A Knight Falls; Misha Dances
Divers Notes and Observations
Early last February there was more snow on the ground than there had been for years for the wouldbe Rodins of Carnival sculpture. A handsomely formed, spear-wielding knight arose, astride a white steed that was molded on what had looked like a firm armature of wood and iron pipe. At their feet, a slithery dragon giving them the evil eye. Perhaps too evil, for thanks to an untimely one-day thaw the day before Carnival, the packed snow around the lower parts of the armature gave way, and both knight and horse tumbled unceremoniously to the green. And so, for the first time since 300 A.D., the score: Dragon 1, St. George 0.
A far more contemporary contest, with a somewhat similar outcome, was the subject of an absorbing talk by David Halberstam, returning to Hanover as a Montgomery Fellow after his keynote Commencement address last year. In "Looking Back on Vietnam: The Collision of Politics with History," he noted that he was speaking just 22 years after the last refugeeladen U. S. helicopter struggled away from a Saigon rooftop at the close of what he called "the Second American Civil War." The war, he said, was an unfortunate clash of our nation's foreign policy with our domestic politics, which for once did not stop at the water's edge—and that the Democrats did not want to lose Saigon because they did not want to lose Washington. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist stoutly disagreed with those who still believe that it was the media that lost the war; our military should have seen from the vain efforts of France to subdue the Viet Cong that it would have taken a far more herculean effort than we were capable of to overpower that particular dragon.
Unbelievably, only 22 years plus a few days after the aforementioned helicopter episode, President Freedman, Tuck Dean Paul Danos, and eightmembers of the Tuck faculty were on their way to Hanoi and the joint business development program launched last year by Tuck and the Vietnam National University. Vietnamese educators will visit Hanover this summer. The proceedings, we hear, are occasionally at the mercy of translators, and we suspect that was part of the original problem 22 years ago.
At the monthly meeting of the Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley, President Freedman recounted some of the other achievements of his tenure: new buildings for chemistry, computer science, psychology, plus additions to Tuck and the Med School; a successful $568-million capital campaign, with its implications for vastly expanded library facilities and for continued need-blind scholarship aid; the first major revision of the curriculum in 75 years; and his unceasing efforts to keep the liberal arts from being crowded into a smaller and smaller niche in that curriculum.
One innovation he did not mention was the annual Presidential Lecture, an occasion to hear from a distinguished member of the faculty on a phase of his particular area of study. Chairman of the classics department professor Bill Scott delivered the tenth of these mind-challenging talks, titled "The Gospel According to Odysseus." In addition to traversing "a moonscape inhabited by fantastic beings," Scott maintained that Odysseus's wanderings also took him past characters who displayed all the human gifts, frailties, and susceptibilities recognizable in us today. He described Homeric poetry as the "bible" of the ancient Greeks, and made the point that although a dangerous and rigid adventure, living the good life was not impossible to one of a pagan civilization. Preceding David Halberstam as Montgomery Fellow was theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman '61, who proved to another overflow crowd, in 3 Rock, that ease of a speaker's delivery can completely mask the complexity of his subject matter. His topic was "At Home in the Universe: Is Life Probable Everywhere?" Kauffman outlined some of the experiments in artificial molecular structure that already exist, yet said that even if they did end in successfully creating life, scientists would still not have the answer to how life on earth began. His definition of life was "an entity that can act on its own behalf," which he illustrated with a Rube Goldberg-like diagram. He concluded that despite the earth's billions of years of existence, there is still a chance, if only ten to the infinite power, that life could occur again, somewhere in the universe.
The campus was just treated (at near- Broadway prices) to a four-performance stay at the Moore Theatre of the White Oak Dance Project, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and a 28-person team of dancers, musicians, and costumers. They performed the world premiere of Remote by choreographer Meg Stuart, as well as a second premiere, Journey of a Poet, by the late Erick Hawkins, and a Merce Cunningham work, Septet. There were strict restrictions to protect the privacy of the world's most famous living ballet dancer—though he violated them himself by sit-in appearances at regular ballet classes and even at the Hopkins Center lunch facilities. Volunteers attending the entrances of the theater called themselves the KGB—Keeping Groupies from Baryshnikov.
The last weekend of February was hardly one of elation for Green sports fansrather, it was of the wait-till-next-year variety. Though very much in each game until the final buzzer, basketball succumbed to both Penn and Princeton, ending its hopes for a possible Ivy title, or at least a tie; and the hockey team, winding down its customary season of too many one-goal losses, allowed Yale—for the moment at leastto sneak into the last available place in the ECAC playoffs. Memento of happier hockey days: we saw in The Times that a scholarship has been named at West Point for its coach of 36 years, all-time Dartmouth great Jack Riley '44. Riley once said, that he had never met a Yale man he didn't like, and when asked how many he had met, the answer was "two."
