Divers Notes & Observations
WE JUST TOOK A GINGERLY trip through plaster dust and assorted debris in the new chemistry building, named for former Trustee Chairman Walter Burke '44, to learn that it will open for business this very fall, 19 years after the Trustees authorized it. At $28.5 million (and right on budget) it is the most expensive building ever to arrive on campus. Its nononsense exterior sports enough brick and granite of New Hampshire to gratify the most traditional proponent of "the Dartmouth look" in architecture (whatever that is). And inside, we imagine that chemistry's 30-year veteran Professor Roger Soderberg, in charge of the operation, is feeling the same kind of delighted expectancy as did the Drama Department's late Warner Bentley as he watched Hopkins Center near its completion, in the early sixties. There are 135 state-of-the-art lab hoods on two floors, each supplied with its own intakes for gases and liquids (which flow through neatly arranged color-coded pipes in all the ceilings). Exhausts for fumes and odors end up for purification in a virtual Sherwood Forest of stainless-steel ducts on the fourth floor, already being called "the penthouse." Nearly all facilities can be monitored by computer from the offices of Buildings & Grounds. Dedication ceremonies will be September 25 and 26, to be attended by many leading alumni in chemistry and allied fields, and the whole thing almost makes you want to start all over again with Chem 1 and 2.
Speaking as we were of the Hopkins Center, back in those days we guess that the College had the clout to just appropriate any old street it wanted. Thus disappeared South College Street, legendary Ma Smalley's eating club and all, to make way for the Center. Not so today day with Elm Street. The College wants to shut down the one-block road to allow for the expansion of 65-year-old Baker Library and its 2,000,000th volume due in the stacks sometime in September. The town fathers (and mothers), overturning the voters' decision, nixed the exchange that would have compensated the town with some much-needed playground land on the east side of Lyme Road, and so the message from the zoning board is "back to the drawing board."
MORE RECORDS WERE BROKEN in the 1992 Alumni Fund than in the average intercollegiate swimming meet. The dollar total ascended to $12.7 million. For the first time, a reuning class ('52) other than the 25th or the 50th went over $1 million. Both '77 and '78 broke the 15th reunion record; for the first time a 5th-year reunion class, '87, went over $100,000; and of 56 non-reunion classes 41 exceeded their last year's totals and nine set new records. The only slightly gray cloud overhanging the celebration was the participation figure, which finally dipped below 60 percent, though only by just a few tenths of a point. An excellent showing for almost any other school in the country, but not up to traditional Dartmouth standards. There are many explanations, some of them even reasonable, for why two out of five alumni now sit out the Fund. We have our own notions as to why this is, and we know several people who'd like to hear yours.
MORE THAN A FEW TRIUMPHS as the spring sports season ended, to atone for the usual tribulations. Baseball's right-hander Bob Bennett '93 underwent a 3-5 junior jinx, but continually fogged them in at 90 mph or better on the scouts' radar guns. He was drafted by the Oakland As and is pitching for one of their farm teams in the Northwest this very summer. The Intercollegiate Rowing Association awarded Dartmouth the Great Eight Trophy, symbolic of die national championship. Not to be outdone aquatically, the varsity women's sailing team took a decisive first in the National Collegiate Championship in Charleston last June, as did the Green sailors in the dinghy championship.
WE BORROW FROM A NEWS letter editor's notes to his classmates on Commencement: "Weather was superb, thanks to the College's having bestowed an honorary degree on Ed Lorenz '38, an MIT meteorologist....First woman ever to receive the College's outstanding-athlete award, Tracy Hagan '92....Among the reuners, easily the youngest Alumni Council president-elect ever, Emily Bakemeier '82....(But no member yet of a freshman class who can say 'my mother went to Dartmouth')...It took exactly 58 minutes for relays of student readers to read the names of the graduates as they stepped forth to receive their diplomas. The crowd stayed attentive until the Ns."
During those 58 minutes, our thoughts turned to how permeated Commencement time is with tradition, including those which, under the unrelenting hand of history, are approaching terminal anachronism. One of the latter sort is Class Day's breaking of the clay pipes on the stump of the Old Pine. A group of Native Americans protested this year, on the grounds that pipes are regarded by many tribes as sacred objects in their religious ceremonies. Unfazed, the senior class's executive committee, after a student poll, declared that "because the stated purpose of the pipe ceremony has been to unite the class, it is clear to us that it no longer serves this function...." and instead, at midnight, provided candles to the nearly 800 members of the class gathered at the senior fence. They all filed to the Bema in candlelight procession, then blew out the candles one by one, leaving the Bema in darkness, filled only by their cheers. We were not there, but we can imagine that there were more than just a few tears as well.
ON OUR WAY BACK FROM Commencement, the Baker bells played Amazing Grace, written (in 1779) by the sea captainturned-pastor of the very church in Olney, England, of which the Earl of Dartmouth was the patron. And right after it we were pleased to hear, though it was barely recognizable, the once-traditional Glee Club favorite about another of the Earl's beneficiaries, the "very pious man" who "went into the wilderness to," etc.
Chemistry is the wordthis season, in everything from constructionto Commencement.
