Divers Notes & Observations
TO PARAPHRASE AN OLD JOKE, every year has to be the 50th anniversary of something. But almost one day after another we commemorate the half-century marks of so many eventful moments of World War II. In February, America's renowned 10th Mountain Division, packed with Dartmouth alumni, met with their counterpart ski troops from Germany and Italy and relived the embattled days and nights of February 18 and 19, 1945. That was when the 10th dislodged the enemy from previously unassailable Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere and opened up the P0 Valley for General Mark Clafk's army and the German capitulation soon afterward. One of the reuners, Newc Eldredge '50, was pictured in the Valley News with two companions, looking as though they could still make it up the Apennines, in the dark, in full combat gear, as easily as they could handle Moosilauke on a summer's outing.
This year is also the hundredth anniversary of the arrival on the Hanover plain of its first Japanese student, Kan'ichi Asakawa 1899. Asakawa spent most of his life at Yale as a professor of history and Japanese civilization. He lectured at Dartmouth for several years shordy after his graduation, and was honored by the College in 1913 with the degree of Doctor of Letters.
Lest we overlook it, this year is also the centennial of the Dartmouth Club of the Rocky Mountains in Denver, a city which boasted all of two alumni in 1895, but which has certainly contributed many of distinction since then.
DEFINITELY NOT INSPIRED BY the annual arrival of the "randoms" on campus, this year's Carnival theme was "The Call of the Wild." Un-winterlike warmth, which to Mrs. Wheelock's horror even brought out buds in our garden, stymied the sculpture builders, who were reduced to using Zamboni scrapings from the Campion skating rink. But at the very last moment, a providential ten-inch snowfall enabled them to complete a reasonably recognizable wolf, and clear weather and an accommodating solar system gave him a weekend of full moons to howl at.
Sports fans did some howling of their own, over an 8-0 weekend in the so called major sports. The women's hockey team beat Rochester Tech and Cornell to share the Ivy title with Princeton.The men also won, shaking off whatever had been ailing it during a nine loss streak, and took the measure of both RPI and Union. In basketball, the men beat Yale handily and Brown in a barn burner, and the women held on to their Ivy lead by topping the Elis and the Bears as well. Little noticed in this welcome plethora of victories was the sub-eight-minute mark set by Sam Wilbur '94 in the 3,000-meters at the Boston University Invitational the fastest time by any NCAA distance runner this year.
THE NATION'S OLDEST professional school of engineering will now also be one of the handful of schools to have a woman as the dean. Elsa Garmire, professor of electrical engineering at USC, and director of its Center for Laser Studies, will become the Thayer School's 11th dean as of September 1. Garmire has written more than 200 scholarly publications; she holds eight patents; and has been a researcher in photonics and quantum electronics for 30 years.
At the other end of Tuck Drive from Thayer, Linda L.Fowler, professor of political science at Syracuse, has been named director of the Rockefeller Center. She becomes a professor in Dartmouth's government department, and was nominated to become the Francis T. Reagan '06 Professor of Policy Studies. Fowler, with both scholarly credits and congressional experience, is married to Stephen Fowler'65, a Rochester attorney. Their son Christopher is a member of Dartmouth's class of '97.
Staying a week as the Montgomery Fellow was Jessica Tuchman Mathews, former deputy for the undersecretary of state for global affairs and now a Washington Post columnist. And on the subject of Washington journalism, Trustee Susan Dentzer '77, economics editor of U.S.News & World Report, gave an excellent lecture in February. Dentzer pointed out to a packed audience at the Kendal community assembled there by her sponsor, the Ledyard Bank that federal budget deficits are merely a matter of priorities, and the conflict is whether you, or your representative in Congress, prefers to view them financially, morally, or politically.
COMPARED TO THE INNOCENT days we spent in and around 217 Dartmouth Hall umpteen years ago, our visit there last month was like stepping onto the set of Star Wars. For the past year and a half, the Office of Instructional Services has been utilizing just about every technique that has been developed at the College during its decades of computer leadership, and has made 217 into the classroom of the future. Available to the professor who, we were assured, doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to handle it all are VCR, tape, CD, film, all at the touch of a button, a switch, or a mouse. Eventually there will be a laptop at each seat for students, to add, we suppose, to the 9,000 computers already in the hands of undergraduates, faculty, administrators, and in public places.
A notable milestone in the computer saga was passed on January 31 with the death, at 90, of Professor George R.Stibitz at his home in Hanover Center. His memoirs, written in 1993, were entitled The Zeroth Generation, because his earliest research, with Bell Laboratories, preceded by years the first generation of computers. As far back as 1940, to cite only one example, Dr.Stibitz sent a set of math problems from a Teletype in McNutt Hall to a Bell Labs computer in New York City, which returned the answers to Hanover in seconds.
A woman is Thayer's new dean, and a wolf isthe Carnival'ssnowy mascot.
