Dr. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

Divers Notes & Observations

LAST DECEMBER 2 WAS NO time to get sick anywhere in northern New England, except possibly in Hanover. At least half the doctors in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire were in Spaulding Auditorium to hear Hillary Clinton expound the Health Security Act which she did for an hour and a quarter, without notes or visual aids, with empathy, and with what seemed to us, anyway, a healthy familiarity with her audience's problems. Among the audience there were obviously reservations about the plan itself, but none on the First Lady's persuasiveness and sincerity. She was warmly introduced by Dr. C. Everett Koop '37, and later in Alumni Hall, before a jampacked student crowd, by President Freedman. When the president said that this was her second appearance here, the first having been during the 1991 campaign, she politely reminded him that, having been a Wellesley student, she had also been here in days when it wasn't fully apparent that Dartmouth was an all-male college. The students gave her a Big Green sweatshirt, and after a spirited photo session, Joe Mehling '69, the new College photographer, said to her, "Mrs. Clinton, I really enjoyed seeing you on Sesame Street the other day." Without dropping a stitch she replied, "Thanks, and I hope you're remembering to eat your vegetables."

STRICTLY SPEAKING, THE IDEA for the new Collis Student Center goes back to the day of President Tucker, who built College Hall in 1901, as an aid to the social and recreational aspects of the educational process. Credit should also go to the several generations of officers, faculty, and students who have since then campaigned for a major campus facility to house a growing expanse of non-curricular organizations and activities. Now, almost a century later, through the generosity of Charles Collis '37 and his wife Ellen, that very resource was dedicated on January 14, in the same room its original panels, wood-carved Dartmouth seal, and massive fireplace handsomely restored that we earlier generations knew as Commons and more recent ones as Common Ground. Most striking, and authentically of the present era, was a rendition by the Dartmouth Intertribal Singers, in native dress and to the sound of a powerful drumbeat, of the Cree Honor Song, a repetitive and spine-chilling chant. Reminiscent of a musical age with which we were more familiar, in the reception that followed, was the Barbary Coast orchestra hardly a trombone's length from the balcony from which freshman Commons bands used to serenade us at mealtimes blasting out a Dixieland "Down by the Riverside" from one of the glass-enclosed rooms bordering on the Center's atrium. The atrium, the building's piece de resistance, projects light all the way to the Center's basement, to the door of the Lone Pine Pub a comfortably accoutered barroom which we feel will become one test of how the Center succeeds in wresting a share of campus social life away from grungy fraternity basements. (The name of that particular game is a four-letter drink beginning with "b" and ending with "r," off-limits here as it is anywhere else in this Granite State under the tender age of 21.) Sit inside the (non-alcoholic) Collis Cafe and you will look out onto almosttoo-good-to-be-true winter scene of Dartmouth Hall amid three feet of snow (22 inches fell on January 17 alone, the most since 1984). While other parts of America were cursed with natural disasters, weather in Hanover was a blessing especially to skiers.

On a critical corner of the campus, architects Tony Atkin & Associates were given two existing architecturally anomalous structures, and have transformed them into one which beautifully becomes what each of the two one of vintage 1901 and the other 1979—was first intended to be: a center for the fullest expression of Dartmouth student life. We were struck by the resemblance of Collis, as an architectural solution, to that of the Hood Museum, by architect Charles Moore, whose untimely death last month saddened so many of those who had known and worked with him during his stay in Hanover. Confronted with a similar problem, Moore resolved it, as The New York Times reported, "where new rhythmic forms of brick and stone and glass danced subtly between older buildings."

The Alumni Council saw still another example of architectural planning-in-progress last December. In a lively presentation of two centuries of Dartmouth buildings, Hood Museum Director Timothy Rub described how the original focus of the campus, Dartmouth Row, shifted to Baker Library in 1927, and such focus is now challenged again as the College expands beyond Baker. On the plans that Denise Scott Brown, partner in the firm that is consulting on the design of the new "north campus," then unveiled, our largely non-helpful observation was that although the passage in Isaiah 40 that follows "a voice crying in the wilderness" is "make straight the way of the Lord," North Main Street at that point, Elm Street, takes a 30-degree right turn.

BE READY ONCE MORE TO vote for an Alumni Trustee to take the place of Bob Danziger '56, whose two terms end in June. The nominees are Peter M. Fahey '68, T'70; Michael D. Keeshan '73, T'75; and Gary L. Love '76. All, needless to say, have had outstanding careers, and have also served the College and their respective classes with distinction. You will receive your ballot in March, and returning it promptly is your voice in Dartmouth's future.

TWO MORE POST-SEASON honors for quarterback Jay Fiedler '94—MVP in the Epson/Ivy Bowl game in Tokyo, and a share of MVP honors in the East-West Shrine game. Notable among at least a dozen other all-Ivies of last season was Melissa McBean '97, also the league's women's soccer Rookie of the Year; and track and cross-country's Kristin Cobb '95, a junior Phi Bete as well. On die twin subjects of sport and academics, may we offer you this unusual development, from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education? You know about Women's Studies, African- American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Latin-American Studies, don't you? A $2.5 million grant has just established a program of Irish Studies— at Notre Dame.

Hillary prescribes a plan, and the campus gets a dose of studentlife architecture.