New York Governor David Paterson nominated Galen D. Kirkland '72 to be the state's next commissioner of the Division of Human Rights, according to a press release issued by the Governor's office last week. The Division of Human Rights was created to uphold New York's Human Rights Law, which affords New York citizens "an equal opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life" and bars many forms of discrimination, according to the division's web site. Kirkland is currently the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the New York State Office of the Attorney General, where he has worked since 1999. Kirkland has served as the executive director of Advocates for Children of New York, overseeing educational advocacy programs for public schools, the executive director of the New York City Civil Rights Coalition, bringing together religious rights-based and service organizations, and the vice president and general counsel for West Harlem Community Organization, which provides low-income housing and promotes economic development. Kirkland, a regular financial contributor to Dartmouth, according to the College Fund, received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
The Bush administration will offer student-loan companies a financial rescue plan that will give the companies access to low-interest lines of credit and some capital, according to the Department of Education's web site. This deal was negotiated after the four leading subsidized loan providers -- Sallie Mae, Bank of America, Citibank, and JPMorgan Chase & Co -- were unable to come up with the funds necessary to meet the demand for student loans and threatened to drop out of federally subsidized lending programs unless the government offered them more beneficial terms. As federally subsidized loans are key components of most financial aid packages, the Department of Education moved quickly to prevent those lenders, which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, provide 40 percent of all subsidized loans, from affecting student's financial planning for the 2008-2009 school year.
Sixty students, faculty and staff at the Tuck School of Business participated for the first time in a student-run blood drive earlier at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center this month. Students teamed up with the DHMC Blood Donor Program to organize the drive, which lasted five days and transported faculty, staff and students to the hospital to donate blood. A committee of Tuck students, led by Michelle Loveys Dovier, marketing specialist for the DHMC Blood Donor Program, Julie Lewis Tu'09 and Chelsey Hood, administrative assistant at Dartmouth Medical School, organized the blood drive. "The students planned everything, from recruiting students, faculty, staff and partners to marketing to logistics to getting the T-shirts and coordinating rides to come over to DHMC," Dovier said. "They were in full control of the entire event."
