The Orange on Campus Is Not on Leaves
Divers Notes and Observations
Orange was the dominant color on campus this summer—that übiquitous plastic netting strung around construction sites. Sidewalk superintendents have been gawking overtime, as Facilities, Operations, and Management (Buildings and Grounds to you) gets the College in working order for the arrival of the Class of Two Grand. Topliff is getting a complete facelift, inward and out. Steve, the foreman, let us browse nostalgically through the halls of our old dorm. No more fireplaces in the corner rooms, countless computer oudets instead. We heard that most of the class of '00 already have everything needed to talk e-mail the minute they arrive, and students still have to pick up their mail at their Hinman boxes in Hopkins Center—so why did the College bother to leave all the brass mail slots in Topliff's doors ? Well, we can show any student how to open a door through the slot with the business end of a hockey stick, if they ever get locked out.
Along North Main Street, a new wing on Cutter-Shabazz Hall is edging right up to the back of Webster Cottage. Around the corner, concrete is setting for the foundation of the new Roth Center for Jewish Life. Thirteen East Wheelock Street, once a stolid-looking frame building, is taking on the look of a neo-Victorian mansion as it is being re-outfitted to house the faculty advisors of the Supercluster, the new Trusteeapproved effort to provide special attention and guidance for the intellectual and social interests of students from a mix of all four clAsses. We learned that nearly half of the entering class had applied to participate in this first-ever first-year experience, but since occupants of the three East Wheelock dorms have been selected randomly, nowhere near all of these made it.
The biggest project in town is the replacement for the decaying Ledyard bridge. A coffer dam has already stuck its toe into the Connecticut on the Vermont side, preparing for the first pilings to be sunk, while New Hampshire's contribution has been the leveling of the pine trees for about 100 yards up the West Wheelock Street hill to widen that approach to town. Incidentally, the Ledyard Canoe Club is celebrating its 75 th anniversary this year. The club was paddling on the river when Ledyard was still a covered bridge.
Back on land, and on more academic pursuits: Professor Nancy Frankenberry's newly designed course "Science and Religion" has already won a $10,000 Templeton Foundation award, and she will team-teach it for the first time next spring, with a science professor yet to be named. Already named for principal donor Bruce Rauner '78 is the Special Collections Library, even before it is transported (very carefully) to its new home in a renovated Webster Hall. By then, it will include a new and rare item, the gift of Roger Malkin '52: a volume of Webster's speeches inscribed on the flyleaf to Chief Justice Marshall.
Tuck's new Dean Paul Danos has come up with a computerized plan for the continuing education of Tuck alumni, enabling them to participate via the Internet in courses being offered to current students. Danos and his staff have also garnered grants from several corporate sponsors to help launch a new school of business at Hanoi's Vietnam National University.
With a certain hesitation, we recommend a look at the October issue of Vanity Fair, in which five varsity football performers, together with several players from among the Green's rivals, were flown to Los Angeles to appear in an Ivy League spread. The photographer, agreed the five, "didn't know much about football." (A somewhat more authentic publication, DartmouthFootball for '96, forecasts the team and its 17 returning lettermen at the top of the Ivies for the coming season.) Not to be outdone, Playboy sent basketball standout Sea Lonergan '97 to Chicago for a piece on the nation's leading scholar-athletes. The twice All-Ivy forward, a pre-med, sports a 4.0 in his chemistry major.
Our baseball allegiance has shifted from the Padres to the Tigers (Detroit subspecies) as catcher Brad Ausmus '91 was recently part of a trade between them. Mark Johnson '9O is astill hitting in the .290s at first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Two days after the College bestowed upon him his honorary degree last June, former Coach Bob Blackman'37A displayed his extrafootball talents on the Hanover Golf Course. Wielding a 4-iron, he scored a holein-one on the 170-yard 12th. Them as has gets, as they say. Them as has televisions that receive WMUR-TV, Manchester, New Hampshire, can catch the Dartmouth Yale game live at one p.m. on Saturday, October 19. That's right after the bonfire, Dartmouth Night.
We hope that by then we'll know what happened to a couple of paintings, including a Paul Sample, that got swiped last February from the walls of Baker Library. Another was stolen from Tuck School, and then more paintings and prints disappeared from other nearby libraries. They and a laptop computer, also missing from a Tuck dorm, ended up in the home of one of New Hampshire Attorney General's own assistants. The suspect state prosecutor is out on $ 140,000 bail, charged with eight counts of receiving stolen property. Observed one of our associates, "That's a pretty good way to collect art without putting up much money."
