The Week in Review

Friday, May 5, 2006

Better than Oprah

This year, Elie Wiesel will see off the senior class as the commencement speaker at graduation. Professor Wiesel is a renowned professor of Religion and Philosophy, his own philosophy being perhaps shaped by his grave childhood: at 15, Professor Wiesel and his family were displaced from their home in Romania to a concentration camp. Professor Wiesel was sadly the only member of his family to survive the grim and dehumanizing Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, an experience he documents by way of memoir in his “Night.”

To be sure, Weisel doesn’t have the cash-value of a Kofi Annon, Hillary Clinton, or Ali G, but the College should be proud to welcome him to campus for commencement, especially when the alternative was Madame Oprah Winfrey, the epitome of superficial compassion.

DEP Survives

Thanks to the continued generosity of its founder, Joe Asch ‘79, the Departmental Editing Program will no longer be dismantled at the end of this academic year. As discussed in The Dartmouth Review on 1/20/06, the DEP is perpetually threatened by a lack of College funding. Asch, who has already contributed $500,000 to the program, recently announced that he would bear the financial burden of the program for yet another year. The program is acclaimed by professors in the sponsored Religion, Art History, and Mathematics departments, as well as by students whose testimony of academic improvement convinced Asch of its effectiveness. According to Asch, the Art History editor, Iona McAulay, has been so successful at her job that the College’s Scholarship Advising Office has been using her to help with students’ Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright and Mitchell applications. Although Associate Dean of Humanities Lenore Grenoble has also expressed support for the program, Dean of Faculty Carol Folt views it as financially unsustainable and thus has not taken measures to adopt it as an official facet of the Dartmouth curriculum.

East Wheelock: Thin Walls, Loud Moans

As revealed last week in a blitz from East Wheelock Community Director Michael Lord, EW residents do, in fact, have sex—loud sex at that. Lord contacted his residents in response to a complaint that loud sexual activity was disrupting study hours in this idyllic community. The complaint noted the thin walls between rooms, suggesting young lovers resort to daylight hours or different buildings for their romantic encounters. Russell Sage and the Fayerweathers, in particular, were recommended as alternative love dens because of their thick, concrete walls.

Dean Larimore Steps Down

The sun shined on Hanover during a rainy week, as Dean of the College James Larimore resigned from his post this week as Dartmouth’s dean for seven years, citing family reasons. James Larimore, brother of current Assistant Dean of First-Year Students Colleen Larimore, will fill the vacancy in the Dean of the Students position at Swarthmore College, where he will enjoy a campus without football.

We here at the Review send the man of Japanese and Cherokee decent both a hearty sayonara and do-na-da-go-hv-i.

Farid Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Renowned computer science professor, Hany Farid, was among the 187 scientists, artists, and scholars to be awarded prestigious Guggenheim fellowships in 2006. With this award, Farid will split $7,500,000 with researchers performing such invaluable tasks as studying the imaginary Wild Wests in contemporary Europe, the cultural history of tap dancing in America since 1900, white women of the Harlem Renaissance, and of course, the highly anticipated research concerning Usama ibn Munquidh’s memoirs and the Muslims in the age of the Crusades. Luckily for Dartmouth, Farid’s research concerning digital tampering is actually useful and has done a variety of things including help catch international terrorists. Less importantly, Farid has studied the digital tampering of photographs of celebrities like Brad Pitt, though he doesn’t understand why, “Because Brad always looks so fabulous!” Farid, who is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Computer Science Department, and who also holds a joint appointment in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, will be taking the next year off from teaching to continue his research in California.

Portman ‘78 Tapped for OMB, Dragon

On April 18th, President Bush selected Rob Portman ‘78 as the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. President Bush stated “Rob’s a man of deep integrity. He knows the priorities of my administration. He can get things done, and the Senate should confirm him promptly as director of the Office of Management and Budget.” Mr. Portman served Ohio in Congress for 12 years before he left his post in April of 2005 when called upon by President Bush to serve as trade representative last April.

With Liberty and Brownies for...Some

In a truly ironic movement this April 25th, women across campus baked for National Equal Pay Day. Organizers rallied support for the otherwise lackluster event by citing dubious statistics; according to Danielle Strollo ‘07 women earn only 77 cents to the male dollar and Dartmouth female professors earn 22% less than male professors. In a gesture of petty short-sightedness, Strollo charged white males $1 for the baked goods, while white females paid $0.77, black women paid $0.68, and Hispanic women paid $0.57.

Such immaturity on the part of these feminists makes one reflect on a version of the pithy statement jocularly posed by Keeney Jones, Review founder: the question is not whether trifling feminists should be educated at Dartmouth, the question is whether trifling feminists should be educated at all.

Hanging onto Racism

Last week, some students had the esteemed privilege (or were required to attend) this year’s James Orr Memorial Lecture given by Dr. James Cone, professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The title of this oration was, “Strange Fruit, the Cross and the Lynching Tree.”

Dr. Cone’s often scattered ideas culminated in his main point of the lecture: the cross is simply a duplicitous manifestation of the lynching tree. Dr. Cone argued that no one had a deeper understanding of the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross than African Americans of this country. Standout points included, “Every time a black man is denied a job in this country, he is covertly being lynched.” Dr. Cone also asserted that, “the government’s disregard for the black Katrina victims is another covert example of lynching.” Another instance of covert lynching, of course. Dr. Cone maintains that our nation is still one of white supremacy. He summarized these assertions with the fact that, “America continues the crucifixion of the black man even today.”

For someone so adamant about the unfair treatment of African Americans in the United States, Dr. Cone offered no reasonable means alleviate the situation. Rather than lauding the monumental steps that have taken place in the last century, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmative action policies, and greater equity in the work place, Dr. Cone blamed the white population’s mindset for the continued oppression of African Americans in this country. Unconcerned with reconciling the differences between the races, Cone was content to sling outrageous claims, that, when objected to by a white citizen, would only endear cries of naivety, racism and misunderstanding (and, perhaps, lynching). Dr. Cone used religion as the backdrop for his societal berating of American culture.

While no one denies that racism still lingers in many portions of the population, categorizing everyone as white supremacists is not an effective way to go about the problem.

Honor, Courage, Croquet

Saturday, at one in the afternoon, the United States Naval Academy met St. John’s for the 24th annual Annapolis Bowl. This fierce competition pits the Midshipmen against the Johnnies in the one sport that truly captures the essence of the USNA: croquet. This year, Navy fell to St. John’s by a disappointing five games to none. It’s possible the Midshipmen lost their composure due to the Johnnies’ uniforms, which consisted of chinos and red shirts sporting the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union.

This grudge match began when the USNA commandant, with full confidence in his Mids’, challenged a St. John’s freshman to find a sport the Johnnies could beat the midshipmen in. The Johnnies found croquet, and proceeded to beat the midshipmen 19 times in 24 years.

Although Navy lost this year, their team shows marked improvements from previous years. In fact, the team is already training hard in anticipation of a win next year. One Midshipman (who wished to remain unnamed do to the highly sensitive nature of the subject) said, “I get a generous swelling of pride whenever I think of the hard work of my fellow seamen.”

Dartmouth, however, lacks a croquet rivalry as fierce as the Annapolis Bowl. This is most likely because no college wishes to challenge Indian supremacy in croquet.

Make Your Own Connections

39.5% of students admitted to the Class of 2010 are students of color, the highest percentage thus far. Given these figures, it is projected that the Class of 2010 will be the most diverse ever. Furstenberg admits that the challenge now is convincing this group of “interesting people who have done a lot of interesting things” to attend the college. Events planned over Dimensions weekend aim to achieve this goal.

Over the course of April 20-22—also known as Dimensions weekend, a time when prospective students are invited to experience Dartmouth’s campus and activities—two fraternities were vandalized or robbed. An email sent out from a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa to the presidents of many sororities and fraternities expressed concern over several acts of vandalisms that occurred during the night of their dance party, which was open to prospective students. Tri-Kap was “trashed” around 6 A.M. Saturday morning. Lights were ‘ripped out,” furniture was “destroyed,” and “crap [was] thrown all over the house.” Sigma Phi Epsilon also reported a large number of DVDs, including those contained in a large CD case, to have been stolen sometime over Friday night or early Saturday morning.

Funding the Obvious Conclusions

Most readers of this publication can empathize with the problem of reduced motor skills that alcohol can create. We feel for the girl who tripped walking across the Green, the guy who mistook a second floor window for a ground floor window, or that dude who was left on a fraternity couch with a broken ankle and a broken heart; but researches at Dartmouth have taken it upon themselves to move beyond empathy towards a better understanding of alcohol’s effects on the human brain. John D. Van Horn, a research associate professor, Melana Yanos ’04, Paul Schmidt ’03 and Scott Grafton, the John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professorship in the Social Sciences used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain regions suppressed by alcohol. Eight people, ages 21-25, were tasked with using a joystick both sober and a fraction beneath the legal BAC level. The study is being hailed as one of the first to directly demonstrate alcohol’s effects on the brain.

Buzzflood Where It’s Needed

Unbeknownst to many in the Ivy League, there is actually a “peer” institution somewhere in upstate New York that goes by the name of Cornell. Never heard of it? Neither have we. That’s why a bunch of lame people at Cornell have formed a committee to improve Cornell’s image. This step is necessary since Cornell has recently languished at the bottom of the Ivy League, along with similarly crappy institutions such as Brown, which also doubles as a crappy color.

Yet their approach reveals deeper problems at the institution. They are trying to improve Cornell’s image by clever branding of T-shirts and the like. Instead of improving the quality of education, life, or the suicide rate at the school, they are improving the junk you can buy at the gift shop; not that anyone wants to be caught wearing red or crimson, or brown for that matter. Seriously, nicer t-shirts aren’t going to change the fact that Cornell has state schools, an unreasonably large undergraduate student body, or the aforementioned high suicide rate. Though according to the Princeton Review’s stupid lists of stupid things that are in no way accurate or remotely not stupid, they have better food than Dartmouth. For shame, Princeton Review, for shame.

The goal of this committee is to improve Cornell’s position in another list, that of U.S. News and World Report. It seems that the perverse mentality of Dartmouth’s infamous BuzzFlood has infiltrated Cornell. Who cares about lists? Here’s a list: the stupidest things appearing in this box: 1. BuzzFlood, 2. Cornell’s stupid image committee, 3. two colons in one sentence.

Maybe rather than forming an image committee, the disgruntled Cornell whackos should form a Committee of Public Safety. This would accomplish two things: it might stop people from jumping into crevices or whatever it is they do and also weed out the pseudo — BuzzFlood operatives and their mind control devices with which they are clearly corrupting Cornell. For shame, BuzzFlood, for shame.

SEC Embarasses Self, College

On Wednesday, April 26th, the eight senior Class Marshals, who assume honorary roles during commencement, were announced, with the ninth position occupied by the senior class president. Conveniently, five of these marshals were members of the same body who appoints those class marshals-that’s right, the Senior Executive Committee.

Briefly reviewing the selection process by which members of the SEC itself are chosen may shed light on their cagey misconduct with respect to the Class Marshal appointments.

Twenty members of the class of 2006 make up the SEC; 12 are elected by the senior class, while 8 are appointed by the administration to “ensure diversity of representation on the committee”—which has come to mean a mishmash of self-victimized, unelected special interest groups making up nearly half of the committee, rather than a true medley of thinkers. This, of course, is to ensure that the administration can maintain a tenacious hold on the loyal sons of Dartmouth, and the future of the College; re-running the election three times is suspicious, to put it mildly.

In any case, the dubiousness surrounding the SEC elections pales in comparison to the atrocious manner by which the Class Marshals was selected. Forty seniors were nominated to lead the senior class through graduation; eleven of those forty are members of the SEC. So let’s do the math, a group who represents one quarter of the nominated seniors is awarded with over one-half of the positions to which they were being nominated. Furthermore, athletes and Greeks, two major segments which define the Dartmouth experience, are proportionally underrepresented at the expense of the same SEC members and other tokenistic ‘representatives.’ In the wake of controversial election, the SEC unquestionably missed an opportunity to reestablish its own credibility as a body of leaders who are truly representatives of their classmates; instead, they made a mockery of their body and its selection process. As Alexander Lawrence ‘06 wrote to the Daily D, “Commencement is a celebration of the achievement of all the members of our class, not an apotheosis of a select few.”

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