Major Commitments and Gold Medals
Divers Notes and Observations
In the dean of the fauty's annual report, Ed Berger differed with those who suspect that all the building that's taking place on campus is part of a plan to expand the College. On the contrary, he maintained that at least 25 years ago, the College made major commitments such as coeducation that only now are being caught up with by buildings and renovations. We also learned that the Trustees raised tuition rates 3.9 percent. As has become the custom, the announcement also contained the statement that this is the "lowest tuition raise in 32 years." It occurred to us that the College could use this same statement for the next 38 years just see that the Trustees lower the raise by onetenth of a point each year until 2035.
A "D" headline: "Fencing Team Foils Opponents."
Person to person to person: Dr. John Baldwin, head of surgery at Baylor University, has accepted the post of Dean of the Med School. Also from the Med School, Associate Professor J ay Buckey has been named to the crew of shuttle STS-90, scheduled to launch in April. Dr. John Satcher, who spoke to a goodly crowd at 105 Dartmouth Hall last fall, was finally confirmed as U.S. Surgeon General. Suzanne J. Lambert '97 has won a Rhodes scholarship. Lastly, twice-married Gerald Humphrey Legge, banker, shipping executive, and Coldstream Guard veteran, died in December in Yorkshire, England, at 73. (Legge, as if you didn't know, was the ninth Earl of Dartmouth).
El Nino bestowed copious snow on the town for a month before Carnival, and two beautiful days thereafter. Unfortunately a rainstorm and dense, snow-melting fog hit the night before, and the campus statue was saved only by two vast sheets of blue tarpaulin. The weekend's theme was "The Roaring 205," and the statue looked to us like a '24 Pierce Arrow touring car with a trunk full of booze making a getaway from the Feds. Women's skiing celebrated Carnival with a first place over persistent winner Vermont (the men finished third). Women's hockey and basketball are in the fight for the Ivy lead, and we imagine that you, too, arose at 7 a.m. to watch the U.S. Olympic hockey team, featuring Gretchen Ulion '94 and goalie Sarah Tueting '98, crunch Canada, 3-1. Ulion scored the game's first goal. Coeducation has certainly done wonders for Dartmouth sports.
And for dramatics as well. Fifty of the same scruffy characters you see on campus in ski boots, jeans, and sweatshirts were miraculously transformed into dainty singing and dancing contadine for The Gondoliers, professionally and so enjoyably directed by the Hop's Louis Burkot.
Keynote speaker for Martin Luther King Jr. Day was Lani Guinier, civil rights lawyer recently made a member of the faculty of Harvard Law School. In "Chaos or Community" she vehemently urged the packed audience to reclaim MLK's vision of America as a moral, as well as a political democracy. If higher learning has a place in the role of democracy, she asked that affirmative action be examined more closely and less critically as an index of merit for citizen involvement.
Dr. Elena Bonner, widow of the Nobel-winning Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, spoke of a Russian democracy on the brink of chaos. Bonner said that after the introduction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are some freedoms: of movement, of speech, and of conscience, none too carefully observed. The individual is not adequately protected. With meager pensions and salaries, poverty of schools, food rationing, overcrowded courts, and break-up of families, life is not essentially different from what it was in the Soviet Union.
President Freedman mentioned briefly, in dedicating the new Roth Center for Jewish Life, that there once had been prejudice in the admission of Jewish students to Dartmouth. Letters to The New York Times on the subject attracted the attention of William F. Buckley Jr., who told a crowded Rollins Chapel that the secular perspective has for a time won the personal battle, but a perverse Christianity refuses to retreat. His own faith firm, he called Christianity and Judaism sister religions, admitted that the curriculum might have a place for teaching religion, and asked for civility to one another on the part of both majorities and minorities.
Montgomery Fellow for the winter term is the renowned Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright August Wilson. Wilson has attracted a number of leading teachers and commentators on black drama in America. He is teaching a course on advanced play writing, and is appearing in other classes that study the theme that runs through his plays, "The Great Migration" from south to north. This cultural dislocation is the subject of Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone that was produced by the drama department.
Dean Lee Pelton's announcement that he is resigning to become president of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, brought one question along with a host of well wishes. How do you pronounce Willamette like a female William? Nope them as knows best say "it's WillAMit, dammit."
