Divers Notes & Observations
LOOKING EVEN AS CLOSELY AS we do at the shorts-clad or blue-jeaned and backpackladen freshpersons now livening up a moribund campus, we don't believe that anyone could detect the presence of 163 valedictorians and 84 salutatorians. It is a group that can boast of 87.2 percent of its membership in the top ten percent of its high-school class. There were 8,584 applications for the class of '97, out ofwhich 2,273 were admitted, out ofwhich 1,088 have been enrolled. These young men (53.0 percent) and women (47.0 percent) have arrived at Dartmouth from a total of 812 different schools, at which their combined SAT median score was 1350— the highest for any class yet recorded.
We noticed that the proportion of international students is up a couple of percentage points from last year. Although they still compose just 6.4 percent of the undergraduate student body, we remember reading somewhere that if it were suddenly decreed that Tuck School would no longer admit American citizens, Tuck could be easily and entirely occupied by MBA candidates from countries other than the United States.
Of interest to some alumni classes in search of an intriguing gift to the College: one of the older classes, in memory of one of its recently departed officers, will present each member of the class of 1997 with a copy of The Dartmouth Story, by Bob Graham '40, reviewed on this page some months ago. The Dartmouth Bookstore, the book's publisher, is now planning a new and revised edition in paperback. There couldn't be a more fitting guide to each new class's campus home for four years.
The calendar has thrown us a curve this fall. Whereas we were able to comment on Convocation in the past, this year's exercises arrive just a week beyond our deadline for this issue. Award-winning documentary film-maker Ken Burns (whose 1990 landmark TV series "The Civil War" won more than 40 major awards) will be the keynote speaker and will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters from President Freedman. Nor can we cover fully the first Ivy football game September 18, against a highly recharged Penn a contest which right out of the starting gate could have an important bearing on whether the Green wins its fourth consecutive Ivy title. We can, however, convey the bad news: that Dartmouth lost a rain-soaked game in Philadelphia, 6-10.
We can also fill you in on other as- pects of Dartmouth sports, a topic on which some of our local readers tell us we have been deficient in the past. Cammy Myler '92, whose fifth-place finish in the women's luge in the last Winter Olympics was the best ever recorded by an American competitor, is training rigorously in the Adirondacks for the '94 games in Lillehammer, Norway The Valley News has observed that Vern Guetens '93, Dartmouth goalie who performed behind a somewhat porous defense for most of his career, has since graduation been working out with the Boston Bruins, who had scouted him ever since prep school. Finally, baseball coach Bob Whalen tells us that not just one but at least four recent Dartmouth alumni are seeking their fortunes in professional baseball, headed by Brad Ausmus '91, now catching for the San Diego Padres. Ausmus, 24, never caught a pitch for the Green, having been signed by the Yankees out of high school and hence been ineligible for collegiate competition. He worked with the Yanks for three years while getting his Dartmouth degree (and making himself useful around Red Rolfe Field in the springtime). The Yankees lost him to the expansion Colorado Rockies; then he became a key figure in the critical Rockies-Padres trade last spring.
Three other recent alumni are playing triple-A ball in major league organizations: catcher Tim Carey '92, for the Red Sox; Joe Tosone, '93's cocaptain, for Montreal; and Bob Bennett '93, in the Oakland A's chain, whose path to the big leagues may follow that of fellow Dartmouth Native American John T. "Chief' Meyers '09.
Moving ahead a season, women's basketball expectations were raised a couple of notches by the return of head coach Chris Wielgus, who led the team to four consecutive Ivy championships in the eighties. Wielgus had left Dartmouth (and coaching) to raise her family, then resumed as head coach at Fordham two years ago. With immediate back-to- back winning seasons, she didn't find it too easy to leave Fordham; at her press conference in Hanover, commenting on the late start to her recruiting season, she said, "I'm just going to have to call up and say we had a bad connection. I meant Dartmouth, not Fordham." The Green field hockey team also sports a new coach, Julie Dayton, from nationally tenth-ranked University of Virginia. Dayton immediately led the stickers to a double-overtime 2-1 win against a highly touted URI team. Both Green goals were scored by Sarah Devens '96, a standout in last winter's women's ice hockey—and whose grandfather, if we remember, was a Harvard athlete who did considerable damage to Dart-mouth teams in his time.
SINCE IT OCCASIONALLY OCCU pies this column, you may be wondering if there is any new word on the fraternity situation. We saved a recent letter to The Dartmouth, in which the writer compared grade-point averages of fraternity/ sorority members to those of the unaffiliateds. He reported that the coed-fraternity-sorority average was 3.30, and the all-unaffiliated average was 3.24. The sorority average was 3.38, while the all-women's average was 3.29. The average of the fraternity men and of men in general was 3.23 for both groups. Which reminds us of a humorous piece on statistics we read some time ago, which ran like this: "The average Harvard man, it is reported, has 1.6 children, and the average Vassar woman [that will reveal to you how long ago that article appeared!] has 1.4 children. This proves conclusively that men have more children than women."
The freshmen are the highst scoring ever;the Green looks to score another Ivy title.
