobs brings back memories of the high-flying '40s, and Riley, Rondeau, and Harrison. Winningest-ever women's basketball coach Jackie Hullah was selected to coach the West squad in the U.S. Olympic Festival at UCLA, July 13-17, and football's Buddy Teevens '79 was named coach of the year by the Gridiron Club of Boston.

There will be no Paris in the spring for the Foreign Study Program, and that goes for Toulouse, Blois, Athens, Rome, and Grenada as well. Dean of Faculty Jim Wright has deemed that the Gulf war's impact on the situation in Europe had become too dangerous. Bringing so many FSP and Language Study Abroad students back to Hanover, however, has caused a minor crisis in rooming availabilities, meaning doubling up, tripling, and even quadrupling up, although those who were inconvenienced got their dorm rents reduced.

Rollins Chapel overflowed with saddened students at the memorial service for the popular Pete McKernan '93, son of Maine's Governor Jock McKernan '70. Pete died on January 23 of complications following cardiac arrest. After a workout in Leverone with some of his baseball teammates, he collapsed, from unknown causes. We recall the words of Calvin Coolidge inscribed in his book in the Dick's House library: "To Edward K. Hall, in recollection of his son and my son, who have the privilege by the grace of God to be boys through all eternity."

John Sloan Dickey 1907-1991 "To seek new responses of learning, to get at the greatissues of peace and social justice...as humans whoseultimate commitment is to both the purposes and processes of man's ancient quest for a civilized society." On February 9, John Dickey '29, the College's president from 1945 to 1970, died in Hanover at the age of 83. Future issues of this magazine and of other Dartmouth publications will attempt a record of his fame.