The Week in Review

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Indefinite Postponement

On Valentine’s Day, the Board of Trustees and the Association of Alumni released a joint notice stating that the Board would not seat any new Charter Trustees until the lawsuit brought by the Association had been resolved. If the Board does decide to go ahead with seating new Charter Trustees, it has agreed to give the Association forty-five days notice. The announcement came just 8 days before the 22nd of February—when the Board was planning to begin its expansion. Had the Board not announced this additional postponement, the Association surely would have asked the court for an injunction, effectively forcing the postponement—and we all know that the Board doesn’t like forcing things.

Spalding ’76 Loves His Line of Work

Spring is around the corner and that means election season: not national elections, but the elections for the Association of Alumni’s Executive Committee. The voting begins in April, and the stakes are high. Depending on who wins, the lawsuit against the Board of Trustees either will or will not go forward. All the current members of the Executive Committee opposed the unproportional expansion of the Board, as witnessed by a letter sent to the Board late last spring by President of the Association Bill Hutchinson ’76. Well, in fact, it was only opposed by members of the Executive Committee who don’t work for President Wright; David Spalding ’76 (the only member of the committee who voted against sending the letter) is Vice President for Alumni Relations and dead set on taking power out of the hands of alumni as the secretary of the Executive Committee. Spalding was one of four committee members who were present when the official slate for the spring elections was formulated. He will be running for the same position he has now, unopposed. Cheryl Bascomb ’82, who also was one of the four deciding on the slate, will be running unopposed as well. On the other side of the fence, Frank Gado ’58 (one of the most vocal critics of the unproportional board expansion) will be facing competition to retain his current position as second vice-president of the Executive Committee. In their announcement the nominating committee made it clear that he and the other lawsuit-backers should be glad that they were nominated at all.

Bizzare Mooney Bill Fails in Committee

On February 12, the State of New Hampshire House Commerce Committee voted 14-1 to reject HB 1292, a proposed bill that would require Dartmouth to gain prior approval from the State of New Hampshire before the College could amend its own charter. Rep. Maureen Mooney, R-Hillsborough, initiated the unpopular proposal, stating in an interview with The Dartmouth Review that the legislation was designed “to preserve the historic and traditional relationship that Dartmouth has had with the State of New Hampshire up until 2003.” She further claimed that she introduced the bill at the behest of Dartmouth alumni concerned with changes in the College’s governance, although one of the alumni who attended HB 1292’s hearing denied any past interaction with Mooney. New Hampshire law requires the full House to vote upon the proposed bill, but the House Commerce Committee’s recommendation renders HB 1292 subject to almost certain failure. “If we have to, we’ll try again in another session,” Rep. Mooney commented.

It’s Going to Continue to Get Worse

Recently Dartmouth professor of economics, David Blanchflower, released the conclusions of his study in happiness. His work indicated that depression rears its head during people’s mid-life and not whenever tragedy befalls, implying a U-shaped curve to designate happiness on a graph over time. Even more recently, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor of psychology, Ed Deiner, and Princeton professor of economics, Angus Deaton, proclaimed their dissent via the prestigious publication, USA Today, via old-fashioned methods, including debate and friendly discussion. Their most prominent qualms were, respectively, that Blanchflower’s evidence was insufficient to make such brazen conclusions and that the happiness over time curve was not U-shaped but rather constantly declining. Blanchflower’s rebuttal: “[People] have no idea how happy they’ll be in the future. … If you want to believe an anecdote, that’s up to you. This is science.”

This is of course the classic confusion that results of understanding, or misunderstanding, trends. Blanchflower’s research entailed averaging hundreds of thousands of responses to determine general trends: this implies that exceptions to the rule exist. A trend, whether downward or U-shaped, will not determine the course of an individual life.

All true and very inspiring, no doubt. However, we at The Dartmouth Review would like to remind all our readers of a very important fact: it’s going to get worse.

Ensler Promotes Vagina Monologues, Herself

On Monday, February 11th, Eve Ensler arrived at Dartmouth College to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of her ‘V-Day’ campaign. The campaign aims to raise awareness of violence against women as well as Ensler’s efforts to combat it. Monday night, Ensler gave a speech to a smattering of Dartmouth students about the history of the ‘V-Day’ movement and violence against women in general. She detailed her travels around the world in her efforts to spread awareness of what she has termed “femicide”, the systematic physical repression and violence against women worldwide. According to Ensler, labeling this problem is the first step to finding a solution; clearly, the millions of women facing abuse every day will rejoice upon hearing that their situation finally has a name.

Ensler is also notable throughout feminist circles for being the playwright behind “The Vagina Monologues,” performed at the Center for Women and Gender on February 14th and 15th. A celebration of feminism and the many synonyms for “vagina,” Ensler praised her play highly. She was quoted as saying “The most woman-friendly space at Dartmouth is where we perform the Vagina Monologues,” though it was unclear whether she was referring to the room in which the play was performed or the Center for Women and Gender in general.

Ensler rounded out her Dartmouth visit with a dinner at the Roth Center for Jewish Life on the night of Tuesday, February 12th, where she received the “Visionary-in-Residence award” for her efforts to raise awareness of violence against women. She has since left to continue her ‘V-Day’ promotion, set to culminate on April 11 and 12 with celebrity guest appearances at the New Orleans Arena and Louisiana Superdome in Lousiana.

Crunchy Types Befriend Eco-System, Grub For Jobs

Environmentally conscious Dartmouth students have long felt a struggle between the dual natures of their lives. They have been entrusted by virtue of their acceptance to such a prestigious institution to do whatever is possible to save the world from all conceivable threats, even if that means tremendous sacrifice for the sake of Mother Earth; on the other hand, who wants to pass up the opportunity to make a comfortable living in eco-friendly New York City and test out their resumes by meeting potential employers in the uber-chic environmental industry. With just such a mindset, 17 Dartmouth students ventured down to Columbia for the fourth annual All-Ivy Environmental and Sustainable Development and Career Fair, presumably in as carbon-neutral a manner as possible. Held on February 15, the event tends to draw unusually small numbers from the College, something that may come as a shock to the droves of Sustainable SPARC-ies on campus. With a world in constant peril from the threats of industry, it is an encouraging reminder that the ecologically-inclined at Dartmouth can find ways to work within the system to overthrow the bourgeois notion that companies ought to turn a profit and speak to representatives from companies that expand upon tried and true technologies like solar panels and wind farms. With any luck, Dartmouth will do a better job of spreading the word about this environmentalism for professionals, and future saviors of the planet will have ample opportunities to ensure that their charitable work has some sort of monetary benefit; after all, what’s more sustainable than a job that solves the problems that nobody realizes they’re suffering from in the first place?

Infestations in
Residence Halls

Several students have notified the Office of Residential Life with complaints of ants and rats infesting their dorm rooms. These varmints do not seem to be present in any one particular dorm or cluster. The severity of their presence also varies: one student noticed a few crumbs on her floor, and shredded cloth in the shape of a nest before seeing a rat scurry across her floor one night. Another complained of ants crawling out of cracks between bricks in her fireplace.

The college response has also varied. In some cases, Safety and Security offers have been sent to check the room daily for the presence of rodents. This method has additionally worried a few students that Safety and Security officers might be checking for the presence of other unwanted objects, thus forcing students to hide such items from Safety and Security officers. Other students have had the opposite experience with an absolute lack of response from the Office of Residential Life. General consensus is that ORL responds more promptly to complaints filed by undergraduate advisors than those filed by ordinary students.

Overall, however, the Office of Residential Life seems unfazed by these pests. Director Woody Eckels cites the infestation as a common problem with living “out in the wilderness.” It is unclear of whether or not Eckels experiences the same rodent problems in his private home.

Frost Lectures
Transcribed

Robert Frost ’96 lovers now have more text to pore over in their free time. From the late 40s until the 1966 Frost gave periodical lectures for Dartmouth students in the “Great Issues” series of classes. President Dickey instituted the classes, which focused on current world events. Seniors were required to take a “Great Issues” class in order to graduate. Twenty of Frost’s lectures were captured on film and stored in the Rauner Special Collections Library. James Sitar ’01, a graduate student at Boston University, has transcribed all twenty lectures as part of his dissertation. Sitar writes that in the lectures Frost “uses poems by other poets—ranging from Shakespeare and Christopher Smart to Coventry Patmore and Walt Whitman—as well as some of his own to illustrate poetry’s unrivaled power to give voice to the human spirit.” Yet Frost stayed true to the focus of the classes and used poetry to comment on politics and other current news including the end of the second world war, the space race, McCarthyism, amongst other topics. The first lecture to be published is coming out in the journal Literary Imagination and is entitled “Sometimes It Seems as If.” In the lecture Frost comments that there are two ways to take life: as a joke—or as poetry.

Daily D Battles
‘Academic Consumerism’

For the first time ever the College has produced the enrollment priorities of various classes during the process of class selection. The priorities were made public despite concerns over whether they would discourage students from selecting classes that are prioritized unfavorably toward them.

While the priorities of most classes were sensible enough (first priority to senior majors and minors, then junior majors and minors, other seniors, other juniors, sophomores, and freshman) there were some odd cases, for example History 61 “Britain & Atlantic World”, which was broken up in the following order: sophomores, junior majors and minors, other juniors, senior majors and minors, other seniors, and freshman. Why exactly a sophomore should have priority over a senior majoring in the department is unclear. Equally unclear is why the Editorial Board of the Daily Dartmouth believes that the enrollment crunch (the reason for enrollment priorities in the first place) is a “check against [the] herd mentality and anti-intellectual academic consumerism.” Good job, fellas, fighting the problems others are too cowardly to take on, or even know about.

The Week in Review

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