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The Dartmouth
July 3, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth
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News

AD, AXA indicted for serving alcohol to minors

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Alpha Chi Alpha and Alpha Delta fraternities are currently under indictment for allegedly serving alcohol to minors in two separate incidents. AD was indicted by Grafton County Superior Court on two counts of serving to minors, and Alpha Chi received one count.


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Kauffman '61 is a philospher-physician

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Stuart Kauffman '61, comfortably stretched out on the sofa in the Montgomery House overlooking the frozen Occom Pond, seemed at peace with the landscape. "There's something awfully honest about these hills," said Kauffman, renowned theoretical biologist and one of this term's Montgomery Fellows. Kauffman arrived at the College on Monday and will be on campus until Feb.


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Fowler observes new House

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Rockefeller Center Director Linda Fowler, long considered an authority on government and elections, last week got to put her expertise to good use when she journeyed to Williamsburg, Va.


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Kauffman '61 gives facts of life

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Stuart Kauffman '61, the second of this term's Mongtomery Fellows, yesterday addressed in front of a packed Rocky 3 the topics of life's emergence on Earth and the possibility of life elsewhere. Kauffman's lecture, titled "At Home in the Universe, Is Life Probable Everywhere?" drew a capacity crowd that overflowed from Rocky 3 into Rocky 2, where students watched the speech on a large-screen television. Half stand-up comedian and half lecturing theoretical biologist, Kauffman began by speculating whether there could be life on Mars. If there were life on the "Red Planet," Kauffman said, the most important possible consequence could occur if life on Mars were dramatically different from Earth, in which case scientists would be confronted with the first time in our intellectual history with the means to invent a general biology. He asserted that because this was a completely unexplored area of science, the most important step in beginning to research all of the possibilities presented would be the asking of questions. "The science which is the best of sciences and the most confusing of sciences is the forming of questions, or protoscience," he told the audience.


News

Application numbers drop from last year

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After six straight years of increases in total applications, the College this year saw a six percent drop in the application pool for the incoming freshman class. The number of applicants for the Class of 2001 fell to 10,700 applicants from last year's 11,385 -- a drop which is consistent with the trend across the country. Despite the six percent drop, the 10,700 total applications still represent the second-highest number ever received by the College in a single year, surpassed only by last year's number, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg. Furstenberg said all Ivy League schools except Columbia saw a fall from last year's numbers. Harvard University's total applications were down nine to 10 percent, Princeton University saw a eight percent drop and Yale University lost seven percent off of last year's numbers, according to Furstenberg. Furstenberg said although the total pool is smaller this year, it is "more diverse and stronger academically" than any previous collection of freshman candidates. Reasons for the decline Furstenberg said the across-the-board drop is probably due to recent publicity about the difficulty of getting into Ivy League schools, which might have scared off some high school seniors from applying. College President James Freedman said "we can relate from this that students are applying wisely to schools rather than wasting their applications on schools they are not likely to get into." "It would seem the students that are not applying are the ones that are the weakest academically," Furstenberg said.


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O. J. verdict steals show in Brace

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About 30 students gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's State of the Union Address in Brace Commons last night, but most of the audience seemed more concerned with the verdict in the O.J.


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Assembly seeks to speed College bureaucracy

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In their four years at the College, students hoping to effect change must weigh the relative impacts of short-term outcomes versus long-term struggles. The recent actions of the Student Assembly put in perspective the troubles faced by students trying to implement changes during their four years at a 228-year-old school that measures time on a much longer scale. Three weeks ago, the Assembly voted to appropriate $8,500 -- almost one-third of its $26,550 budget -- toward the purchase of new equipment for the Kresge weight room in the Berry Sports Center. The equipment will include both large-scale exercise equipment in the form of stationary bicycles and a stair-climbing machine, as well as smaller supplementary items needed to maintain the room. And while the Assembly's contribution will produce tangible results for students by the end of this term, the solution is a short-term one.


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Students say supercluster heightens campus intellectualism

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When the College implemented the "Dartmouth Experience" plan last year, Dean of the College Lee Pelton said he wanted the East Wheelock supercluster to be "a marriage of intellectual and social life at Dartmouth." After a term-and-a-half in existence, many students and faculty living in the cluster say it is achieving Pelton's goal. "I am very pleased and happy with the way things are going," Pelton said.



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Rain threatens efforts to build snow sculpture

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Workers constructing the snow sculpture say the 30-foot knight will be finished in time for Winter Carnival, although rain forecast for Wednesday night could undermine their efforts. The sculpture will depict a knight fighting a dragon, in the tradition of England's Saint George.



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Bomb threat disrupts Leb. 'Star Wars' debut

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A bomb threat forced more than 200 people into the cold at the first showing of the re-release of the movie "Star Wars" at the Sony Theater in Lebanon Saturday night. More than half the people evacuated were Dartmouth students, and some of them had been waiting for tickets since 3 p.m. At about 8 p.m.


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Bollinger begins at Michigan today

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Former Dartmouth provost Lee Bollinger begins his duties as the 12th president of the University of Michigan this morning, although his official inauguration is several months away. Bollinger, who moved into the Michigan president's house with little fanfare Jan.


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'Genius' biologist arrives at College

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Renowned biologist and Dartmouth alumnus Stuart Kauffman '61, who arrives today to begin his 11-day stint as a Montgomery Fellow, said he looks forward to being pestered by as many people as possible. "I hope a bunch of undergraduates who want to hear really weird things will come and find me," he said.


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NYC school chief praises reform

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New York City School Chancellor Rudy Crew gave a public lecture last night to a packed 105 Dartmouth Hall about the ways the city school system is currently failing its children and how the system could be reformed. Crew spoke generally about urban education, but he also stated his belief that the New York City public school system over which he presides is at a crossroads: "Either I will preside over its resurrection ... or its demise -- there is very little in between." Crew's speech, which was punctuated throughout with laughter, emphasized that schools revolve around human contact and are not simply a factory where students are educated. "Education is a profession that is relationship-driven," and teaching is all about relationships moving people from one state to another, he said. Crew said he thinks school systems are failing to instill several standards in their students.


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No profs found for LACS classes

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Students interested in taking Latino Studies courses in the near future will have to wait a bit longer, because the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program has still been unable to find someone to teach them. LACS is currently working on drawing up a short list of candidates for a permanent tenure-track professor for Latino studies courses, and will soon invite individuals to visit the College, according to Marysa Navarro, chair of the LACS program. The College created the tenure-track position a year ago in response to student and faculty efforts to make Latino Studies a permanent part of the LACS program -- and the search for someone to fill the position has been underway ever since. The hurried search did not produce a sufficient pool of candidates immediately, and Brenda Bright, who had been teaching the courses on an interim basis, was compelled to leave the College when her contract expired last spring. The LACS program began a more extensive search last fall and Associate Dean of the Faculty George Wolford said he authorized the program to hire a temporary professor while the search continued. While there have been a few candidates interested, Wolford said none of them could be hired for one reason or another. "We could not find anyone to come and teach the courses for the year," Navarro said.


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Thayer professor designs sails for America's Cup

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A professor from the Thayer School of Engineering is currently working with IBM and Fluent Inc. -- a Lebanon software company -- to design sails intended to help the United States win the 2000 America's Cup yacht race. Thayer Professor Horst Richter is researching in conjunction with Thayer student Ron Ross and Jeff Shoreman '97. Richter and his staff are actually part of a larger group whose goal is to bring the America's Cup back to the U.S., since a New Zealand yacht won the competition in 1995. Peter Runstadler, Director of Applications Consulting at Fluent, Inc. said, "We're sort of a group working together to make it happen." PACT2000 -- a syndicate of the New York Yacht Club, which is working to solicit donations for research and development of the yacht -- is funding and coordinating the project. Richter, who also teaches the undergraduate class, Engineering Sciences 2: The Technology of Sailing, said PACT2000 approached IBM to gain access to their superior technology. "We need a lot of computer power because there are a lot of complex computations," he said.


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Crew: the man with a million kids

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Throughout his distinguished career in public education, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has made it a point that every child has equal educational opportunities. Extending such equality throughout the New York City schools will be certainly be a massive undertaking -- for more than 1,100 schools and over 1 million students fall under Crew's jurisdiction. And with a budget larger than 125 nations and a total school security force that ranks as the 11th largest police force in the nation, casual observers might think Crew was the mayor of New York and not its schools chancellor. But Crew is indeed an expert in the field of education, and he gave a lecture last night in Dartmouth Hall describing the problems he sees with urban education and ways in which he feels they can be addressed. Just moments after arriving on campus yesterday afternoon, Crew was in the 1930s Room of Rockefeller Center sipping on mint tea and offering his views on education issues from literacy to overcrowding in schools.


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Survey: '00s study, stress more

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College freshmen nationwide have become more conservative, ambitious, serious and stressed-out, and Dartmouth's Class of 2000 is no exception. Freshmen nationwide are smoking more and studying more, but are less likely to approve of casual sex or abortion than previously, a trend the New York Times attributes to a rise of conservatism in a world where freshmen feel increased pressure to succeed. "The emotional health of students seems to have bottomed out," Alexander Astin told the Los Angeles Times.


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Ivy League students struggle to cooperate

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To many, the term "Ivy League" means a collection of New England schools with distinguished professors, famous alumni and not-so-great athletic teams. But, despite what prospective applicants might think, the eight Ivy League schools do not constitute a unified group of allied institutions that act as one. In fact, as evidenced by the recent difficulties by various campus organizations to bring together different Ivy League students, the eight schools of the Ivy League do not have much of a connection at all. Efforts to unite students from the eight Ivy League schools -- Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Yale University -- have a history of organizational and communicative difficulties. A recent example of this is the Upper Valley blood drive, which began yesterday and ends today. The College's Student Assembly had tried to organize an inter-Ivy League competition, to see which school could raise the most blood. But collaboration between the eight schools failed, and the blood drive competition is now between the four classes at the College. Kristin Veley '00, a member of the Assembly community service committee, said a late start on the organization of the blood drive and unenthusiastic responses from the other Ivies precluded the possibility of an inter-Ivy blood scenario. Of all the schools contacted, Veley said only Harvard replied. "The other Ivies are being really lame about it," Assembly President Jon Heavey '97 said. Veley said the Assembly is still interested in establishing a precedent for inter-Ivy events, "hopefully next year." Steven Wolkoff '97, vice president of Hillel, the College's organization for Jewish students, said he has found Ivy League students unwilling to work with each other. Wolkoff said he has been communicating with leaders from other Ivy League Hillel organizations since last term to plan the celebration of an inter-Ivy Jewish Sabbath. Earlier this term, Dartmouth Hillel invited Jewish students from schools throughout the Ivy League up to New Hampshire to "hang out and go skiing," he said. After initial enthusiasm, the event "kind of didn't happen" because it became too hard to organize, he said. "Timing hurt us," he said.


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