DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL
While off-campus banks proliferate, on-campus kegs take a dive.
A handsome portrait of John Ledyard graces a wall at 38 South Main Street where only a year ago hung an assortment of hammers, screwdrivers, and drill bits. The new Ledyard Bank, founded mostly by local Dartmouth people and replacing Hanover Hardware, is the town's seventh, making Hanover's citizens-perbank ratio 1,314 to one-compared to 7,300 to one for the United States as a whole (or a measly 86,000 to one for Great Britain). One student was heard to remark that perhaps they'll now turn the Sphinx tomb into a savings & loan.
Or now that Campion's has thrown in the sponge, closing after 85 years as outfitter to Dartmouth men and women, there's an ideal spot for bank number-eight.
And the end seems nearer for another tradition even older on the Hanover Plain than the venerable Campion's. For it looks as though the law of the land could now very well become the law of the campus, and the beer keg join compulsory chapel in the halls of memory. After interminable meetings, committees, task forces, and forums, outgoing Dean Edward Shanahan announced that beginning on September 1, 1991, 80 percent of the student body, in effect (those under age 21), would be imbibing, if they did, on their own responsibility. Kegs, and other forms of common-source alcohol, will be banished. It will soon be seen whether, as the students claim, the keg is a key ingredient of student social life, and, if so, what effect its demise will have on the vitality of that other exemplar of campus society, the fraternity/sorority.
What will take common-source alcohol's place? More studying? Dorm rooms full of solitary drinkers? "Just say no?" The last three administrations, at least, have concerned themselves with social alternatives, with only occasional success. This time, however, official regulations seem to have become implacable. Colleges must prove to the U.S. Department of Education that they comply with regulations or they risk for-feiture of federal funds (in Dartmouth's case, about $35 million yearly).
The situation is not exactly the most hospitable welcome mat that the College could put out on Parkhurst's steps for Shanahan's successor, Lee Pelton, most recently the dean at Colgate.
While we're on new faces, say hello to new Trustee Barry MacLean '60, of Libertyville, Illinois, taking the place of Bob Henderson '53, T '54, whose two terms have just ended. An engineering major, MacLean also holds a degree from Thayer, where he has served as chairman of the Board of Overseers.
New faces in sports include Crawford Palmer, 6-9 backup center at national champion Duke, who will lose a year of eligibility but join Dartmouth basketball for the '92-'93 season. His 7-1 brother Walter Palmer '9O was recently given Sports Illustrated's 12 th Man Award as the Utah Jazz's backup center. "This is still a great job to have, just coming out of college," said Walter. "I'd recommend it to anyone."
On a somewhat tangential topic, Dartmouth's Director of Forensics Kenneth Strange-noting that in the past 12 years the debating team has placed ten times at the national level- said, "That's better than Duke's record in the Final Four."
And speaking of national standing, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine has just won Newsweek's Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year award for the outstanding periodical in education. Last time Dartmouth won this top prize (described by the administrators as "$2,000 and a hunk of lucite") was when Charlie Widmayer '30 was editor-in 1949.
More on sports? Shon Page '91, 1990's Ivy Player of the Year, will be lugging the ball this summer for the Turku Trojans in the European Football League —you're right, that's Turku, Finland. One among a dozen Big Green athletes chosen first team All-Ivy in their sport in the past season, 3,000-meter steeplechaser Ray Pugsly '91 will attempt to make the Olympic team. And Mike Remlinger '87, after finally fulfilling the customary indentured servitude in the minors, pitched a three-hit shutout for the San Francisco Giants in his first major-league appearance.
Commencement '91 was blessed with distinguished degree recipients by the handful and nary a cloud, either in the sky, or, as has too often occurred in the past, at the podium. Elizabeth Dole's speech researcher gets an encomium for digging up her tribute to Basil O'Connor '12, Dole's predecessor several times removed as president of the Red Cross. Most applause: for the reclusive Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of whose three sons was reported to be reading a copy of Peer Gynt throughout the ceremonies. Most unexpected applause: when President Freedman mentioned that degree recipient Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild ThingsAre, was probably the class's single most widely read book.
The valedictorian was Shamir Merali '9l, a most serious-minded East Indian from Nairobi who except for one Aminus received all A's during his four Dartmouth years. Though not his main topic, at one point he decried what he feared was grade inflation-that too many students were getting good marks despite what he had noted was their not too great attention to their studies. One woman within our hearing observed that with those marks he should have gone to M.I.T.
Two events recently took place at Dartmouth but somehow, for some reason, we can't relate to them as being of Dartmouth. One, the unimaginably shocking off-campus murder of two 24-year-old Ethiopian women, both graduate students in physics. An Ethiopian grad student visiting from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, is charged with the murder, for which at this writing no motive has been uncovered. And two, the meeting in Hanover of the European Parliament, hosted by the state's energetic Congressman Dick Swett, and attended by 15 others from Congress and 23 elected representatives from the 12-nation European Community. Discussions were reported to have been held on protectionism, assistance to third-world countries, agricultural subsidies, economic integration, and other topics. The event was billed as the most significant of its kind in New Hampshire since Bretton Woods in 1944 and the murder, the first in Hanover in 60 years.
ILEAD-Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth-is now the College's version of Elderhostel, without the travel. After a trial run last spring, some local retirees with special talents and interests, along with a handful of retired professors and volunteer faculty, organized a series of six-week study groups, on a variety of "courses" ranging from World Food Problems to The Crusades. At least 300 turned out for ILEAD's convocation in June to sign up and to hear President Emeritus John Kemeny, who, on the subject of how hard it was to keep up with the spread of knowledge today, said he had spent a large part of his life teaching courses he had never taken himself.
Most of the two-hour sessions will take place in regular campus facilities. One course, however, will be held at the spanking new life-care center, Kendal in Hanover, on the Lyme Road, to which at least 200 chronologically gifted (President Freedman's gag, not ours) couples and individuals will be retiring this summer and fall. The class will be hosted by English Professor Peter Bien. The subject: Paradise Lost.
One of the nation's outstanding researchers in thermonuclear physics, Los Alamos veteran H. Ralph Lewis, has been appointed professor of physics. And following nearly 50 grants obtained for various areas of study by the Med School faculty in the past few months, the NIH has given $1.5 million for the study of a bacterial infection responsible for almost half the deaths of AIDS patients in America.
That's about it for the good news from Washington. The press has been full of instances of government interference in the affairs of academe, these last few months whether well-meaning, or just bureaucratic. Or demagogic. One such instance, of course, was responsible for Dartmouth's alcohol policy mentioned earlier.
Another was the investigation into the agreement by 57 eastern universities to exchange family income information on those students seeking financial aid-and another, the flap over the audits of overhead charges allocable to federal research grants. See "On the Hill" in this issue for more details.
On still another, the feds decreed that computers cannot be included in a financial aid award unless all students are required to own them. All the College had to do to ace that one was to make computer ownership mandatory. About 90 per cent of the students own one anyway.
An important anniversary took place, and we almost missed it. June 16 was the 60th birthday of the ant house, invented in Hanover by Frank Austin '95 -1895, that is. Older Hanover residents remember, as boys, collecting ants for inventor Austin, at $4 per quart.
Or if you prefer another ending to this column, the elevator at the Hanover Inn broke down a month or so ago at a conference of knee surgeons.
