The Week in Review

Friday, October 7, 2005

Class of '09 Most Diverse Ever, Crime Up

Dartmouth recently released information on the Class of '09 showing that it is the most diverse class yet, with students of color comprising 27.4% of the student body.

Also released was the college annual security report that shows a doubling of burglary and liquor law arrests in the past two years, as well as a quadrupling of forcible sex offences in the same time frame. In compliance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act the College has generated its annual report on policies relating to security, alcohol and drug use as well as statistics on crime occurring on campus. This information has been collected to serve as a resource for those in the Dartmouth community to readily find information about campus policies and "criminal activity."

Rush Begins, Awkward Small Talk Ensues

Sorority rush commenced this past Wednesday, with 312 women signed up to participate. However, the sororities only expect between 230 and 270 women to actually reach the process's conclusion. Many girls have expressed anxiety about rush, although they have been assured by their recruitment counselors that they are the ones being recruited. Sophomore women have a plethora of reasons for accepting a bid from a house—Sarah Rathnam '08 says she will possibly base the decision of whether or not to accept a bid from a house based on proximity to her off-campus residence. Rushees will go to all six houses in two nights for Round One, up to four houses for another two nights of Round Two, and finally preference a house on the final night.

IFC rush for men commences the evening of Saturday, October 8th. In a far less excruciating process, the 300 expected participants need only visit houses of their choosing for two nights, each visit lasting only two hours.

Geography Department Next to Go?

Around sixty students assembled at Brewster basement on the evening of September 30 for the annual International Map Ceremony, where students took turns talking about where they came from before pinning a small flag onto a world map. Quirks of culture, language and people were shared by the students who represented over twenty countries. The Central Europeans assured their audience that their countries were not from Eastern Europe, the historical East Indian colonies emphasized their colonial history to the lone Brit present, and the Canadians were mostly absent because they didn't feel international enough. Some people pinned more than one flag, calling multiple places home. American citizens who have lived in other parts of the world were also present. Stephen Silver, Director of the International Office, pinned a flag on Australia, where he vacationed. As of this year, Antarctica remains the only unrepresented continent at Dartmouth College. Hanover winters are just not cold enough.

Feingold Visits College, Ignores Students

Likely Democratic presidential candidate Russ Feingold held a "listening session" at the College, which was open to members of Dartmouth and the surrounding community. The session provided Senator Feingold with an opportunity to speak about his policies to concerned members of the community; the only problem was none of those members were of the Dartmouth community. Senator Feingold held an hour-long discussion in which he answered dozens of questions, two of which actually came from Dartmouth students. The questions asked were not of issues like crime and foreign policy, or issues of paramount importance to America. Instead, Feingold and the audience exchanged ideas on how to make the Democratic Party stronger and "retake its moral authority." Somehow the Democrats forgot that by turning their party into a national version of "Experiences" it will be tough to recover their moral high ground.

Freedom Without Responsibility

Lee Bollinger, former Provost of Dartmouth and current President of Columbia, came to speak to the Dartmouth faculty on the subject of "Academic Freedom," or the right of academics to say anything without repercussions. In the forum, Bollinger made his attempt to regain the ground lost over the last several years to men like Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado who think it is an exercise of free speech to call victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns." Bollinger made the case that the academy should be insulated from external influences and not subject to criticism from outsiders and that any things said by professors in the public forum should not reflect on them in the academy. Bollinger also chose to point out that the academy and society have been going in different directions since 1980, coincidentally the year Reagan was elected, and how a "realignment" must occur. Many may also know Bollinger for his advocacy of the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action policy.

Pregnant With Irony

Dining on Ramuntos' pizzas and several liters of Pepsi, participants in AGORA's discussion on Obesity in America collectively consumed approximately 35,000 calories. Moderators Kapil Kale and Julie Kim led about 35 students in a rather heated debate over government involvement in containing the spread of obesity, which currently affects 64.5% of American adults. Speakers cited Americans' consumerist tendencies, as well as their unhealthy relationships with food as the main causes of the disease. Though one brave student suggested that citizens be held responsible for their actions, the majority of participants advocated both the tightening of government regulation on the food industry and the establishment of educational programs. Apparently, the ignorant public needs to be alerted of the dangers of consuming massive amounts of pizza and Pepsi, since the government has shirked its responsibility to "maintain the welfare of its people" by ignoring the obesity crisis.

Dartmouth's First Female Student

Joann A. Herman '75, formerly Joe A. Herman, gave an hour-lon on Monday, October 3rd on transgender bias. The speech featured topics ranging from the promotion of unisex bathrooms to the growth of neutral sex housing on America's college campuses. There was laughter when Herman spoke about her friend Melissa, a pilot on American Airlines (which apparently has five transsexual pilots), who sent the wrong signals to a male about her gender identity by refusing a male's offer to lift her bag. However, tears were also shed during the story of an IBM employee whose invention was forgotten when he changed sexes and therefore identities.

Perhaps Herman summed up the hour of not knowing when it was appropriate to laugh when she spoke about transgender marriage, saying: "It's a bit of a change for the spouse." The talk also featured many random statistics, such as that two murders a month stem from transgender issues and two out of five thousand US citizens have a sex change. At the end of the presentation the attendees were broken off into smaller groups to discuss how the Dartmouth community can be made to be more accepting of transgender individuals.

Stay as You Are

Last Wednesday, the Women in Business program sponsored a panel discussion regarding "Invisbility in the Workplace." The Review thought this was good advice, and chose to remain invisible by not attending the event.

A Genteel Revolutionary

With a congenial Peruvian accent, Hernando De Soto discussed the role that western economics can play for the third world in his aptly titled speech, "Liberty and Democracy in the Developing World." De Soto emphasized the need for property rights and business organizations in developing nations as a means to economic renewal. De Soto is renowned for his restructuring of property rights in Peru, where he defeated the terrorist group, "Shining Path." De Soto also shared his disagreement with economist Samuel Huntington, in that he believes that democracy and capitalism are able to be implemented everywhere, not just in the developed world as Huntington has asserted. De Soto, the Rockefeller Center's Class of 1930 fellow, has been named one of the five leading Latin-American innovators of this century by Time Magazine. De Soto finished his talk with the popular sentiment of encouraging students to "keep the long view." He further noted that the West is itself capitalistic enough,but needs to help impress upon the rest of the struggling world the principles of capitalism and democracy that have worked so well for so long.

Post-Modern Johnny Appleseed

Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental activist Wangari Maathai spoke at Rollins Chapel as the first speaker in the Tucker Foundation's Social Justice Lecture Series. In her speech, entitled "Peace, Democracy, and Environmental Justice," Maathai discussed a plethora of tired issues, including Africa as a corrupt continent, climate change, and how Japan is on the cutting edge of environmental technology because they all drive tiny hybrid cars. This serves as little surprise coming from a woman who shares the sentiment of Kanye West that HIV is a "weapon of mass destruction" created by the West to "punish blacks." Much of her speech was reserved for her description of the Green Belt Movement, which gives African women the opportunity to plant trees in different places. Maathai predictably made criticisms of current Washington environmental policies, asking the Bush Administration to "wake up" to the dangers of melting ice.

Her speech was made up largely of simplistic metaphors of buses and hummingbirds and begged the question: will the Nobel Prize committee ever stop using the Prize to criticize American policies?

East Wheelock Still Bastion of Pop Culture

In an e-mail message posted on the East Wheelock Community Blitz Bulletin late last month, Community Director Mike Lord summarized the submissions of essays collected as part of the East Wheelock application process. The question requested that students pen a brief response to the paramount question: "If you could have dinner with one intellectual, cultural, or otherwise "established" person still living, who [sic] would you choose, why, and what would you want to talk about?"

The Dalai Lama, author Toni Morrison, and, inexplicably, J.K. Rowling, led the pack, each the subject of four essays. The lone student who wrote about author Tony Robbins was awarded the complete CD set of Inner Power and a nod of pity. Mike Lord definitively proclaimed that terrorism was indeed winning when two students elected to dine with Osama bin Laden, compared with just one for President Bush. In a testament to the famed aptitude and intellectual curiosity of East Wheelock residents, Tyra Banks, Dan Brown, Ben Folds, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey each received plaudits. And, in a baffling turn of events, two students would have liked to take a meal with General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) and Tupac Shakur (1971-1996), respectively. The one piece on Elvis remains under consideration.

Another applicant, unnecessarily concerned about his qualifications to be a resident of East Wheelock, composed a piece about Tom Luxon, faculty director of the same. The topic of conversation, presumably, was to concern the proximity of the student's lips to Professor Luxon's hindquarters. Another student declared his desire to take a repast with Michael Moore and discuss the "recent unjustified, irresponsible, and pre-emptive changes to the buffet menu at Golden Corral." He stated no preference in regards to dining locale.

Tuck School #1 Again

The Amos Tuck School of Business was recently ranked as the number one business school in the nation by the Wall Street Journal and as the number three business school in the world by the Economist. Tuck retook the number one spot in the Journal's rankings after a three years of being outside the winner's circle. The Wall Street Journal's ranking is done by recruiter evaluations of their experiences with the business school's graduates, which hurt Cambridge Community College's business school, whose graduates were cited as "arrogant" and ranked sixteenth. A ranking formula was used by the Economist that evaluated several factors of the school that included such categories as new career opportunities and personal development. This reflects what has been a long-running trend of excellence for the Tuck School, which is also ranked sixth by US News and World Report.

'09 Diversity Not Coming From Blacks

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has just come out with a recent report on the number of blacks serving as faculty at some of America's top colleges, the number of black students admitted to those colleges and the change in these numbers over the past ten years. Dartmouth actually saw negative growth in the number of blacks admitted into the college over the past decade, with the total dropping 9.4 percent. This was the largest shift in the Ivy League, however it was not as shocking as CalTech's drop of 50 percent (from two to one). Despite this, Dartmouth has the second-largest percentage of black faculty with 4.1 percent, behind Columbia at 6.4 percent. There was a zero percent change of the black faculty at Dartmouth over a 7 year period, though it did drop to as low as 3.2 percent as recently as three years ago. CalTech rounded out the bottom of the list with a total of four black faculty members, a doubling since 1999.

Blogs React to Riner Speech

Student Assembly President Riner's convocation speech has gained national exposure and his story has been discussed in several leading blogs. Inside Higher Education said, "Riner… said that in preparing for the speech, he read the remarks delivered by his last six presidential predecessors and found that while the content varied, they generally 'spoke about who they are from their own perspective,' (two years ago, he said, the assembly president discussed the legalization of marijuana)." The Washington Times ran his speech and prefaced it with, "The student newspaper's editorial board, while noting that the Ivy League college was founded in 1769 as a Christian institution, criticized Mr. Riner." William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say about the issue in an Op-Ed, "An effort was made (I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times and gave a lecture at Dartmouth) to make the sensible distinction: to eliminate anti-Semitic discrimination should not require the rejection of Christian traditions." The National Review had the following to say, "As responses to the speech go, this had at least the merit of being too demotic to match the self-righteousness of all those pompous op-eds and public resignations. Of course, this made it no less embarrassing."

Hudak '07 Discovers Collis Stir-Fry

Food connoisseur and Review President, Kevin Hudak recently discovered a new form of cuisine at Dartmouth College, the Collis stir-fry. After hearing word of it at Tabard during a late-night study session, Mr. Hudak meandered down Mass Row and banked left in front of Thayer dining hall and into Collis. Upon entering Collis, he walked toward the front only to be disappointed that Collis Café was closed, as it only operates during the day.

The next day, Kevin ventured out armed with the goal of trying the mythical stir-fry. Before setting out, Hudak, equipped with a Dartmouth ID, map, compass and binoculars, was quoted as saying, "I feel like Indiana Jones in search of my own Holy Grail." Arriving at Collis he found the Café open and a line leading out the door, much to his surprise. Approaching the counter he was dumbfounded by the choices; observers said Mr. Hudak retreated into a vegetable-like state until awoken by a pan to the face. Choosing a chicken teriyaki, Kevin took his food to the tables outside. After a series of mishaps involving cheap plastic spoons, he began to feast. When he finished the meal there was a look of disappointment on his face; clearly his appetite had not been satisfied. Thankfully for Hudak, Food Court was serving General Tso's Chicken that night.

Ellis '06 Kicks Off New Boot Trend

Sources have confirmed initial reports that Editor in Chief Michael J. Ellis '06 acquired cowboy boots on a recent junket to Colorado with consultation from Stacy Kourlis '06. They reportedly served as essential accoutrements on Ellis's wanderings in the northwest of the state, where he engaged, TR-like, in vigorous activities such as horse-riding, gun-shooting, and bear wrasslin'. Other sources contend that bear wrasslin' was cancelled and replaced by marshmallow burning. Not aware that he has returned to civilization, Ellis has continued sporting the boots on campus, usually in conjunction with unprecedented jeaned-trousers.

Croquet League Fares Better than Football

The Dartmouth Croquet League's Fall pre-season got off to a strong start last Wednesday as a handful of hardy competitors braved slightly brisk post-Labor Day conditions and donned distinctively pre-Labor Day attire to tune up their games in advance of the annual Homecoming Tournament. The contingent was led by league President and, by all counts, reigning singles champion, Daniel Linsalata '07, clad in garish Kelly green chinos. Joining him were unproven veterans Sarah Stern '08 and David Glovsky '08, and rookie enthusiasts Michael Russell '09 and Carol Szurkowski '09, both of whom professed "some knowledge" of the game.

Due in part to a poorly laid out court, the match got off to a slow start. All players showed a bit of rust as the first two south wickets proved stickier than they should have, while questionable choices in footwear caused several badly-executed roquets. Soon, though, Linsalata strung several shots together, getting the black ball out to a commanding leading, and his partner, Szurkowski, quickly followed suit with the yellow. Once beyond the third wicket, Linsalata and Szurkowski were untouchable, cruising easily to victory. Glovsky did his part to carry his team, while his partner, Stern, had trouble working out the kinks in between frequent cigarette breaks. Russell, left to fend for himself, had difficulty with the uneven terrain in front of Baker Library, but nonetheless showed great promise as he held his own. Additional challengers are always welcome as the regular season gets into full swing.

The Week in Review

Article Tools

Related Articles