29 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(02/14/19 7:20am)
Four years ago, Dartmouth formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Grading Practices and Grade Inflation, and to quote Douglas Adams, “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” Of course, the rationale seems both simple and unimpeachable: Dartmouth gives a lot of As, and if we keep going about it this way, soon everyone will have an A (and if that happens, Dartmouth isn’t doing its job). I added the part in parentheses because it’s an implicit assumption of Dartmouth’s approach toward education, and because I want the reader to read it in a stuffy bureaucratic voice that undermines it as a normative assumption about what Dartmouth’s job is. A giver of well-distributed grades is a terrible way to think about a college education.
(10/23/18 6:05am)
There are few things more futile or depressing than attempting to teach leadership via sticky note and slightly dry Crayola Broad Point Washable Markers. Yet the words “With your support, we will build on this legacy by creating a comprehensive, four-year cocurricular strategy for cultivating that spirit of leadership” on the Call to Lead capital campaign’s website immediately conjure the image of several bored undergrads contemplating death-by-catered-sandwiches while a leadership guru gesticulates madly in the background.
(09/18/18 6:15am)
“Yeah, I can’t believe they did that. It’s so…”
(03/01/18 6:00am)
It was 9 a.m. on June 27, 2016 when I woke and sat up, the texture of the sidewalk pavement imprinted deeply into my cheek. I checked the time, straightened my tie and glanced toward the front of the line I had been in for four hours. I was outside the Supreme Court on the day the decision for the Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt case, which concerned a Texas law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and raised the standards of abortion clinics to that of ambulatory surgical centers, was set to be announced. At the base of the court steps were two sign-wielding groups, ready to assume their role as supporter or protester depending on the holding.
(02/01/18 5:45am)
Dartmouth College, the rest of the Ivy League, Stanford University, Williams College — these are colleges only by technicality. See, thinking about a general category often means thinking about the mean or median. When we think of the American worker, our national consensus converges to about the right median.
(01/18/18 5:30am)
The ninth issue of the ninth volume of “InfoWorld: The PC News Weekly” from 1987 was filled with what one would expect for a magazine targeted at IT professionals and computer geeks. The front page advertised the new Macintosh II, replete with one megabyte of memory sold for $3,899 for one floppy drive and no display (nearly $8,500 in 2018 dollars). One page featured a story labeled “Presentation Package Lets Users Control Look” by Scott Mace. Mace writes that “Forethough Inc. last week introduced PowerPoint, a Macintosh program that lets users create and manage business presentations “using overhead transparencies, flip charts, speaker’s notes and handouts” and concludes that PowerPoint will be a catalyst in the new computerized business market. What Mace failed to prophesize is that PowerPoint would become the bane of the civilized world.
(10/27/17 4:30am)
Biosphere 2 was an interesting experiment. Built in Arizona and currently owned by the University of Arizona, it includes seven entirely self-contained ecosystems where plants, animals, soil, water, bacteria and animals can exist. But a fascinating issue arose regarding the trees that grew in Biosphere 2 — they died because there was no wind. Wind, and the resulting tensile and compressive stress placed on the tree, force the creation of stress wood in which the cells of the tree are arranged at angles rather than purely vertically. The tree is stronger for the adversity. This is a metaphor served on a silver platter for a lazy writer, and here’s how I’m going to use it: our most accepted, reasonable and applauded opinions are trees without wind; our biosphere is college. It is these simple laws we’ve come to accept — the equality of all people, the power of democracy and the dangers of isolation — that are the most endangered when we come to college.
(10/06/17 5:10am)
This column was featured in the 2017 Homecoming Issue.
(09/19/17 5:00am)
They broke the law — plain and simple. It’s the common thread that runs through every argument directed at the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Even the phrase “undocumented immigrant” seems to irk conservative Americans, who more commonly prefer “illegal alien” as well as the crude shorthand: “illegal.” As if breaking a law in a broken system is all that defines a family seeking a better life. But I digress.
(08/18/17 6:10am)
Elite universities are places of careful research and meticulous formulation, yet their admissions policies are a far cry from the principles they ought to represent. In the chaotic debate over affirmative action in college admissions, the methodology problem is painfully apparent. Affirmative action needs to be more granular — especially as it applies to Asian Americans.
(05/18/17 4:30am)
“The causes of death were family, finances and fatigue. The tasteful tombstone is set amid the soothing green of a field of Perrier bottles,” wrote Time magazine in an “obituary” of the yuppie. The year of death: 1991.
(05/16/17 4:45am)
When you hear about algorithms — like the one Facebook uses to construct your personal newsfeed or the one Google is fine-tuning to fight the spread of fake news — it’s likely that you’re hearing about predictive analytics. An algorithm is just a series of instructions: Multiply the two, carry the three or go to class at these three times every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Predictive analytics, as the name might imply, are algorithms meant to collect and use data to generate a prediction about an outcome that cannot be definitively known until the event occurs. Based on what you know, is a given person going to make it to class? If it’s Green Key Friday, then that probability might go down.
(04/27/17 4:35am)
We once used tribalism to describe the circumstances of ethnic conflict or to explain warring factions in failed states, but now the word is just as commonly thrown around in the political op-ed pages of the New York Times as it is in academic papers on foreign policy. It’s a useful term — a succinct way of explaining humans’ proclivity to group, categorize and create social identity. And it’s been remarkably apt at describing the worst parts of our political climate: hostility toward immigrants, anti-globalization, “America First” policies, bans on Muslim immigration and the increasingly visible white supremacy of the alt-right. All these issues clearly demarcate an in-group, such as whites or Americans, showing hostility to an out-group, such as Muslims.
(02/23/17 5:20am)
This past Sunday, author and software engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post detailing a horror story of sexual harassment and corporate failure at Uber, the massive ridesharing company. Fowler, who now works at the payment processing company Stripe, had worked for a year as a site-reliability engineer at Uber. A cursory look at her personal website quickly reveals that she’s — to use the industry buzzword — a “rockstar.”
(01/26/17 5:20am)
Any discussion of flag burning must start from one critical point: it is constitutionally protected as free speech per the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v Eichman. Last Friday, Timothy Messen ’18 gathered a group of people of different views together for a discussion on flag burning — and I walked away from the Green that day, more confident in human goodness and able to rethink the way we treat those with whom we disagree.
(01/10/17 5:15am)
Let’s start out with a really simple question: what’s the most common occupation in the United States? We’ll end with a Ronald Reagan ’84 presidential campaign commercial — but more on that later. The answer, as it turns out, is either long-haul trucker or retail salesperson, depending on how you sort the data. But that’s probably not what you thought it’d be, so we have to ask another question: what things are fundamentally American?
(05/30/16 9:30pm)
I have a friend from home who just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He is especially reflective and keen to proffer advice. Just a few months before he entered the real world, he sent me an article from Sociology of Education titled “Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘Prestigious’Jobs.” Of everything he’s ever told me, from “don’t take dumb classes freshman year” to “don’t worry, you’re at Dartmouth — you can always sell out,” this article was the single most enlightening piece of information.
(05/16/16 9:30pm)
Dartmouth never makes for boring dinner conversation. A recent heated Foco debate ended in a statement of unanimous resignation — “everybody wants to be right.” In a conversation in which no one could agree, it was the one universally accepted truth. Everybody — at the table and here on campus — stands by their views precisely because they believe them to be right. Of course, no one backs views they find faulty. But there are multiple sides to any debate, and unless you subscribe to some exceedingly extreme and annoying form of relativism, that means someone is wrong. What if that’s you?
(05/02/16 9:30pm)
To put it bluntly, I thought Divest Dartmouth was pointless. I strongly believe that climate change should be our foremost concern, but it seemed that Divest Dartmouth didn’t have any concrete goals, and I didn’t buy into the idea that “morally bankrupting” energy companies counted as doing anything productive. I’ve always been unenthusiastic about activism that doesn’t propose solutions or set goals. T-shirts and megaphones do not social change make. But I missed something in this analysis. There is a strategy to Divest Dartmouth, one that is less easily assigned a dollar value or measured in parts per million: making colleges divest is a way to tap into their symbolism and influence. In my view, divestment isn’t about affecting fossil fuel-burning companies’ finances — it’s about renowned institutions sending a message of urgency.
(04/18/16 9:30pm)
With the recent blitzstorm about Student Assembly elections, I felt like it would be a good time to write about our governing body. Then I realized I had no idea what Student Assembly actually does. So I did what any curious college student would do: go to the Assembly’s website. A few initial impressions: the landing page is a photo slideshow, of which slides one, two and four are the exact same picture with different captions. The “SA News” section’s last post was on Sept. 16, 2012. The website highlights two of the Assembly’s recent initiatives — the Dartmouth Group Directory and Course Picker. The DGD hasn’t been updated in four years, based on the page for this newspaper, which lists a ’12 as editor-in-chief. The Course Picker, on the other hand, does not work whatsoever. Any attempt to search for a class immediately returns an error. But maybe their website just has some issues — it might not reflect the state of Student Assembly. After all, the recent Bill of Rights website certainly looks great, and maybe the fact that two of their initiatives have gone nowhere is just a coincidence. But if the prevailing opinion on campus is to believed, it’s not.