The Week in Review

Friday, March 3, 2006

The Plot to Kill Tubestock

The Review has learned that the efforts of the College and several governments in Vermont and New Hampshire will almost certainly bring an end to Tubestock, an annual tradition in which Dartmouth sophomores raft down the Connecticut River. This has been controversial previously because alcohol is usually involved.

In the past, an event like Tubestock has been technically illegal. However, according to state law, the organizers are held accountable (not the participants), and, technically, no one organized Tubestock. In the eyes of the law, students spontaneously congregated. The idea is to introduce a law in the New Hampshire state legislature that would make participants legally accountable. Students would be videotaped, and the College has agreed to help identify participants, who could then be arrested. Another option is to require a permit. The event could take place in theory if the government grants a permit; however, the permit will require that the event be insured, and Hank James, the College risk manager, thinks no one will insure the event, hence denying the students a permit and killing Tubestock.

Julia Griffin, town manager of Hanover, New Hampshire wrote the following document:

Problem Statement � Tubestock is a dangerous event, mixing large numbers of participants and "rafts" with of age and underage alcohol consumption. It puts Dartmouth students, Dartmouth itself, the State of New Hampshire, the Town of Norwich and the Town of Hanover at substantial risk. Our concern is with protecting the safety of participants and we do not feel we can do so effectively. As such, we want to take steps to abolish the event or to so constrain the event that it is substantially changed, involving no alcohol, no rafts or floating objects of any kind, and that any party with jurisdiction is completely absolved of any liability.

Background� Tubestock falls under the jurisdiction of four different legal entities. The State of New Hampshire has jurisdiction within the Connecticut River and enforcement is taken by the Marine Patrol. The Town of Norwich has jurisdiction on the Norwich side; the Town of Hanover has jurisdiction on the Hanover side. Dartmouth College owns the property abutting the river at the current location, which also places them in both the liability chain and enables them to prevent launching of the event from the Hanover side.

Dartmouth has declined to have any responsibility for the event given the danger it poses and the illegal alcohol consumption that typically happens during the event.

The State of New Hampshire requires that an event like Tubestock be permitted. According to the Marine Patrol, the event has not received a permit and so, legally, the event sponsors are in violation of state law. Dartmouth students have specifically avoided obtaining permits because no single individual or group wants the responsibility for being the permittee.

Alternative Solutions:

1. State law can be modified during this legislative session to make it illegal to "participate" in a non-permitted event on a State waterway. Currently only the responsible event organizers or sponsors can be arrested for participating in a non-permitted event; the participants cannot be arrested. Marine Patrol has not been able to arrest any individuals because Dartmouth students have refused to obtain a permit. By modifying the law, every participant could be arrested, also resulting in implantation of academic sanctions by Dartmouth. Under this scenario, if the event were to proceed, law enforcement authorities would videotape and photograph the event and then seek Dartmouth's assistance in identifying all of the participants, rather than attempting to prevent entry into the river for the event itself. Collectively, the three enforcement agencies involved simply do not have the manpower required to effectively arrest everyone at the scene, nor do they feel this is a safe approach to policing the event.

2. a. Dartmouth student sponsors will be required to obtain a permit for the event. The Towns of Hanover and Norwich would require a permit, as would the State of New Hampshire. The permits will identify the conditions outlined below.

b. Each entity would require the event sponsor to provide an independent certificate of insurance, naming the Towns and/or State of New Hampshire as an additional insured in the amount of $2,000,000. We would suspect that Dartmouth would do the same to protect the College in the event they were sued by the family of a Dartmouth students who might be injured or killed during the event. It is highly unlikely that any insurance agency will issue a certificate for such an event given the combination of factors which make the event dangerous.

c. In addition, the Dartmouth students will be required to pay all of the expense related to the presence of the Marine Patrol, Town of Norwich and Town of Hanover Police Department personnel. The combination of overtime for event coverage and the cost of transporting and/or renting specialized equipment (boats) will likely result in a bill totaling several thousand dollars.

d. Checkpoints will be set up on both sides of the Connecticut River and down and up-river of the event. No participants will be allowed to enter the area without either all participants presenting acceptable ID to prove they are of-age or submitting to searches to eliminate the presence of alcohol.

e. All costs of clean-up, including any removal of debris such as makeshift rafts, will be paid for by the participants, requiring the up-front deposit of several thousand dollars as security against the clean-up expenses.

f. In the event an accidental death occurs as a result of the event, all State Marine Patrol costs associated with the recovery of a body will be assessed against the event permittee(s).

Quiet, Boy

Monday’s Daily Dartmouth contained an advertisement for Black Solidarity Day, to be held on February 28th. Realizing that the civil rights movement ended a generation ago, the event organizers wisely decided to include every marginal group “based on race, religion, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, able-ism, or gender.” This all-encompassing protest will be silent, but will ironically culminate in “an afternoon of spoken word, dance, and song.” Black Solidarity Day is part of a long tradition of similar events at Dartmouth, events that perhaps one day will finally end the white hegemony on campus and end the oppression of groups such as the Taiwanese Culture Association. At least this protest is silent; nobody wants to talk to these hate-mongers anyway.

Try Losing the First ‘R’

Last Friday, the Dartmouth sororities organized a “night of solidarity” in which women were order to boycott the fraternities. The six on-campus sororities opened their doors and hosted several parties in an attempt to dominate the social scene for one night. Many women flocked to the sororities in an effort to lessen the image of the male-dominated night life at Dartmouth.

However, those women who crossed the proverbial picket line and caved to the allure of the frats had the last laugh. Each traitor was reported to have gone home with a frat brother who would normally have been “out of her league.”

Said one woman, “I wish every Friday night was Frat Free Friday...not because I hate frats. I just hate female competition.”

Live Smoke-Free or Die

The New Hampshire legislature is in the process of filing a report regarding whether smoking will be banned in restaurants, bars, and cocktail lounges starting next year. All of the New England states surrounding the Granite State have banned smoking in a fashion similar to the proposed bill.

However, the residents of New Hampshire are evenly divided on the issue. Those in favor of the health benefits of a smoke-free environment are pitted against those who are concerned about the potential economic downturn a ban could bring to the largely tourism-based New Hampshire economy.

The large libertarian presence in New Hampshire also feels threatened by the creation of a “nanny state” with laws that place restrictions on human liberty. As one anti-smoking ban advocate said, this law is an instance of regulations being “stuffed down people’s throats.”

Dartmouth’s Saddest

Editors’ Note: The following is an article that appeared in the March 5, 1934 issue of TIME magazine. We reprint it as an homage to those who died in the single most deadly incident in the College’s history just over 72 years ago. Theta Chi has since been rechristened Alpha Theta, which is now a co-ed fraternity. However, the house preserves the memory of their fallen brethren in a plaque in the basement, the stairs to which, the only part of the 1934 house still extant, are said to be haunted.

Away from snow-buried Hanover, N. H. on week-end jaunts last week went eight Dartmouth members of Theta Chi. Nine were left behind in the big, white fraternity house. Uneventful as ever was their Saturday night of bridge, radio, talk. Soon after midnight two friends who had dropped in went home. One by one the students drifted upstairs to bed.

In the night one of them heard a dull boom from below. He knew what that meant. Someone had banked the furnace fire too heavily and a puff of exploding coal gas had blown open the door. Sleepily he stumbled down cellar, slammed the door shut, went back to bed. He did not notice that a part of the chimney pipe had also been blown out.

Merton Little, the fraternity’s janitor for ten years, discovered the broken pipe when he tramped in at 6:30 a. m. to stir the fire. Muttering angrily, he picked up the pieces, fitted them back in place. He had told the fraternity’s Graduate Body, owners of the house, that the furnace was worn out and ought to be replaced. But no one listened to a janitor. Still grumbling, he climbed up to the sleeping rooms on the second and third floors. Finding the boys snug in their beds, he pushed down a few barely-opened windows, went home.

At 1:30 that afternoon Janitor Little returned to do a little cleaning. The house was still quiet. He supposed the boys had gone out to lunch. But when he returned at 4:30 to make beds, he found the students still lying as he had left them in the morning. He looked close, saw that one of them was not breathing, that his face was strangely pink. He shouted, shook the boy’s shoulder. There was no answer. Heart thumping, he leaped from room to room. Each boy lay pink and still.

That night the eight Theta Chis who had been away returned to find a policeman barring their door. Sickening as a blow from his nightstick was the news he had to tell. All over the campus telephones were ringing. Students hurried from house to house. Soon all Dartmouth knew that, flowing from the broken furnace pipe, carbon monoxide gas had seeped through the Theta Chi house without sound or smell, brought Death to all nine sleepers.

Students flocked to Hanover’s telegraph office, reading the list of the dead. They recognized most names. William F. Fullerton, 20, had been an editor of the Daily Dartmouth . Americo De Masi, 20, had been college fencing champion. Edward N. Wentworth Jr., 21, had been on the soccer squad. Harold D. Watson, 21, had sung in the glee club. So it went down the list: Edward and Alfred Moldenke, 21 and 20, only sons of a Manhattan pastor; William M. Smith Jr., 21; Wilmot H. Schooley, 20; John J. Griffin, 19.

Next day a raging blizzard whipped Dartmouth’s flags flying at half-mast for the saddest day in its 164 years. Grave-faced students plodded to their classes. They talked little. Asked for a press statement, President Ernest Martin Hopkins replied. “There is nothing that can be said that can be of any comfort to anyone.”

Linsalata ’07 Selected As Editor in Chief

At its winter meeting, The Dartmouth Review ’s Board of Directors selected Dan Linsalata ’07 as the paper’s next Editor in Chief. Mr. Linsalata, a junior from Ohio, has been active with the Review since his freshman year and will succeed Michael Ellis ’06. This issue, Mr. Ellis’s 17th, is the last of his tenure. Kevin Hudak ’07, the incumbent present, was re-elected to that post by the board. However, Thaddeus Olchowski ‘08 will serve as acting president during the spring term, during which time Mr. Hudak will be studying in Washington, DC on the government department Foreign Study Program (yes, DC always has struck us as a foreign nation). Congratulations are also in order for Review founder Gordon Haff Th ‘81 (see below), who rejoined the board, and James Panero ‘98, who presided over his first meeting as chairman. Chairman Emeritus Jeffrey Hart ‘51, who is also the paper’s faculty adviser will remain on the board.

The Last Word ’Revisited

Editor’s Note: In honor of Gordon Haff’s rejoining of the Review’s board, the editors have rechristened “The Last Word” as “Gordon Haff’s Last Word” (a variation on the long-running “Last Word by Gordon Haff”). As part of TDR 25, we are reprinting his July 1985 recollections on TDR’s founding, taken from his website and accessible at http://home.comcast.net/~ghaff/lword/intro.html:

The Dartmouth Review ’s first issue, published for commencement in 1980, contained a back-page quotations column called the last word. In the over five years since that first issue, the Review has gained nationwide notoriety as the vanguard of a wave of campus conservative newspapers. It has been featured in Time , Newsweek , and the New York Times . It has been sued by liberal Dartmouth faculty members. Throughout this entire period, the last word has remained as a regular feature, the most widely-read page on the Dartmouth College campus. This book is based on those five years of columns, although it incorporates my Conservative Digest columns and other material as well.

The Dartmouth Review grew out of a series of incidents involving a board of trustees election and the editor of The Dartmouth (the college daily) in the Spring of 1980. Long dissatisfied with the liberal trend which eliminated many old traditions and diluted the educational vigor of their college, a group of dissident alumni decided to run their own trustee candidate, John Steel, against the Alumni Council’s official candidate.

Unlike many schools, Dartmouth College maintains a relatively small board of trustees of only fourteen members. (A historical note: it was an attempt to pad the board of trustees which brought on the famous Dartmouth College case with Daniel Webster arguing for the college, “It is a small college, but there are those of us who love it.”) As such, the election of a single trustee can have a much greater effect than at most schools. The dissident group evoked a rarely used clause in the college’s charter permitting the alumni to hold an election for certain trustee seats upon the submittal of a petition.

The college and its president, John Kemeny, fought the alternative candidate by illegally opening ballots and generally trying to discredit the opposition. Meanwhile, Greg Fossedal, the editor of the college daily, was under heavy fire for his support of Steel. As editor, he refused to allow an editorial attacking Steel to be run in his paper. To appease the opposition, he instead permitted his other editors to print an editorial note in the paper’s fortnightly magazine which had its own editor.

The following week Fossedal wrote a column, Stainless Steel, supporting Steel’s candidacy. The editorial page editor, Matt Joiner, refused to run the column. Fossedal fired Joiner and in retaliation the paper’s publisher fired Fossedal. Many of the top editors of The Dartmouth resigned in protest and The Dartmouth Review was founded.

The staff which left The Dartmouth included the advertising manager (Rachel Kenzie), two news editors (Dinesh D’Souza and Keeney Jones), the national prize-winning cartoonist (Steve Kelly), and other staffers including myself, Wendy Stone, and Shawn Bolan. Jeffrey Hart, an English professor at the college and a National Review editor, and his son, Ben were also among those involved with the paper at the beginning.

By this time, two weeks remained until commencement, and the date which was set before the first issue. I spent two days drawing up a design while other staffers worked on writing articles and obtaining advertising. The design was a mix of the designs of MIT newpapers I had worked on: The Tech, thursday, and the MIT/Wellesley Review. One element of the design was identical to the back page of thursday, a quotes column called the last word.

When I went to MIT in the late seventies, thursday was on its way out, and it went out of business permanently during my senior year. It had been founded during the ferment of the late sixties in response to the stuffiness and the, by the standards of the time, conservativism of the mainstream paper, The Tech. thursday was known on the MIT campus during the late seventies for personal attacks which bordered on the libelous and perhaps most of all for its sex survey in which two female staffers rated twenty or so of their partners. Their office, cluttered with marijuana pariphenalia, contrasted sharply with The Tech’s $50,000 typesetting system and banks of old Royal manual typewriters. They represented one of the last of a dying breed, the college radical newspaper, of which The Berkeley Barb is probably the best-known example. Through all this, the best-read page on the MIT campus, better read evn than The Tech’s front page, was thursday’s the last word.

The quotations included in the last word are not solely political. I have always tried to keep the column more humorous than profound. Nevertheless, my personal beliefs have shaped the content of the column. I make no excuse for the recurrence of such themes as the superiority of strength to weakness, of reason to superstition, of the exceptional to the ordinary.

The Week in Review

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