The Week in Review

Thursday, May 18, 2006

NH Restricts Voting to…Real Residents

The Democratic Party may have to find new ways to manipulate the vote in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire state legislature passed House Bill 1566 which stipulates that one cannot be a New Hampshire voter if he or she has a car registered in another state or has a driver’s license in another state. Also, if a person becomes a resident of New Hampshire, he or she must register his or her car and obtain a driver’s license within forty days.

While various Dartmouth College publications have attempted to paint this bill as a malicious attempt to limit the left-leaning college vote, the bill’s effect is to put a halt to “voter shopping,” and to increase state revenue by forcing New Hampshire voters with two residencies to register their cars with and obtain a driver’s license from the New Hampshire Department of Motor Vehicles. While the bill clarifies the prior vague definition of “resident,” the bill also requires people who are transient voters (mainly college students, retirees, and second home owners) to choose a state in which to claim a domicile, instead of having the unfair advantage of choosing which state to vote in based upon a whim, or on where they believe their vote will “count more.”

As one might expect, the bill was opposed by leading New Hampshire Democrats who want leftist college students to vote in New Hampshire, a perennial swing-state. The New Hampshire Democrats claim that this bill is an attempt to “suppress the vote” even though these transitional voters can (and should) vote in their home state.

No One Likes a Tomby

Since 1986, it has been rumored that the Skull and Bones Senior Society at Yale University currently possesses the skull of Geronimo, the infamous Apache warrior. This rumor, based on an anonymous letter from someone who claimed to be a Bonesman, was sent to the former chair of the San Carlos Apache Tribe when he expressed a desire to have Geronimo’s remains relocated to Arizona. Until now, no method of verifying this rumor existed. However, a new piece of the puzzle has emerged.

A 1918 letter from one Bonesman to another was recently discovered in Yale’s library. The letter announced that a new member of the society dug up the skull, femur, and saddle horn of Geronimo from his grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and that they are all safely inside their tomb back in New Haven. Although this letter is not undeniable proof that the body the men exhumed was in fact Geronimo, it does show that the rumor was not hatched in 1986 by the anonymous source. The gravediggers may well have believed that the body they dug up was Geronimo’s, but historians claim that the actual site of the Apache warrior’s body was unknown at the time and it is certainly possible that the bones belong to another man.

Efforts by interested Dartmouth organizations to recover the remains, while intoxicating, have thus far proved futile.

It’s Okay, I Already Know How to Do That

A Review staffer had hoped to attend a lecture last week put on by the Center for Women and Gender entitled “The Mechanics of Female Pleasure”. The selfless chap showed up with pen and pad, hoping to learn a thing or two about pleasing the fairer sex. To his disappointment (and to that of the five others in the audience) no speaker showed up, and they all wandered off having been deprived of such an opportunity to learn about the pleasures of female mechanics, or some such thing.

Aliens to Land at Harvard

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has entered the debate over illegal immigration. On May 8, the city council passed a resolution reaffirming its status as a Sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, originally designated in a resolution dated April 8, 1985. The current resolution lashes out against a bill passed by the House and under consideration by the Senate that would increase border security and crack down on and criminalize illegal immigration, including stiff penalties for anyone knowingly aiding illegal aliens. The Cambridge resolution also rejects guest worker programs on the grounds that they “would create a second-class citizenry without basic rights…vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers.”

Though Cambridge’s councilors believe that the Congressional bill is full of “counterproductive, misguided measures,” they do not offer any concrete solutions. Two of their points are relatively specific: opportunities to acquire legal permanent residency status and expedition of family visas. The other two are mere unoriginal fluff: “Visionary program for future migration flows that respects the rights of immigrants as workers and as human beings,” and integration of immigrants into American society. Here the resolution takes one from the playbook of Dartmouth protestors, appealing to the ideal of immigration to cover the decidedly unappealing illegal aspects of the problem at hand. These enlightened suggestions do nothing to further the debate.

Unsurprisingly, the resolution is also full of the kind of rhetoric that has become standard for the pro-illegal immigrant forces, which serves only to obscure the issue. For example, the Cambridge demagogues cite “adverse emotional and psychological effects,” fault public discourse for taking “on a tone that ranges from irrational to racist,” and call the current situation “a backdrop of fear, repression and intimidation.” But the world is certainly a better place now that Cambridge officially “affirms the basic human rights and dignity and every human being.” (The “and” in “and every human being” should presumably read “of,” a mistake that highlights the lack of instruction in basic grammar available in Cambridge).

In a final round of creative wordplay, Cambridge has taken upon itself the duty of changing the words “illegal” and “aliens” to “undocumented” and “immigrant,” respectively.

The resolution laments that “current US immigration policy does not reflect our standards of what is just, humane and moral.” In Cambridge, defying the law is just, hiding illegals from the authorities is humane, and criticizing without offering alternatives is moral. No individual or group can profess to have the solution to this complex problem. It requires debate that is open and informed. Alas, this is apparently impossible on the Charles.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa

Earlier this week the Italian Department announced that due to a shortage of students and professors, the Fall Rome LSA will be cancelled. With this news, the seven students planning to attend this trip are forced to change their D-plans and will have to attend the program at another time. Some students are left feeling lost after this crushing news and will now have to alter their entire year’s plans and start from scratch only three days before room draw.

Other students had different reactions. For instance, a certain student resorted to criticizing the College’s respected language departments and the pride it puts on its off-campus programs, stating that the Italian Department has not given the displaced students enough options, forcing them to fend for themselves.

The cancelled trip is not the only problem the Italian Department is having. The department usually has five tenured professors, but as of July, it will only have three. The Italian Department’s severe lack of professors leaves students with large class sizes and the possibility of future program cancellations.

This Just In, from Salem

The Duke lacrosse scandal continues as Duke co-captain and Bethesda, Maryland native Dave Evans was charged with first-degree forcible rape, sexual offense and kidnapping in a case that has continued for months with little substance other than inflamed racial tensions and damaged lives. The charge comes a month after Evans’s fellow team members, 20-year-old Reade Seligmann and 19-year-old Collin Finnerty, turned themselves in for the same charges. Evans plead his innocence outside the Durham County magistrate’s office, as a seemingly futile case continues amongst intervention by such credible groups as the Black Panthers and the Rev. Al Sharpton. As the case continues, little emphasis has been placed on the DNA evidence that has essentially exonerated the accused, or the past history of rape allegations and the questionability of the accuser’s mental state. Nevertheless, the case still continues and the fate of the lacrosse players will certainly be watched by many in the coming months.

The Professors Respond to Horowitz

David Horowitz’s The Professors: 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America has faced its worst enemy in a publication from Free Exchange on Campus: fact checking. They show Horowitz is guilty of inaccuracies ranging from quotes taken out of context to a list of only a 100 professors instead of the alleged 101 (a mistake so glaring this newspaper did not think to count them). Though the Review hates to join “the wolfpack” in attacking Horowitz’s poorly cited screed, sometimes a follow-up is too appropriate to not publish.

“Facts Count,” Free Exchange on Campus publications, researched Horowitz’s claims and The Professors appears more and more like wishful thinking than factual reporting. Most importantly, for over half of the professors in his book, Horowitz provides no in-class critiques, but bases his entire criticism on articles and actions the professors took outside of their classroom. The threat of the academics seems to fall away when it appears that half of the “most dangerous” of their ilk can manage to separate their professional teaching from their extracurricular activities. As for the student complaints, Horowitz does manage to find a baker’s dozen of testimonials criticizing professors from such unimpeachable sources as RateMyProfessors.com. The folks over at Free Exchange on Campus even went so far as to interview professors who are on Horowitz’s list and allowed them a chance to respond to the allegations against them, and while these should be taken with a grain of salt, they provide a noteworthy refutation of the bulk of Horowitz’s work.

These tactics are no surprise from the likes of Maureen Dowd or other polemicists who often sensationalize the mundane, but they are unworthy of a conservative disposition that is characterized by sobriety in thought and action.

You Want to Stick that WHERE?

In response to a recent study revealing that college freshman are 70 percent more likely to be infected with Chlamydia than their older peers, student health centers at colleges across the nation have been urged to increase screening for this sexually transmitted infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that sponsored the study especially encourages sexually active young women to be routinely tested for Chlamydia since untreated it can cause ectopic pregnancies and infertility. Chlamydia is asymptomatic in 80 percent of women and 50 percent of men, making an epidemic a potentially serious concern given high-risk sexual behavior at college. Future projects aim at determining whether the majority of freshmen contract Chlamydia in college or are infected in high school which would require the educational outreach to be extended to high schoolers in addition to college students.

The suggested policy change brought tears to the eyes of any college student who has previously endured a Chlamydia test.

Can You Repeat That, Please?

The faculty of Gallaudet University, the nation’s only chartered liberal arts college for the deaf, recently threatened a vote of “no confidence” for the newly appointed president, Jane K. Fernandes by virtue of her, essentially, not being deaf enough. Born deaf, Fernandes didn’t learn how to speak (or rather motion?) sign language until she was twenty-three. Because of this seemingly irrelevant technicality—only one Galludet president in it’s history has been deaf—some faculty and students are calling her misrepresentative of the profile of the school and calling for a new president to be named. Despite having the backing of the departing president, and having been with the school for six years as Provost, Ferdandes can’t fit the “perfect deaf” mold, and apparently is therefore unworthy of her position. Despite the presumably silent protest, the Board of Trustees has promised not to review their decision.

Breaking Public Health News

The Dartmouth Review has just received breaking insider information about a mutation in the Chlamydia virus that has created a Conjunctivitis-Pertussis-Chlamydia hybrid, hereon referred to as C4P1C5-squared. This new super bug, C4P1C5-squared, has the unfortunate characteristic of being spread telepathically, which has public health officials in a frenzy.

Dr. Ouben Von Shloebenhabermass told reporters, in a private press conference held at Dartmouth-Hitchcock-Medical-Center, that C4P1C5-squared is “far more lethal than avian flu, and not nearly as Asian.” When asked to elaborate on the latter half of his statement, the doctor began to curse in a Transylvannian dialect.

But, alas, there is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is that C4P1C5-squared causes impotency and seizures, and become 100% virulency when the virus cross-contaminates with phenylketoalphabromohydriadic acid, the dominant constituent of computer-keyboards. The rampant use of blitz terminals could create an epidemic unlike any seen in New Hampshire’s history-—this includes the unexplained epidemic of 1975, which ravished the state’s population of brown-tailed doves.

UNC Throws in the Towel on Swim Test

The mandatory swim test has been a college tradition for nearly a century, not just for Dartmouth but also for many of the nation’s colleges, and all of her premier ones. However, it is a tradition that is waning in a time when the mind has become all-important and the body merely an after thought to a woman’s education. Though few have nostalgic thoughts of their swim test, recent events here at the College remind us that some skills should not be forgotten.

Few can forget the tragic events of last summer when a student from Trinity College, enrolled in the Tuck Business Bridge Program, drowned in the Connenticut River. Events like these a century ago caused wealthy donors at many institutions to insist that, as a condition of their donation, a swim test be manadatory for all students to graduate.

Yet, the University of North Carolina has thrown in the towel as it abandones its cohorts in ending the swim test requirement for graduation. The Class of 2006 will be the last class that will have to perform the 50-yard swim in order to graduate. Though few students have ever had trouble meeting the requirement in order to graduate, during a review of the curriculum the University found the test superfluous and decided to discontinue its requirement.

UNC’s test dates back to World War II, as do most similar tests, when many colleges were turned into barracks and swimming was seen as an effective way to ensure safety and physical fitness. Up until the late seventies nearly half of the United States’ colleges and universities still had such a test in place, but theses tests have practically disappeared in recent years. Dartmouth preserved its swim test during a curriculum review few years ago, but the trend seems to be heading where only the plebes at the service academies will continue to be tested.

Alas, we are one step closer to the singular students translating Catullus and one step further away from the Dartmouth Man.

The Week in Review

Article Tools

Related Articles