The Week in ReviewPride Isn’t Free. In Fact, It Costs $27,830.20 The Pride Week 2007 committee managed to wrangle up this sum from various donors, including COSO and Student Assembly. It will be spent over a week’s time to raise awareness of lesbian and gay history at Dartmouth. Well, such spending does require a certain measure of pride, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
This year, Dartmouth attracted the largest pool of applicants in the school’s history, with a total of 14,176 students vying for the 2,165 available spots in the Class of 2011. This apparent increase in exclusivity has been attributed largely to an increase in the number of schools that each high school student applies to, a process facilitated by the Common Application, which Dartmouth accepts. Consistent with previous years, the Admissions Office expects about half of the accepted students to matriculate.
Starting in the fall of 2007, Dartmouth will offer ‘gender neutral’ housing in several dorms. For the unhip, ‘gender neutral’ housing allows men and women to be roommates. The Office of Residential Life has has set aside a pilot program floor for which students must apply. The highly politicized program will focus on ‘gender identity’ and have lectures and speakers from the Women and Gender Studies department. The program application, which includes such questions as “What is your biological sex?” (Male/Female/Intersex) and “What is your personal gender identity?” (Man/Woman/Other), explains that it provides an environment not limited by “the traditional gender binary.”
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, the College is reviewing its security structure. The most dramatic potential change may be the College’s relationship with the Hanover Police. Currently the police are prohibited from entering dorms unless a Safety and Security officer lets them into the building, though S&S can open any door on campus from their headquarters. Speculation on campus is rife that the Hanover Police would abuse their newly received power by entering dorms for rather trivial reasons, such as underage drinking.
The Intercommunity Council interns, Soralee Ayvar ‘07 and Jamal Brown ‘08, recently wrote an blitz “to whom it may concern.” “After careful research,” begins the letter, “the Inter-Community Council (I-CC) has developed a well-thought out and considerate opinion regarding the candidates in the current trustee election of Dartmouth College.” They endorse John Wolf ’70 and Sherri Oberg ’82, and then their well-thought out and considerate opinion continues with regards to Sandy Alderson ‘69 and Stephen Smith ‘88: “We do not believe Sandy Alderson would be beneficial to the communities we represent. He was against the Student Life initiative, which has provided great support and services to the student body, and includes the Office of Pluralism and Leadership. He also advocates for free speech without mention of the need for responsibility or sensitivity. (Note: we are not advocating for a speech code, but rather the need for students and the College to engage in civilized discourse.) Additionally, Alderson criticizes President Wright for speaking out about the events of the fall, whereas the I-CC applauds President Wright’s handling of the situation. “Stephen Smith is by far the worst candidate. He has no connection with the campus, either through previous service to the College or current communications. During his visit to the Afro-American Society general body meeting, he demonstrated a clear lack of awareness of current issues as well as deficiencies in his information and arguments. His platform is based upon nonexistent and sensationalized issues, which John Wolf provides good evidence about on his website, as does the opinion piece in the Daily Dartmouth (‘Smith Out of Touch with Students’ 2/15/07).”
Bradley Smith, former Chairman of the Federal Elections Committee, spoke at Dartmouth College on May 3. During his tenure at the FEC, he was known for his outspoken opposition to campaign finance reform; thus, it was unsurprising that he spent most of his time talking about campaign finance reform. Smith argued that the current trend of more expensive campaigns is not something to be worried about. As a way to illustrate this he noted that all political spending in a two-year period is less than what Proctor and Gamble spends on advertising in that same time period. For candidates, money is secondary to organization, ideas, and charisma. When asked whether he believed if contributions were protected by the first amendment, he replied, “Money is clearly speech, or, to be more accurate, money facilitates speech.... You can limit speech by limiting people’s ability to spend.... It sticks in my craw that the government would tell you [that] you can’t spend your own money to talk about what you want.”
On May 7th, Dartmouth heard a lecture by Kenneth Pennington, Kelly-Quinn Professor of Ecclesiastical and Legal History at the Catholic University of America, on “Tortures Past and Present”. One reason why torture still takes place, he argued, is because of misconceptions about its efficacy. Audiences watching 24’s Jack Bauer succeed in obtaining information via torture do not necessarily believe that the situation is impossible. The lecture, delivered to a mixed audience of students and locals, provided a survey of jurisprudential history on the subject of torture. Pennington began with the ancient Greeks as the first proponents of torture in recorded history, though he stated that torture has existed as long as human society itself. He moved over the Romans to focus primarily on Italian jurisprudence from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, important because Bologna was the center of the rediscovery of Roman legal procedure in the early 12th century. Pennington concluded with a mention of the current political controversy concerning the alleged torture of Islamic terrorists, which Pennington takes as confirmed. He faulted Berkeley Professor John Yoo, the source of President Bush’s reasoning on the matter, for exploiting the language of the Geneva Conventions and other United Nations statutes. However, he also blamed the U.N. for inserting ambiguous language that reflects a lack of understanding of torture, suggesting that famed 16th-century Italian jurist Prospero Farinacci would “throw up his hands” at such ignorance.
The newly Democratic New Hampshire Senate passed House Bills 132 and 133, which ease restrictions on who can vote in New Hampshire, particularly out-of-state college students. College students need to declare New Hampshire their “domicile” in order to vote, and, before the passage of the two bills, obtaining domicile in a New Hampshire town meant registering your car in the state and obtaining a New Hampshire driver’s license within 60 days of registering to vote. Now, one only needs to declare that his “hometown” in New Hampshire is “that place, more than any other, where I sleep most nights of the year, or to which I intend to return after a temporary absence.” With this new language, practically any out-of-state student at Dartmouth can register to vote in New Hampshire if he desires. Leaders from both the Democratic and Republican clubs at Dartmouth supported the bills. Although the Daily Dartmouth has dubbed House Bills 132 and 133 as “student voting bills” these bills could apply in greater numbers to non-collegiate temporary residents of New Hampshire. Many out-of-state residents from the abutting liberal states of Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts have a summer residence in New Hampshire, and can now vote in New Hampshire elections without fear of repercussion, even though their primary residence is in another state.
The Student Assembly‘s Student Government Review Task Force will review the performance and efficacy of the Student Assembly and all other student government bodies and to recommend improvements. So far, they have conducted research and compiled a PowerPoint presentation, though the chair of the task force admits “We don’t have any hard results yet.” The preliminary problems identified include a lack of transparency in the allocation of funds, a lack of publicity, and a lack leadership training for organization leaders (treasurers excepted). The Dartmouth Review urges the task force to recommend that the assembly be given an unlimited supply of Monopoly money to spend as it pleases on a variety of synergistic and sustainable endeavors. Tragicomically, these clowns are toying with real cash.
John McCardell, former President of Middlebury College, visited campus on Wednesday, April 25 and met with fifteen Greek leaders and one Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisor to discuss his support for changing the current drinking age—something he has called, “bad social policy and terrible law.” He compared the current situation in ways to prohibition: “I think we’re living through a similar moment now where alcohol is identified as a corrupting evil, and there exists an assumption that we can root it out. We have to relearn the lesson [that] the harder you push, you may wind up making the situation worse.” |
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