Dr. Wheelock's Journal

Divers Notes & Observations

DESPITE THE ALMOST universal neglect paid to it by the national media, the news may have filtered through to you that the President of the United States received an honorary degree from the president of Dartmouth College, and also was the featured speaker at the College's 225 th Commencement in June. The event took place at the scoreboard end of Memorial Field, on a stage which started out looking like an Erector set and wound up resembling a colonnade-less portico. Its site is now marked only by a bare spot in the grass somewhere between the five- and the ten-yard lines.

The yellow-slicker-clad spectators, some 16,000-17,000 strong, larger than any football crowd within memory, were asked for security reasons to be in the stands by 9 a.m., and some of them actually made it by then. Working with the White House, the College's planning committee, tirelessly led by Barbara Whipple '85, headed off most of the inconveniences, minor and major, that normally attend an enterprise of such moment. Two signers discreetly gesticulated from the side of the stage, for the hearing-impaired; and the Secret Service was everywhere, some in gown and mortarboard, even two well-equipped pairs precariously perched on the roof of the press box and atop nearby Leverone. The only unpleasant weather in the unceasing sun and heat of the previous eight weeks tried its best to dampen the proceedings—but the return to command of President Freedman apparently in fine health; the relentless affability of President Clinton; and the standing ovation for the 50th Reunion class (which had no Commencement of its own in 1945) easily carried the day.

The big news, however, took place a few hours later at a senior-citizen center in Claremont, New Hampshire, where the President and House Speaker Newt Gingrich held a civil, cordial, and most unBeltway-like confab on current political matters.

Having observed Valedictorian Kristin Cobb (3.99 GPA, all-Ivy cross-country, and GTE Academic AilAmerican) set Dartmouth records at all kinds of distances on Memorial Field over the past four years, we were interested in how she'd fare on another kind of track. Timely, as predictable. Her topic was the social and ethical effects of the unceasing progress of education and technology as each College generation advanced into alumni-hood. To society's successive coping with the telephone, auto, plane, radio, TV and computer, the double biology and philosophy major added, "during our four years at Dartmouth, the human embryo was cloned for the first time."

It was a busy and, for the most part, successful spring season for other student athletes as well as Kristin Cobb. We counted 13 who made Academic Ail-American on one level or another, including football co-captain Josh Bloom '95, and two members of the Ivy champion women's lacrosse team, which also got to the NCAA quarter-finals. Men's track and field captured the New Englands and placed third in the Heptagonals (the women were a strong second). In the National Championships at San Diego, the women sailors missed out for second by a mere two points. Bob Whalen's hustling ballplayers batted .322 as a team for their first winning season in five years. Incidentally, we have gone back to watching major-league box scores, to follow the fortunes of Mark Johnson '90, at first base for the Pirates, and Brad Ausmus '91, catching for the Padres. And Foxboro patrons should have a glimpse this fall at defensive back Brian White '95, signed a few weeks ago by the Patriots.

What looks like one of the ablest Green basketball teams in years will test its mettle against the Tar Heels of North Carolina in December; a return game in Hanover will take place in 1997. And finally, the class of 1966 gets a rouse - with a will! - for its gift of a new, glare-proof, multi-capability scoreboard for Memorial Field.

When Jim Freedman left for his six-month sabbatical. Acting President Jim Wright promised him that upon his return, July 1, the Will to Excel campaign would have reached or exceeded its original goal of $425 million. Which indeed it has done, with two million more for good measure. Not a bad lead-in for our next item, a $7 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, credited to chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahnn, who pinch-hit as dean of faculty while Jim Wright took over for President Freedman. After servitude as Montgomery Fellows in the winter of 1987, former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm and his wife Dorothy have returned to Rope Ferry Road in the same capacity. Dedicated recently, by President Freedman himself, was the new $25 million Norris Cotton Cancer Center, in a building adjacent to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. The building will be named for Barbara Rubin, a late patient of the Center and an official of the Amicus Foundation, one of its major contributors. The Center was the last inhabitant of the old hospital, which now awaits the wrecking ball which in turn now awaits behind a ten-foot high fence, beautifully painted in Dartmouth green. There are also rumors that a mild dose of implosion will be prescribed. No rest for this sidewalk superintendent a year of reconstruction will begin next month at Robinson Hall, where so many of us pulled all-nighters at The D, WDCR, the DOC, or at the old Jacko offices.

At his lecture last spring, "A Journey through Economic Time," economist John Kenneth Galbraith-of world-class rank in self-deprecation—said, "Nothing brings an audience back like the speaker's word, finally."'

Finally.

Commencement seesthe return of twoPresidents to theHanover Plain. A