When her face first appeared as one of about a dozen photographs that flashed in the upper right hand corner of Dartmouth's new website, Janine Denny '02 -- an African American student here -- was surprised.
"It just showed up one day," she said.
She was stopped at Lone Pine Tavern, at parties and outside Lou's over parents' weekend. She also began receiving at least four BlitzMail messages per day related to the website.
After about three weeks, Denny blitzed the webmaster and asked for her photo to be removed from the slide show.
Computing Services Spokesman Bill Brawley reported that the request was completed right away.
Although Denny said she did not mention race as a factor contributing to her request in the message to Keiwit, she acknowledged, "I didn't like the fact that I was chosen as a representative without my permission. The race thing was just something added on top of that."
She added that the photographs that flash on the website misrepresent Dartmouth's student body.
"If you look at it, the close-ups are of two black kids and an Asian kid," she said. "All the others are from far away."
Since Denny's removal, there have been 11 photographs in the flashing slide show. Among the four photographs in this series that feature close-up frontal head shots, there is an African American student lounging on the Green, a Native American student in traditional garb and a close-up of an Asian student wearing a bike helmet.
Misrepresentation
Despite the image that the flashing photographs on the website may convey to onlookers, the majority of Dartmouth's students are not members of minority groups.
"There's a misrepresentation going on here," newly elected '02 class President Phil Mone said. "It's a misrepresentation because Dartmouth is 68 percent Caucasian and the slide show that you see is about 95 percent minority."
Mone said many classmates have complained to him about the new College website, and some have raised the issue of race and what role it plays in Dartmouth's online representation.
Lonnie Threatte '02 -- an African American -- called the website's images "deceiving."
"They make it look like we've got all these different people here," he said. "Dartmouth can't claim diversity when it's just surface diversity."
At the same time, he said the new diversity-focused aspects of the website may draw some ethnically and racially diverse students to the College -- and for this reason, the perhaps misrepresentative images may be worthwhile.
Mone, however, thought the website's visible emphasis on diversity might have a more negative affect.
"The College is clearly using this as a marketing tool to draw minority students," Mone said. "I work in admissions, and I know that nothing so far reaching and public as the official College website would have anything but a lot of thought put into what images it portrays," Mone said. "The problem is that its done in such an obvious way."
Indeed, a web design team with members from Computing Services, Admissions, the Department of Public Affairs and the President's Office spent six months to plan, create and implement the new site.
Administrative intent
According to members of the web design team, diversity was a conscious concern.
"Diversity issues are very much in our minds," Computer Services Spokesman Brawley said. "We wanted to do more on the web with regards to diversity."
He said the web design team met with a diversity committee made up of administrators working closely with the Dean of the College and others, such as people involved in athletics.
"[Director of Admissions] Karl Furstenburg wanted to present more of Dartmouth's diversity on the website," Brawley reported, saying that this led the team to look into issues of diversity continually throughout the website's creation.
"It's just something we wanted to keep in mind as we went forward," he explained.
Brawley said one new aspects of the website that aims at making it more accessible to a diverse community is its "diversity resources" section. In the future, according to Brawley, the website will include profiles of people at Dartmouth in the "about Dartmouth" section, which will also highlight Dartmouth's diversity.
But Director of Admissions Karl Furstenburg was not so forward when he stated the goals of the design team, of which he was a member.
"Diversity is part in parcel of all that we do," he said. "We wanted to make Dartmouth inviting to a broader audience, but that wasn't a single focus of this at all."
He encouraged students to notice the new technical features of the revamped site, its easier navigatability, its roll-over text and its accessibility.
He also pointed out the fact that the website is a work in progress, repeating that there will be "continual change" as the site evolves further.
Flashy images
Although design team members said diversity played a role in their website decision making, they universally denied that the College had intentionally placed disproportionate numbers of minorities in the slide show.
"As a matter of course we take photos of the campus and the people on campus," Director of Public Affairs Laurel Stavis said. "We choose photos because they represent images of Dartmouth that convey to a number of different audiences that this is a dynamic and exciting place to be."
Furstenburg echoed this statement: "I think there are a variety of students represented."
He added, "There's so much variety in the people at Dartmouth and the things that they do, there's no way you could capture that in a set of photos that cycle through."
Brawley also referred to the small role that a flashing picture plays in the website as a whole.
"We didn't want the focus to be on the graphic," he said. "It's kind of small. There's not much you can do with a photograph in that space."
However, he also admitted that diversity did play into the picture selection.
"I think there was some desire to think about representing a diverse community with that photo, but we weren't trying to misrepresent Dartmouth in any way," he said. "I don't think there was any thought to say that X percentage should be of people in this category, Y percentage should be in that one."
All agreed that the photographs were honestly attempting to show Dartmouth the way it is.
As Brawley put it, "Dartmouth is a very diverse place. We're no longer the kind of all-male predominantly white school we were 30 years ago."
