Divers Notes & Observations
ONCE AGAIN, WE WANT TO BE of help in the event that you have spent the last few weeks in a grotto somewhere: President Clinton has accepted the College's invitation to speak at Commencement. Hillary has said that she can't make it.
The First Family are no strangers to the campus they were here during the 1992 campaign. Government professor Larry Radway recalls that he reminded Clinton of Garfinkel's Law, named for one of his associates, on "how to be a good President: (1) Be good. (2) Be President." And when Jim Freedman told an audience that this was Hillary's second visit to the campus, she corrected him: She had been here as a Wellesley '72.
Clinton's speech is to be the third in a trilogy that will begin with prior 1995 appearances at Michigan State and the Air Force Academy. He will have to go a long way to equal Ike's memorable "Don't join the bookburners" speech of 42 years ago.
IN ADDITION TO SIX REPUBLICAN Presidential hopefuls who have preceded Clinton to the "Live Free or Die" state (Governor Wilson being the latest of the bunch to drop the other shoe), the campus has already had a smattering of political palaver. Larry K. Smith, history professor here in the sixties, divided Washington into three categories during his lecture. First, political hacks the operators, fundraisers, pollsters, lobbyists. Second, the policy Wonks ("know" spelled backwards?) the staffers, specialists, abstract thinkers. Third, the believers those of one-issue convictions, impossible ever to be argued with. Smith was not optimistic on whether the three groups could ever interrelate hard or long enough to solve any of the country's economic or social problems.
The balanced-budget amendment came under the guns of a foursome of history and government professors who, although neither hacks, wonks, nor believers, had a hard time agreeing on the issue's plusses or minuses. Government profTom Nichols said entrenched senators will never allow anything less than a pork-filled deficit. "You can typify this problem in three words," he said: "Senator Robert Byrd (You may recall Nichols as a genial Jeopardy! contestant last year, whose winnings might have made a modest dent in the budget all by themselves).
If a key word in Acting President Jim Wright's new curriculum is "interdisciplinary," he has a winner in newly appointed Mae C. Jemison, engineer (Stanford), physician (Cornell), and former astronaut (NASA). Prof. Jemison will co-teach a course in environmental studies and then will head her own Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in Developing Countries.
AN ESPECIALLY TOPICAL conference took place on April 9 and 10, The United Nations: 50 Years After San Francisco, sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding. It was organized by the Center's United Nations Institute Director Gene Lyons. Ambassadors to the UN from several nations participated, as did Provost Lee Bollinger and many Dartmouth alumni now prominent in international affairs.
Jonathan Newcomb '68, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, is the newest of Dartmouth's seven alumni trustees. The polls closed on April 1, making Mr. Newcomb the winning nominee, and the Trustees gave him the okay a week later. We confess that since our instructions were to vote for any one, two, or all three of the nominees whom we considered best able to handle the demanding responsibility of a Dartmouth trustee, we voted for all three. It reminded us of a story about the late, king-sized columnist Heywood Broun. At a gourmet restaurant, when the menus were brought around, Broun glanced at his, then handed it back to the waiter saying, "I see nothing to be objected to."
Former Alumni Councillor Bill Tell '56 and half a dozen other alumni do have an objection and have sued the Alumni Association over the sitting Trustees' practice of giving alumni members an unelected second term. We wonder whether the litigants aren't making a mountain of punctilios out of a molehill of pique.
A MOUNTAIN OF DETAIL HAS accumulated on Dean of Students Lee Pelton's plate this past term. He will shortly present his plan to make "the first year at Dartmouth" more intellectually and socially productive for fresh persons and (we guess) upperclasspersons as well. The students have complained bitterly, though belatedly, about the library's takeover of Webster Hall, and they are insisting on a replacement. He has launched his nth attempt to come up with a policy that could conceivably alleviate alcohol's headlock on the social scene. There has been a disproportionate handful of incidents of homophobia that periodically rack the campus. To top it off, Playboy has announced that once again its cameras are coming to Hanover. We doubt that they plan to take panoramas of spring on Balch Hill.
We must give a high-five to the editors and writers of The Dartmouth this past term. The coverage of all the above campus ferment has for the most part been restrained, civil, and to the point. One columnist's sardonic observations caught our fancy: "Expanding social options would be the ideal outcome, but the decisions we are making involve a choice between little and nothing....If you are in the market for social options, push to relocate Dartmouth to Boston or Montreal."
Despite a belated four-win burst, men's hockey missed the ECAC play-offs by a hair. The women tied Princeton for the Ivy title, but lost to the Tigers in the first round of the ECACs. The women basketeers however, annihilated a statistics-loaded Harvard, 72-48, for the Ivy title, and met Virginia in the first round of the NCAA championships. And mens basketball finished with a flourish, to tie for second in the Ivies. They lose but one senior to graduation, against mighty penn's entire first team, so the Green should certainly be a factor under the boards next year.
Of Garfinkel's law and policy wonks and a whole molehill of pique.
