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We were at San Francisco’s BIX last evening, enjoying prosecco, cheese, and a bit of music. A full year of inhabitation in Northern California has unraveled to me no decent venue for proper lounging, but BIX comes closest. The trio playing midnight to one was piano, double bass, and percussion. One had the distin
So our colleague and Dartblog writer Joe Asch informed me that the D has rejected our cunning advertising campaign. Uh-oh.
The Dartmo
As Dartmouth alumni proceed through the legal hoops necessary to defuse a Board-packing plan
If you are an alum of the College on the Hill, you may have received a number of e-mails of late beseeching your input for a new arm of the College’s Alumni Control Apparatus called the “Election Reform Study Committee.” The e-mails have come from such people as Janine Avner ‘80, president of the insular and undemocratic Alumni Council, and John Mathias ‘69, president of the Association of Alumni.
[Incidentally, Mr. Mathias is also the ringleader o
And now Dean Tom Crady has precipitously announced his departure from the College after only 20 months on the job. How to read this?
By way of background, prior to coming to Dartmouth, Crady had been the highly regarded V.P of Student Services at Grinnell College, where, among other tolerant and student-friendly policies, he supervised the lenient enforcement of the underage drinking laws. In fact, he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on student drinking habits.
During the 2005-20
In an interview with The Dartmouth, alumni-elected trustee T.J. Rodgers ‘70 explained his reasons for declining to participate in future evaluations of trustees up for “re-election,” namely the “kangaroo court” nature of such discussion in the case of former trustee Todd Zywicki ‘88. Dartblog has covered that unreelection
An interesting piece in the Washington Post today about the future direction of gay marriage in California vis-a-vis Prop 8. Dartblog has offered contrasting perspectives on the subject, see here and here, but agreed that the constitutional expressions of voters should be respected, certainly over judicial dictation.
That is the
An article from Inside Higher Ed looks at a new study by Neil Gross, a researcher at the University of British Columbia on faculty politics, available here. This study and article raise a number of interesting points. 1. The finding that “faculty members take seriously the idea that they should not try to force their views upon students, or to in any wa
An interesting article in Inside HigherEd reporting on survey data that shed interesting light on what university professors believe and how they conceptualize their role.
Among some of the more interesting findings, there have been huge increases in the number of professors who see their role as encouraging the development of personal values and emotional growth and enhancing self-understanding and that of other rac
With the announcement of Dr. Jim Kim this afternoon, I thought that I would present a template for College governance. The humble points that follow are value-neutral; they do not mandate any specific course of action only a consideration of general principles upon which (I would imagine) we can all agree and which might point us in the right direction.
1. Transparency
The importance of this principle has become particularly obvious in light of the recent budge
Dartblog has been covering and opining on the gay marriage debate, particular in reference to “Prop 8” California’s recent constitutional amendment to ban the practice. Some past thoughts here. I have been mulling the issue over for some time now, here are a few thoughts.
With all that is at stake in the wake of the recent election, I don’t quite know why my interest has turned towards this particul
Here I am in 3 Rockefeller Hall, liveblogging the fourth and most important presidential debate of this election season: the one held right here, in this room, between the Dartmouth College Democrats and the Dartmouth College Republicans.
On the Republican side, we have two of Dartblog’s own: Zak Moore ‘09 and Jenn Bandy ‘09, who is the president of the Dartmouth College Republicans, as well as Greg Boguslavsky ‘09, chairman of the New Hampshire College Republi
You know we’re both amiable in our own sense—in our own senses, and I think that, basically, you know, us together produces a force of, uh, amiab—amiability which is, ahh, a synergical force of amiability which is, far beyond the reaches of normal human comprehension.
So sayeth George Z., one of four candidates for Student Union President a couple of years back at what I am objectively calling the best public high school in the nation, Stuyvesant High School
The movement to get alumni involved and included in the governance of colleges and universities is alive at Colgate. A Better Colgate is campaigning “to elect a majority of the members of the Board of Trustees in a free and fair election by a majority vote equal to or greater than 50% plus one of the alumni voting.” Dartmouth College alumni just lost the hundred-plus year-old right to parity— to elect 50
With hope to reprise the great popularity of Dartblog’s first mathematical puzzle, (my long-winded solution here), I am retroactively introducing the semi-regular column Math@Dartblog. I am calling the first puzzle and its solution Installments 1 and 2, respectively, and I’ll call this great a
Last week Dartblog reported on the College’s new C.O.S. policies—the rules that dictate the investigation, trial, and punishment processes for students accused of some alleged violation of Dartmouth policy or of some alleged actual crime in which the administration, frequently in service of one agenda or another, desires to take action quite apart from the legal process.
The subject of fixing the Committee on St
This morning, one of Domenico Scarlatti’s later sonatas, the delightful K. 427 in G major. Here it is as executed—at comprehensible tempi, no less—by Racha Arodaky in an unfortunately obscure French release. A highly competent, brilliantly recorded version. If you are like me, you will have to press “play” on this piece a half-dozen times before getting on with your day.
Now: who
For a while now Congress has been looking for a new way to inject itself in to private, higher education institutions (which are doing quite well, thank you).
U.S. News reports on a list of schools that are committed to meeting, in full, students’ demonstrated financial need. Dartmouth is, of
WOODSIDE, Calif. — In strange ways nature seems to desire wine-making.
I passed this morning on a drive to the winery of a friend, whose affinity is for pinot noir—seen above, nearly as fresh as I wi
Barack Obama’s latest ad attacking John McCain for being computer illiterate is backfiring in a big way. Let us forget for a moment that McCain is more aware of computers than the Democrats would like to admit. John McCain can not send an email. Why? Not because he’s “out of touch” as Obama’s campaign would like you to believe, but because his war injuries prevent him from doing so. According to
Ariana Huffington & Co. believe they have heard the first imperfection issue from Sarah Palin’s lips. They explain it thus: A whisper in the desolate winter, forced hushed by closed minds, Withthrop among those seeking, that G-d’s truth might one day bloom, In an email sent Wednesday afternoon to members of the Class of 1985, Mark Byrne ‘85 T’86 and Patrick Byrne ‘85 tell classmates that they believe the Board-packing plan proposed last September by Chairman Ed Haldeman and his five-person Governance Committee
“I am an openly gay man, a teacher, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party, the ACLU, and the Human Rights Campaign,” writes Daniel King, Class of 2002, in an essay just emailed to Dartblog. “I don’t really think my political leanings should have anything to do with how I vote in the current Association of Alumni elections,&
I too attended Friday’s meeting for faculty with Board Chairman Ed Haldeman ‘70 and Presidential Search Committee Chairman Al Mulley ‘70, concerning criteria for the selection of Dartmouth’s next president. See Zak’s comments below. My views on the next president are here. Three professors’ comments towards the end of t
A series of curious emails from Priya Venkatesan, who is a “lecturer” of writing at Dartmouth College, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Medical School, a 1990 graduate of the College—doubling in biochemistry an
As Mr. Malchow has already reported and opined, there is a movement within and around the College of William & Mary to allow alumni participation in selecting their board of trustees, and it is good. At this public university it is the Virginia state government that is responsible for the school’s charter or constitution, rat
In a major loss for Dartmouth’s administration and the trustees who established last September’s “Board-packing plan,” New Hampshire Superior Court Judge Vaughan has ruled against their motion to dismiss a suit brought by the Association of Alumni on behalf of the 70,000 living former students of Dartmouth. The Association’s suit seeking to enforce an 1891 agreement mandating that half of Dartmouth’s Board be democratically elected will proceed normally, an
When in 1961 Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey wanted to expand the College’s Board by four seats, he first had to secure approval from the state. As the College’s attorney wrote to Mr. Dickey on January 16, 1961, there was only one thing the Attorney General of the State of New Hampshire wanted to know: Mr. Dickey wasn’t trying to pack the Board, was he?
It may have escaped your attention that Dartblog maintains a many layered network of yeasty, hyperactive pencil-mustached spies who nightly file reports on everything happening in fair Hanover. This includes such things as hirings, firings, flagrancies, misdeeds, drunken emails betraying confidences, and parking tickets. Mostly I judge the airing of these reports imprudent; a small subset of the data permits a daily blog that beats student journos to every major story, and in this tidy little
A well informed correspondent, whom we shall call Septimus Hodge, submits the following on Dartmouth matters. After four victories for pro-oversight candidates and a rejected constitutional proposal to change the election process, elected Trusteeships capped and unelected Trusteeships expanded by eight seats; Transfer of power to internal Executive Committee; Insularity for Dartmouth leadership: the recommendation of the Governance Committee enacted in spite of outpouring of current and former student sentiment in favor of status quo; On lopsided Trustee vote, electi
In this weekend’s editions of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Rago interviews Trustee T.J. Rodgers on the administration’s present efforts to reduce the democratic character of the Board of Trustees in “Mr. Rodgers Goes to Dartmouth.” Also, The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighs in with an editorial recommending against any such changes:
In a letter dated July 6, 2007, Dartmouth Vice President of Alumni Relations David Spalding
Just now, I was walking back late from a dinner party along First Avenue. It occurred to me, quite wrongly really, that there were a surprising amount of people about. There were people about, but that should not have been surprising at all. The crosstown L train achieves First Avenue at Fourteenth Street, and from Fourteenth I began walking uptown—north—to Twenty-first, which is where I live. The nine blocks are intermittently lively. One corner features a restaurant with a large
Friends, here is Michel Camilo, one of my favorite living composers and by lengths the most underrated, doing a solo piano setting of his brilliant 1990s piece “Suntan.” Camilo has a creative mind mossier than the Dominican tropics from whence he hails. His compositions are each worth hearing. But he also is a virtuoso pianist. He recently recorded a fine “Rhapsody in Blue” with the Barcelo
After four petition victories, concerns that Trustee elections may end or be postponed after chairman addresses alumni over Green Key weekend; Association of Alumni lobbied for elections in 1890, now in 10-1 vote passes motion calling on Board to preserve elections for half of the Board; Motion earns vote of co-drafter of last year’s constitution, but lone dissenter remains veiled. For more than a century, Dartmouth alumni have elected Trustees.
There is an old adage about journalists. What they write seems to be reasonable and accurate almost all the time. Unless you happen to have any amount of firsthand experience with the topic at hand, in which case you know they are almost entirely wrong. That’s certainly the case with this Associated Press article by Katharine Webster on the election of petition candidate Stephen Smith—th
T.J. Rodgers, Todd Zywicki, Peter Robinson, the constitution, and now Stephen F. Smith. Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees will be joined by a fourth petition Trustee. Stephen F. Smith ‘88 has won the latest election, with 9,984 votes. 55% of voting alumni cast a vote for Mr. Smith. This makes him the most successful petition Trustee candidate i
Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist and maestro who defied the Soviet communists and played Bach as the Berlin Wall was rent to pieces, died this morning at eighty years old, of cancer. In addition to leading Russian ensembles, Rostropovich from 1977 to 1994 held the reins of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. while exiled from Russia. Rostropovich was famous for his large hands. Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr at National Public Radio
Patricia Taylor Buckley died in the wee hours of Sunday morning in Stamford, Connecticut. She was ill for a long while, and it was through an infection arising from surgery that she passed on. Mrs. Buckley was wife to William F. Buckley, Jr. and mother of their son Christopher, both of whom survive her. The Buckley men are possessed of a rare skill in letters, the elder having earned his pl
Having learned that Paul Hewson—Bono—is on William and Mary’s shortlist and therefore probably not on Dartmouth’s, I and some e-mailers now consider it most likely that Dartmouth has engaged Hank Paulson ‘68, the Secretary of the Treasury, to deliver the keynote address at Commencement this June. As I say, these rumors are plenty likely to be incorrect, so don’t put too much stock in them. On December 1, 1985, Variety Clubs International, the Hollywood children’s charity, hosted a tribute dinner for President Ronald Reagan. Frank Sinatra was the emcee of the evening, but Dean Martin captured the night when, backed by just a piano and a sheen of strings, he sang a tweaked version of “Mr. Wonderful,” the ballad from the the 1956 musical composed by George David Weiss, and made famous by Sarah Vaughan. (She, in her usual way, had melted it into a love so
K.C. Johnson, the brilliant history professor whose blog helped vindicate the Duke lacrosse players and shed light on D.A. Nifong’s misdeeds, now turns to the Duke Arts and Sciences faculty, elements of which egged for conviction from the very start—if not in the courtroom then in the public square. If you’ll recall, a “Group of 88” professors issued the most poorly written legal brief you’ve ever seen
The Duke Rape Case continues to founder, as District Attorney Mike “Ahab” Nifong does anything and everything to press his case for essentially political reasons—he rode the case to victory in his Democratic primary months ago, and from the start has been under pressure from a few professors at Duke who were largely responsible for creating the frenzy to begin with. The latest news? Nifong failed fully to disclose the results of a DNA test months ago. We learned a while back
Ah, the question: Did Pláci earn his boos? There is more to say about Tuesday evening’s performance of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera. The golden duo of Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko—which duo will not be together on stage for a good while, and certainly not in another Bohème this season—was occasion for vigorous curtain calls after the acts, and an extended one that lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour at the end of the opera. New York&
Two of Dartmouth’s finest, Liz Hunt ‘05 and Meredith Wilson ‘07, bega
Reader Jason Stadel, a Dakotan, a Native American, and a member of the United States Army, kindly shares his e-mail of this morning to Dartmouth Athletic Director Josie Harper. I was wondering why you took it upon your self to comment publicly on something that has nothing to do with you or your fine institution. How would you know that the name Fighting Sioux is offensive? Have you been to any Sioux reservations in North or South Dakota? I’m an enrolled
From an e-mail from a reader and Dartmouth alum: It has happened that the state of Michigan is the primary theater in the national war over racial preferences. On the one side, absolutists who believe that racial equality is a term which means, basically, racial equality. On the other side, an ad-hoc coalition of diverse people whose immediate interests would be diversely served by special preferences in job hiring, university admissions, and the like. Also on that side, reparationists who believe that inequality today is fair so long as it
With record turnout—the highest ever achieved at Dartmouth—alumni voted to reject the undemocratic constitution. Fifty-one percent voted to reject the constitution, which was the position recommended here at Dartblog over the course of eighty posts composed between September 27, 2005 and this very day. Further details here and
Well, then. I suppose it is safe to say that Dartmouth alumni governance has become intensely politicized in recent months. The small group which has dominated it for years—that is, those who control the debate, make the decisions, and listen (or fail to listen) to the alumni—have driven a wedge through Dartmouth’s alumni body. That wedge is branded the Proposed New Constitution for Dartmouth Alumni Governance. The substance of that beset document—the actual legal writ
This morning’s edition of The Dartmouth carries a worrisome story by reporter Rebekah Rombom. Here is a significant portion of it, but please click here to read the whole thing. New information shows that the decision made months ago by the Executive Committee of the Dartmouth Association of Alumni to cancel the planned October 2006 annual elections—to stretch out their own terms by as many as six months—is, flatly, unconstitutional. Below, the necessary background reading, and then the new information. On Saturday, May 26, the Executive Committee of the Association of Alumni released a letter declaring that they had decided to cancel the annual e
Bill Carney is a member of the Dartmouth Council of Alumni and was asked, like his fellow Councillors, to vote on the proposed new constitution preliminarily—that is, before it goes out to the whole alumni body. (It will go out on September 15.) He first voted in favor of the constitution. When asked to vote again a month later, he reconsidered and changed his vote to no. Bill writes: I see that word has gotten around that the Alumni Council vote on the AGTF
Reporter C.J. Chivers writes a news article in this morning’s New York Times defending the abilities of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with i
In early March, I wrote in “Professor Discretion Is Advised” about the brave Professor Karen Murdock of Century College. She had the libertine* gall, and in the thick of the Cartoon Jihad no less, to actually make public the cartoons in question, that the studentry might debate the issue having actually seen those editorial graphics—those little newspaper drawings—which had moved great masses in the East to
Jared Smith, trainer at the United States Army’s Mountain Warfare School in Vermont and longtime reader, writes to me, and to everyone: The episodes of South Park of the last fortnight concerned a partisan censor who wanted the television show Family Guy—in the real world another animated comedy but in this South Park episode a doppelganger for Park itself—taken off the air. He didn’t like it; wanted it dashed. But of course, there are many such people and they don’t have veto rights over television networks and the broadly-measured opinion of the viewing throngs. So the cens
Saith Handey in a bygone era of the “Saturday Night Live” program, “If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at some guys, throw one of those little baby-type pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think of how crazy war is, and while they’re thinking, you can throw a real grenade.” Now, Jack Handey doesn’t actually create American foreign policy, and he is not actually a contributory commentator, but he does write wh
Today is celebrated the 274th birthday of Joseph Haydn, one of the greatest music-makers ever to have graced this green Earth. Although the world is captivated these days by Mozart—and this entire year, of course, is dedicated to his birth’s 250th anniversary—Haydn in some musical respects was ahead of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and in many, many others was his father and shepherd, especially when it came to formalities, public life, and
Several days ago I placed a phone call to a member of Dartmouth’s Alumni Governance Task Force—a small group of alumni charged with drafting an overhaul to the constitution on which Dartmouth alumni draw their power and organize themselves, and the document under which the two underdog trustee candidates last year were elected—thanking that member for an open-mindedness I had not expected. That
The number of living panda bears perennially dotes with the three figure mark, and for their scarcity and cuteness they are a matter of special pride in the far east. Their trade is heavily regulated, their births are controlled, their health scrutinized, and those yin-yang visages can not long stay removed from television camera. Right now there is a brouhaha stirring over a possible panda transfer. Tucked away in the Wolong Nature Preserve, Communist China has a panda bear named Tua
It is a little stunning that it took so long. Mohammad al-Qahtani, a captured and worn and non-trivial al Qaeda operative, is the prime suspect for the infamous “20th hijacker” position, as investigated by the United States’ domestic security and intelligence agencies. The which is cause for celebration in itself, for if al-Qahtani were not captured and worn and locked away at the military’s Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he would have been the likely war
The United Nations long ago misplaced its formative charge in the wilds of the Secretariat. It had, vaguely now, something to do with preventing another world war. As the years intervened the organization’s job description has changed, and if its practices are any indication, the current goalposts seem to be: Grant legitimacy to Earth’s cruelest operators; Mislead all the wrong people into believing that the power balance does not matter; Valiantly defend human rights where hu
At Harvard it was an entrenched and self-reinforcing circ
“Here in the UK, even my most liberal and left-wing friends have very suddenly become deeply anti-Muslim and are saying that Muslims clearly cannot live in Europe. These people didn’t say that sort of thing even after the London bombings, but they are saying it now. People are furious with these attacks on our freedoms, with our stupid grovelling politicians and newspaper editors, and with the Muslims who marched through London waving banners with slogans such as ‘Behead
I believe that South Park has already furrowed its comedic brow in exploration of this rarely understood bifurcation, but when I read the headline, “Lambda 10 works to erase homophobia” in The Dartmouth this morning, I suddenly felt the urge to proselytize. I’m going to preach on the wrongness of proselytizing. I hope you’ll excuse the catch twenty-two—after I’
You needn’t be smart or able to think in order to have a newspaper column. All you need is a one-inch square black and white photo of your head and the ability to end sentences with homey, down-to-Earthisms like, “capisce?”. Then you can follow a special formula and churn out a weekly column without so much as a corpuscle of sweat. The Seattle Times’ Nicole Brodeur is good—and by ‘good’ I mean ‘bad’—at using the for
Purportedly to protect students but more often for the purposes of enforcing code that would never exist or survive in the public arena—and code which is often politically-motived—private colleges tend to construct faux legal edifices that ensconce all students in a vice-like grip. The most commonly understood product of these nebulous legal enterprises is the notion that an accusation of sexual assault equals a conviction. This is enabled through the very popular ‘eh
It appears that the senior senator from the Bay State has quit his hahlf-century-long membership to the Owl Club, which was a tight-knit coterie of Harvard gentlemen who loved Hooters Restaurant but wouldn’t want to be caught in the society pages there, and so banded together in bloodbrotherly solidarity to feast on buffalo wings disguised as slovenly Boston University students, and after gawking at the waitstaff,
It deserves no surprise that the NSA wiretap story is tops on al Jazeera, the world’s only news network al Qaeda terrorists feel comfortable exchanging videotapes with. National Reviewer Cliff May was invited on the network, along with a slurry of ACLU types to discuss the story. Cliff describes the outrageously front-loaded session here. Reading it, I am reminded of the original Bush Doctrine, which said,
Dear Dell Latitude D600 Notebook, I don’t know quite how to do this, so I’m going to cull what I can from various episodes of ‘Friends’ and hope that you understand what I’m trying to say. Dell Notebook, we have to talk. You and I both know that this just isn’t working out. You’re a mess. You come home without having gone into hibernate during our commute—you’re 105 degrees. You’ve got flashing red lights and I have to bail you out each time. You know the routine, don’t you? Or don’t
A prominent Dartmouth professor once sophomorically quipped that Dartmouth’s Departmental Editing Program, which provides subject-specific adult editors to Dartmouth students whose writing requires refining, was a useless dalliance because the editors are public high school teachers. Ignoring for a moment the blue-hued elitism of that comment, what struck me is that the professor failed to note that the alternative—Dartmouth’s own Research, Writing and Information Technology
Every year I do a cynical and ornery post on the movie business and its award ceremonies. Here it is. The Los Angeles Times, like everyone under the hot L.A. Lovin’ sun except the event’s producers, is bearish on the Academy Awards ceremony. For the uninitiated, the Academy Awards—often referred to as the “Oscars” so that advertising material can anthropomorp
As Morgan Freeman, who is a man as close as any in memory to being a wise old tree, recently said: “The only way to defeat racism is to stop talking about it. I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.” When I was a young boy, I didn’t know there was racism. Then I learned that there was racism, and it occured to me rather speedily that the best wa
I was going to write this entry yesterday morning. And then, before that, I was going to write it Tuesday morning. In fact, every morning as I step out of the building, across the street, and into the Dunkin’ Donuts by Grand Central, I have it in my mind to write this entry. Mostly, it was the enjoyment of my Dunkin’ Donuts products upon my return that prevented me from doing so. But now the situation has reached its apex. And here I am, telling you. I generally like Dunki
It happened today. The United Nations recognized a serious problem, and it—stop me if you’ve ever heard these words used sarcastically in reference to this organization—sprang into action. Real, independent experts were commissioned and studies were studied; reports reported. No official was spared; no string pulled. The professional advice was considered and mulled and transformed into new policy. Policy like a scapel: aimed at excising the dead, bringing the sickly to hale
Jeff Jarvis has a wireless router that doesn’t cover his entire home. He’s tried to fix the problem with “range extenders” (those are actually radio repeaters of the type police departments mount on electrical poles) and with “boost antennae” (those amplify the radio signal a few dBi through wire patterns and work exactly like aluminum foil, only more expensive and le
When one reads through a few thousand entries, a year starts to look like a very long time. And indeed 2005 was an eventful one. From the ephemera of French ambassadorial confontations, BBQ narcissism, pizza delivery guy tip advice, abandoned strip mines,
One curious thing about the internet is what it has done for famous quotations. Bad, bad things. Classical music lovers who also happen to be savvy on the world wide web (Hey, Dan.) know that, if ever looking for a quick-and-dirty MP3 rip-off of a recorded classical album for auditioning purposes, an internet search for the classical piece in question will rather consistently yield results. Except each will, pursuant to the file name, purport to have been recorded by either the Boston Pops, t
The New York Transit Workers Union’s strike continued today. (Mark me down: 20 blocks downtown & 4 blocks crosstown in 29 minutes.) Early this morning, the internet discovered “Transit Worker”, the Blogspot blog run by the TWU. It listed strike demonstration locations and reprinted strike-related articles from the New York Times, which was virtually the only media outlet in the city that cast the illegal job action in a
There were two lives ended. One I was a part of; he was a man I knew. The other I knew nothing of, save for the judgment made against him by the people of California. But the first man has, for me, put a fine point on the life—or, more precisely, the death—of the second. Successive courts of appeal, the governor, the United States Supreme Court, and the president, have denied Stanley Williams his request for clemency. He will be executed at 3:01 A.M. EST on the morning of
This is ridiculous. Of course soda is to blame for the plumpness of
She may have served honorably on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that to some deserved acclaim, but by the admission of virtually all mankind—including those sympathetic to her sundry causes—Whoopi Goldberg is not a funny person. I really thought Vanessa Carlton was a big deal. She was here at Dartmouth last night, belting ‘em out to the back(ish) rows. I didn’t go to the concert myself and, based upon the aforelinked article, basically no one else did either. Things are dire indeed when The Dartmouth reports event turnout as “disappointing.” I was, frankly, surprised to see that word when I took my daily g
Dartmouth College is in the midst of a power shift. The Task Force on Alumni Governance was commissioned to draft an update to the constitutions of the Dartmouth Alumni Council and Alumni Association in the Spring of 2004, just as T.J. Rodgers ‘70—a petition candidate—was elected to the Board of Trustees. Rodgers’ democratic win inspired two new petition trustee candidates in last spring’s ele
[Bumped to top.] By fits and starts, the nation is coming to terms with the reality that it will soon have a new High Court. Tragic events and wingy, Rovian conspiracies aside, the debate on John Roberts has commenced, and it will end with two new justices and one new True North for the Supreme Court of the United States. Like most things, including, evidently, natural disasters, this shall be a partisa
The Amnesty International leadership is now “unsure” that the United States is running a gulag, as it previously asserted. (Bumped up) This is post number 1900 here on the Dartblog. In just over six months, I’ve averaged 10.5 posts per day, which I think is pretty good. But the number 1900 also gives me a convenient lead-in to a topic that will be in the news today, once again: marriage for homosexuals. The Great State of Oregon will have its Supr
It is difficult, philosophically, to support a foreign policy that almost by its nature bucks diplomacy with America’s traditional allies, provides for pre-emptive warfare, and counts among its goals the overhaul of long-entrenched political interests in the world’s most tenuous neighborhoods. Sans Washingtonian isolationism, which in this century is a recipe for irrelevance, and when outside the auspices of national security, the Bush Doctrine can look closed-minded and unworkabl
I just got into an argument with the French consul to New England, based in Boston. Thierry Vankerk-Hoven, I believe his name was, was at Dartmouth for something or other, but my French professor sent out an e-mail last night asking some of us to meet with him. He arrived late to the Hanover Inn, to much smirking by the predisposed among us. He gave a short talk made of generic diplomatic verbiage: “Fra
Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” The companies, as McClatchy reported, “are
set out for a new world, precious freedom there to find.
Rough seas nary a besiegement, mountains only to be trod;
those in faith provided all, carrying the banner of glorious G-d
To the mighty shores of province. From a well of black despair.
Godspeed to those of constant zeal, discovery lingering in air.
to create a
Billionaire Dartmouth donors dispatch email to Class of 1985; lambaste Board-packing plan; “We urge you to vote for the Parity Slate. If we don’t elect them, your vote will never matter again.”
Dartmouth Writing ‘Lecturer’ Threatens Suit Against Students, College, Superiors; Displeased with Negative Performance Evaluations; Poor Prose Ability Revealed in Late-Night Missives; General Mockery Made of Freshman Writing Program.
Nearly three weeks ago now, Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt
IN EVERY LARGE ORGANIZATION where there is no effective independent oversight, the sole criterion for action becomes the interests of the controlling insiders, and what they think they can get away with. Absent such oversight, they can get away with a lot, particularly if they are willing to impose secrecy and prevent transparency, as is the case at Dartmouth. Private unive
Association sought to warn 68,000 former Dartmouth students of Board’s effort to reduce or eliminate elections; was rebuffed by College acting in support of the effort.
Tufts University is nurturing a swelling and dishonorable record on freedom of sp
Isn’t it something that this small Iraqi girl has achieved an impossibly pink te
On the Tuesday following the first Monday of November every year, you can be told: Vote, because men have died to ensure that you may. At Dartmouth, the best we can say is that the College’s doting alumni have, in its darkest moments, saved the institution from extinction by organizing financially, legally, or otherwise to defeat pressures arrayed against it. <
Dartmouth students have for a long while—since, at least, President Wright’s introduction of the Student Life Initiative—been confident in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, is try
A retired popular
Ms. Harper,
I read with great interest your writings today about Jim Wright’s defense of “free speech.” I interpret his comments to mean that “his” exercise of free speech means that “he” can determine whenever he chooses “who” has been offended and “who” has not. Great power resides in that man!
The reader make
Music shops do their customers an enormous wrong by hiding the Wor
Even as Dartmouth, in a soft concession to dignity, reinstalls the famous Tiffany and Royal B
As the Association of Alumni prepares to vote on a new proposed constitution this fall, heated debate has persisted throughout many sectors of the Dartmouth community. Factions on both sides participate, with weblogs beco
Dear Joe:
What does it look like when a person who has never played an instrument, never sung, and never read a note, tries to do a thorough analysis of a piece of classical music? It looks a lot like Mozart & Micromanagement, which is, well, three things: The final oeuvre I’ve just submitted for Music 36, a class all ab
…clips of Mr. Zarqawi’s supposed martial incompetence were unconvincing.
Today, Dartmouth College experienced A Day Without Immigrants. It is late a
Donald Trump developed the lot just across from the United Nations complex into a residential skyscraper called Trump World Tower. It is, or was, the tallest residential building in the world. 871,000 square feet. And each one cost Trump $258.32. He gave these statistics to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Subcomm
Dartblog has many undergraduate readers — and an undergraduate writer — and it suddenly strikes me as important that we all understand our extreme unimportance; our unredeemed deficit of bravery and human utility. You see, I’ve just learned an incredible story of utter heroism in Iraq.
Note: This post discusses Dartmouth politics and is a continuation of “The Situation on the Charles,” which dealt with ousted Harvard president Larry Summers. Regular, non-Dartmouth readers may be mostly interested in the above.
Most working people don’t watch often enough to realize this trend, but if you turn on the television any weekday afternoon, what you’ll see will, without a doubt, be a very blurry image. Nothing is wrong with your television. This is the result of a strict pan-network rule in effect Monday through Friday from ten in the morning to five in the afte
The English poet John Dryden once wrote that William Shakespeare was “the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” The significance of that is hardly appreciable unless we stop, at the end of this twenty-first century day, and take measure of what we heard, read, and said during that day. An
Gregory Pence is a Dartmouth ‘06 and a rising editorial cartoonist. His work now appears regularly in the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s largest newspaper. It finds its way into 81,000 homes on Sundays, carrying within those gray pages Gregory’s commentary on the national a
Click to enlarge.
Here we are, hurtling thro
It became limelight figure numero uno for forty-eight hours last week: 30,000. The number of civilian deaths as a result of the Iraq War, as quoted by President Bush in response to a reporter’s question. As a White House press briefing later clarified, the president’s number was merely a genera
Todd Zywicki reveals the news that “the long-anticipated lawsuit against soft drink manufacturers for contributing to children’s obesity is expected to be filed in the near future.”
Image Courtesy: Scott Meacham and Dartmo.com. Circa 1950.
1976: Dartmouth’s very first female students—they matriculated in 1972, taking up the rear among the Ancient Eight—are graduating and, as they receive their diplomas, they not only embolden their c
Dartmouth, as an institution with vasty roots spread across, as the Alma Mater goes, the girdled earth, is no stranger to political, scientific, or academic controversy. No worthwhile college is, I suspect. But what is new, at least in the memories of those now participating, is the ruction inside. Sons of Dartmouth they all remain, but the quarter of alumni interested enough i
The famous ‘flower’ portrait of the Bard is a fake. The BBC is reporting that the painting, usually attributed to the year 1609- the date on the painting itself- was actually created almost 200 years after Marlowe Shakespeare’s death. Art experts had suspected this for s
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Kangaroo Court, Indeed
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