The Week in Review

Friday, January 20, 2006

Rosenbaum ’63 Murdered in Washington

David Rosenbaum ‘63 died last Sunday after being violently beaten and robbed near his Chevy Chase home in Washington, DC on January 6. Rosenbaum, who was 63 years old, had been an editor and reporter for the New York Times ’ Washington Bureau since 1968. During the course of his career, he served as Chief Congressional Correspondent, Chief Domestic Policy Correspondent, and special projects editor, among other positions. He had also lectured at the College.

Last Sunday night, Washington police arrested Michael Hamlin, 23, and charged him with robbery and murder. Hamlin, a maintenance worker residing in Southeast Washington, had stolen Rosenbaum’s credit cards and used them at a variety of locations in the DC metropolitan area. When police aired a surveillance tape of a man using the stolen credit cards on the local news, Hamlin turned himself into the police, asking “why [is] my face on TV?”

While an undergraduate, Rosenbaum wrote for the Daily Dartmouth, was a brother at Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity, and played squash and tennis.

A Hostile Take-Over?

This Monday, 40 South Main Street, the building that houses The Dartmouth Review ’s offices was flying a light-blue United Nations flag in place of its usual American flag.

East Wheelock Contretemps VII

Poor Mike Lord. The beleaguered East Wheelock Community Director was once again forced to e-mail out to the residential cluster decrying “refridgerator [ sic ] issues.” Apparently Lord has received numerous reports of “EW Residents who have had their food (which had been labeled with their names on it) being taken/eaten from both the Brace and McCulloch fridges.”

In an effort to quell the rash of lawlessness, Lord noted that “if you are taking food that is not yours from the kitchens, this is stealing, and should stop. Just because food is in a public place does not imply a right to eat that food.”

A tragedy of the (Brace) Commons indeed. Lord wrapped up his clarion call by making it clear that he is not foolish enough “to believe that this e-mail will stop people from eating food, but I do want to raise awareness of this issue.”

High-Handed Elves Post Amusing Maxims

Domineering slogans written on bright construction paper appeared in the windows of Novack last week. Their authors chose not to reveal themselves, but the central theme was “I wish I had known that...” Among the more comical signs were: “You DON’T have to go through CORPORATE RECRUITING to be $UCE$$FUL!”; “SURPRISE! The goal of life is not to become a ‘sweet dude’”; “NO MEANS NO THE FIRST TIME”; “I wish I had known its [ sic ] ALLRIGHT [ sic ] to be the only WHITE PERSON in AAM”; “I wish I had asked my girlfriends *which guys* I should go home with”; “Just because you have lots of sex doesn’t mean you’re a slut.” Heh, heh—now ain’t that the truth.

Preysman ’04 Named Mitchell Scholar

Daniel Preysman ’04 has been announced as a winner of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship. Preysman is one of 12 recipients, chosen from among a pool of 236 applicants from 171 colleges, and is the first Dartmouth graduate ever to receive the honor. The scholarship is named for the former US Senator from Maine, George Mitchell, who played a vital role in Northern Ireland’s peace process. While an undergraduate, Preysman was president of the college’s Mock Trial Society, senior editor of the Journal of Law , an intern at the New York Times , and a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He will spend the next year studying journalism at Dublin City College.

Alumni Association to Vote Feb. 12

The Dartmouth Association of Alumni has called a special meeting in Hanover on February 12 to vote on changing the requirements of the alumni constitution on voting procedures for future amendment proposals. Under the current system, alumni must vote in person in Hanover to vote on amendments proposed at any given meeting. However, if the amendment passes, the procedure will be changed to long distance “all-media voting,” eliminating the expense and inconvenience of traveling to Hanover every time an alumnus wishes to vote on an amendment. The Association called the proposed amendment “long overdue” and believes the new system would “provide alumni with a more democratic and transparent mechanism for change”. Voting on other amendments at the February 12 meeting has been postponed, presumably in anticipation of the implementation of the new voting procedures.

Kronos Premiers New Work at Hop

The Grammy Award-winning string group Kronos Quartet performed for a nearly full Spaulding Auditorium on the rainy night of January 14th. Perhaps best known by the Dartmouth community for recording the haunting soundtrack to the film Requiem for a Dream , Kronos is also well connected to Bollywood (India’s Hollywood) through their soundtrack recordings. Kronos opened its performance at Spaulding with some of these strange, but good pieces. John Williams the music is not, but then again nor is it John Williams that Kronos is striving for. Mid-performance Kronos played the familiar Requiem’ theme followed by the ‘world premiere’ of a work commissioned for the Under 30 Project, a joint effort of the Hopkins Center which aims to bring the work of young composers to life.

Unfortunately, the composition by (Dan Visconti, who apparently was chosen among 300 competitors from 35 countries) fell well short of expectations. The fact that Dartmouth partially funded is not encouraging either. The piece did not quite recall anything in particular, but did give the mental image of a cat scratching a metal post. One of the members of Kronos, who was violently slashing away at his instrument, broke several strings and achieved visible smoke. After this low point came intermission, which was the cue for a noticeable but small fraction of audience members to depart, likely scared off by the premiere piece. Unfortunately, they missed the far better second half of the concert. After two solildly-played but not memorable pieces, the quartet played an encore piece from Scandinavia that was the highlight of the performance. After ending on a high note, Kronos stayed around to take questions from the audience and bask in post performance glory.

Liquor Commission Busts KDE Sorority

Early Saturday morning, an undercover New Hampshire Liquor Commission officer reportedly reconnoitered Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority’s party by stationing himself in an unmarked car on Webster Avenue. Though the volume of entrants and their joyous dispositions clearly indicated happy students; the undercover officer did not possess a valid Dartmouth ID and thus could not gain access to the Dionysian frolic. The officer then spotted Safety and Security helping an overly-exuberant student as a result of a Good Samaritan call on KDE’s porch, he saw his opportunity to interject. The officer arrested the drunken student and pressured KDE into shutting down their party.

So, be sure to keep an eye out for a “medium-height, light-skinned black man with a shaved head” who sometimes sits in a parked car Webster Ave. on Friday or Saturday nights. His lurking presence on campus is not to be confused with the white male in his early twenties, 5’9” to 6’0,” of a slender build and dark hair who was spotted prowling about the lower levels of the River Cluster dorms last week.

Southern Calendar 101

Richmond Correspondent Daniel Linsalata ‘07 reports—

The creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday was hotly contested at the time of its proposal, particularly by the several members of the Southern delegations. Little has changed since that time. In the fifteen years since its creation, the firm at which I work has never closed for the holiday. Having been recently acquired by a large, national bank, however, we were technically required to close this past Monday. Nevertheless, fully three-quarters of the employees showed up at the regular starting time. Similarly, the majority of area businesses, particularly those locally-owned, remained open—perhaps to make up for being closed on Lee-Jackson Day, which was widely observed the preceding Friday.

Perhaps most telling, however, were the reactions of local news anchors who reminded viewers of MLK day. On each broadcast I watched (three in all), the anchor dutifully reported that banks, post offices, and state and city government services would be closed for the holiday. To a man, the anchors’ faces each bore an expression that screamed, “...but for the life of me, I don’t know why.”

The Museum of the Confederacy, conveniently located behind the Capitol building, just blocks from my apartment, opened for extended hours from Friday through Monday.

Flexual Healing

Just when you thought the LGBT—that’s the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movement, for those of you keeping score at home—at American universities couldn’t get any more absurd, enter Wesleyan University.

The organization formerly known as the Queer Students Alliance at Wesleyan has decided to change its name to be as inclusive as possible. The student group is now called the LGBTQQFAGIPBDSM... Communities at Wesleyan. That’s short for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderqueer, Intersex, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism.... The society’s name ends in an ellipsis because, as the website notes, “although this acronym may seem to go on indefinitely, such is the spectrum of our diverse communities...and this is only the beginning.” Never fear, though, there’s a variety of names they’ll respond to, since “many people still use queer as an all-encompassing term. Other describe our commnity(ies) [ sic ] as the endless acronym....Whichever you choose for yourself, please be respectful of other’s [ sic ] choices, too.”

Latino Alumni Group Recognized by College

The Dartmouth Association of Latino Alumni (DALA) received formal recognition last week as an affiliated group of Dartmouth College by the Office of Alumni Relations. Affiliated groups are defined as sub-groups of the Dartmouth Association of Alumni that are made up of 100 or more members, and “share a common bond as self-identified, historically under-represented alumni.”

DALA joins the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association (BADA), Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Alumni/ae Association (D-GALA), Dartmouth Asian-Pacific American Alumni Association (DAPAAA), and the Native American Alumni Association of Dartmouth. Perhaps next will come the creation of a Dartmouth Polish-American Alumni Association (DPAAA), a Dartmouth Irish Roman Catholic Alumni Association (DIRCAA), Association of Dartmouth Alumni from South of the Mason-Dixon Line (ADAFSTMDL), and, for post-affirmative action alumni, the Dartmouth White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Alumni Association (DWASPAA).

Irony Alert

This past week, Review editors Michael J. Ellis and Scott Glabe were parodied in Paul Heintz ’06’s Daily Dartmouth comic “Guy and Fellow” as modern-day versions of the 1970s group Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

CAP recently gained notoriety during the confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito, when it was derided as a conservative group hostile to women and minorities. Heintz probably didn’t realize, however, that former Review editors Dinesh D’Souza ’83 and Laura Ingraham ’85 edited CAP’s magazine after their time at Dartmouth.

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