The Week in ReviewTrustee Voting Ends Voting in the alumni Trustee election ended last Friday, and the results are expected later this week. The deadline for voting was extended two weeks because of repeated irregularities in sending ballots and other campaign materials to alumni, who were charged with filling two vacant spots on the Board of Trustees.
Dean of the College James Larimore last Tuesday approved several major changes to the alcohol policy, especially those relating to fraternities. Organizations may now hold small parties with kegs without first notifying a half-dozen College bureaucrats. Large parties are still subject to College oversight, including "safety inspections" designed to catch fraternities in technical rule violations. See the next issue of The Dartmouth Review for full coverage.
College President James Wright has again tried to defend the 2001 derecognition of Zeta Psi fraternity on the grounds that their newsletters were offensive. In the very same breath, he told the Daily Dartmouth that campus organizations enjoy total freedom of expression.
The Student Assembly is applying its creative genius—responsible for such catastrophic failures as the communistic Big Green Bikes program—to reforming the Scholarship Office. The office has in recent years failed to secure prominent scholarships for graduating seniors; there have been no Rhodes Scholars from Dartmouth since 2003, while just this year Yale had two and Harvard six. The Assembly proposes that it take over several responsibilities from the office's full-time paid staff.
Veteran news anchor Tom Brokaw will deliver the main address at Commencement on June 12. At Commencement, he and eight others will receive honorary doctorates. Other honorees include former New Jersey Governor and 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean, Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, University of Michigan president and affirmative action activist Mary Sue Coleman, and former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador Andrew Young. President James Wright and the senior class valedictorian will also speak at Commencement. Brokaw, the former anchor and managing editor of NBC's "Nightly News," stepped down in December after two decades in that position. During his 21 years working for NBC, he won several awards and became a respected and distinguished figure in the field of broadcast journalism. He is also well-known for his books, including The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, and A Long Way from Home.
The Student Assembly's recent "State of the College" survey found that students feel exceptionally alienated from the administration. Students told the Assembly that the administration seems detached. Only 24.9 percent of students agreed that "the administration is responsive to concerns of the student body." Almost no one felt informed about the administration's "Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience" or the administration's vision for the college in the next 10 years. Concerning Greek life, only 16.8 percent of respondents are satisfied with the administration's interactions with the Greek system. Most believe that the College's regulations regarding the Greek system are too strict. A majority of participants believed that the school's alcohol policy is too strict, and less than half understand the so-called "good samaritan policy" or would feel comfortable using it to report an overly-drunk companion. Nearly 85 percent of students agreed that they would use the good samaritan policy more if they did not believe the College would punish them as a result. Other issues addressed in the survey included Greenprint, parking, Dick's House, class sizes, faculty quality, and course selections. Almost universally, students agreed that there is not adequate parking for undergraduates at Dartmouth, with 56 percent of respondents urging the College parking garage should be built specifically for students. The Assembly plans to lobby the Board of Trustees for changes based on these data.
According to several Dartmouth seniors who spoke at an event last week called "Will the Women of Dartmouth Please Stand Up?" the College is a male-dominated institution where members of the fairer sex are routinely oppressed. Other women found Dartmouth to be home of refreshing chivalry. We tend to believe the latter view.
The Student Assembly may finally have gotten something right. Last term, the Assembly performed a survey which determined that about three-quarters of students want library hours extended by an additional two hours on weeknights. This convinced Provost Barry Scherr to keep the library open until 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday nights, beginning this summer. The $40,000 annual cost will be taken from the provost's discretionary fund, but it will later be incorporated into the library's permanent budget. The Assembly had originally proposed that it help fund the extended hours. If the Assembly used all of its funds for productive purposes like this instead of wasting it on communistic bicycle-sharing programs, the body might gain some legitimacy.
Columbia University took steps recently toward allowing a branch of the Army Reserve Officers's Training Corps to return to campus. At present, cadets at Columbia must travel to Fordham University in the Bronx to conduct their training, just as Dartmouth cadets go to Norwich University in Vermont. Unlike Dartmouth, Columbia recently began to list military courses on transcripts. Two years ago, a student referendum found that 65 percent of students favored ending the Vietnam-era ROTC ban. This month, the university's senate, composed of students and faculty, will vote on ROTC, thereby passing the issue to the trustees. There are no ROTC programs at Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Dartmouth's female professors are paid 22 percent less than their male counterparts, according to a study by the American Association of University Professors. According to the survey, Princeton University was the only Ivy League school to narrow the gap in pay between male and female professors this past year. Princeton pays men only 5.5 percent more than women. Dartmouth spokesperson Roland Adams reported that Dartmouth was still preparing a response to the association's survey. Princeton's recent success in this area is likely due to the efforts of President Shirley Tilghman, who in 2002 created a taskforce to examine the salaries and tenure rates among the male and female faculty. Among other things, this taskforce recommended that Princeton allow for time off after the birth or adoption of a child in an effort to attract top female professors. Concerns about the pay gap have also led Harvard University President Larry Summers to set aside $25 million to help recruit more women and minority professors. That move, of course, came just days after his comments suggesting women might be less predisposed to science than men created a national uproar.
Attentive readers of The Dartmouth Review may have noticed a disturbing trend of misbehavior in East Wheelock; sadly, an end is not yet in sight. The dormitory cluster has of late faced a crisis of disappearing kitchen accessories. The dearth of cooking items is making it difficult for the benevolent Wheelock residents to bake treats for their fellow "creative loners." Community Director Michael Lord is asking that students return the items. There will be no penalty for the student who absconded with them if they are returned.
Jim Merkel, who claims to make his own life a model of "sustainability" by living on only $5,000 a year, will develop the College's existing organic farming, recycling, and composting programs. More insidiously, he will, according to the College, "develop a strategy to embed principles of sustainable prosperity in all of Dartmouth's roles—as a place of learning and research, a business enterprise, and a member of the local community." Merkel, author of The Global Living Handbook (2000) and Radical Simplicity (2003), is currently completing a book tour by bicycle across sunny Spain. A pity the late Department of Speech could not be sustained.
Dartmouth Review Associate Editor J. Stethers White '07 left Bones Gate fraternity after another partygoer complained to brothers that he was wearing an Indian tee shirt. White was encouraged to wear a sweat-shirt to hide the "offense"; he elected to leave instead.
In a recent interview with the homosexual publication Planet Out, pop artist Moby expressed his desire that his future children be homosexual. "As a matter of fact, I was talking to my friend Laura, who sings on [my latest] record, and we're both getting to the point where we want to start families," Moby stated. "We're convinced that if we have children, we're going to do everything in our power to make them gay. Like maybe drinking a lot of extra soy milk while she's pregnant, or anything that would work to make that happen. I'd just rather have a really sharp, interesting, smart gay son than some big, dumb, hetero meathead." Moby, who is married to a woman, maintains that he only seems gay and was once attacked in Boston by a group of men who thought the pop icon was a homosexual.
Wanton vulgarity in the name of political correctness is again defended, this time at Roger Williams University, where the popular Vagina Monologues (which feature a scene depicting an adult woman taking advantage of a 16 year old girl with alcohol) was strongly endorsed by the school's administration. The play has been lampooned by the local College Republicans' "Penis Day" festival, a similar celebration which makes mention of the other half of the world's population and its respective genitalia. The students' P-Day was immediately attacked by school authorities and its organizers threatened with suspension, while the vagina warriors were allowed to continue distributing graphic posters with slogans asking, "What does your vagina smell like?", distributing vagina lollipops, and, at schools like Arizona State, erecting a 50-foot inflatable vagina. P-Day promoters attempted to match V-Day, lewd deed for lewd deed. At one point the college Provost greeted "Testacles," the P-Day mascot, mistaking him for a giant mushroom. The embarrassment that then ensued when the provost was presented with a "Penis Warrior" award, did nothing to help the cause of the embattled P-Day activists. In the end, the primary differences between the two campaigns were that P-Day promoters admitted to their own absurdity, and P-Day promoters have received disciplinary sanctions. Nonetheless, P-Day will return until V-Day backs down.
At the annual "Will The Women of Dartmouth Please Stand Up?" panel discussion, Robin Rathmann-Noonan '05 pointed out a didactic function of this publication. "I was called a fem-Nazi by The Dartmouth Review, and I learned from it," she said. But what did she learn? |
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