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The Dartmouth
July 25, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth
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News

Events recognize sexual assault

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With the sponsorship of 31 campus organizations, the fifth annual Sexual Assault and Awareness week kicks off today with a mock Committee on Standards hearing and culminates Thursday night with a "Take Back the Night March." "The general purpose of this week is education and to raise awareness about sexual assault and how it affects people," said Yun Chung '97, who served on the committee that planned the week's events.


News

Shafer dead at 71

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Chemistry Professor emeritus Paul "Dick" Shafer died Wednesday of cardiac arrest at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.



News

Politicized SA helps Class Councils

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Critics claim the Student Assembly has done nothing this year except waste its time engaging in meaningless political bantering. But the political wrangling in the Assembly has at least one positive repercussion: the growth of the Class Councils. While Assembly members have debated impeaching their president, the four councils have been planning more activities, becoming more involved in policy matters and scoring a large increase in College funding. Senior Class President Dan Garodnick said the increasing presence of the Class Councils is directly tied to the public perception of the Assembly. "I think there's an increasingly negative perception of Student Assembly, and students tend to look to the Class Councils more for their representation," Garodnick said. As the councils have become more involved on campus, people have begun to take notice - Assembly presidential candidates this year have pledged to better integrate the Assembly and the councils. The Class Councils have three main functions: to sponsor and organize activities, to handle policy matters pertaining to their class and to try to create unity and class spirit. Class leaders say the councils are the perfect organizations for handling issues that relate to a specific class.



News

Holocaust remembered

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Dartmouth's Hillel, the College's Jewish students' organization, held a series of events this weekend to recognize Yom Ha Shoah, the commemoration of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Mike Hauser '95 and Gila Ackerman '94 organized a reading of names of some of those killed in the Holocaust to begin Yom Ha Shoah events.


News

Computer consciousness?

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World renowned author Robert Penrose gave the keynote address for a day-long conference Saturday in a filled-to-capacity Cook Auditorium, discussing the possibility of a conscious computer. The conference, titled "Of Apples and Origins: Stories of Life on Earth," was sponsored by the College and the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Penrose is the author of the 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind," which fueled public interest in the interrelationship between artificial intelligence and the human mind. Among Penrose's major contentions is that computers will never be able to think as humans do. Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and author of the book "Consciousness Explained," presented the opposing viewpoint at the conference, contending that the creation of a conscious computer will be "the inevitable culmination of scientific advances that have gradually demystified and unified the material world." In addition to their speeches and workshops, Penrose and Dennett participated in a round-table discussion with Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, and author of "The Problem of Consciousness." The speakers advanced their theories and predictions regarding the possibility of consciousness through artificial intelligence in a debate mediated by Eric Chaisson of the Wright Center for Science Education at Tufts University. Chaisson empathized with the audience and set a light tone for the debate when he began the discussion by saying he was confused, and asking the speakers if they were confused as well. "The very fact that the mind leads us to truths that are not computable convinces me that a computer can never duplicate the mind," Penrose said in a news release. "It could well be that the way the universe actually operates is according to some non-computable procedure," Penrose said in the discussion. To demonstrate the ambiguity in determining consciousness, Dennett cited similarities in the physical construction of the human mind and the nervous system of a cockroach and asked "Is the brain of a cockroach non-computable?" Penrose responded that he did not know.


News

Softball dominates

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Dartmouth Softball dominated both games of a doubleheader this weekend against Amherst College, scoring 9-2 and 7-1 victories. Ericka Lee '95 struck out six Amherst batters for the day as she pitched a six hitter in the first game and two hitter in the second game. The Big Green attack also helped in Lee's effort with Co-Captain Jen Pitts '95 hitting two for five and freshmen Lauren McQuade and Jodi Priselac tallying two hits each in the victory. Amherst took an early lead in the first contest with two runs in the third, but Dartmouth rebounded with nine runs in the four innings. In the second game, pinch hitter Kelly Goodwin '97 began the Dartmouth scoring with a hit that put her in position to score the tying run off of a single by Pitts.


News

Female Cherokee chief to speak

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Wilma Mankiller, the first female leader of a major Native American tribe, will visit the College later this month. Mankiller, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, will deliver a lecture on April 18 after spending most of the day with Native American students. She is widely credited with revitalizing the Cherokee Nation through her efforts in improving health and children's programs. In addition to receiving numerous honorary degrees, including one from Dartmouth in 1991, Mankiller was named Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year in 1987. Mankiller's visit and her speech titled "Native America: Contemporary Issues in Historical Context," are being sponsored by the Native American Program and the Native American Studies Program, with assistance from the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences. In 1985 Mankiller was appointed chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the second-largest nonassimilated tribe in North America. Mankiller announced Monday that she would retire and not seek re-election next year when her second four-year term expires. Mankiller participated in an occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 as part of a movement to reclaim land in the name of all "American Indians," which began her career in Native American activism. In 1981 she became director of the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department. She was elected deputy chief of Cherokee Nation in 1983, and two years later was appointed the nation's principal chief.


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Symposium begins

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In a keynote address last night, Boston University President John Silber said actions do not necessarily constitute activism for today's generation. Speaking as part of the Senior Symposium, Silber defined activism as an intellectual movement in which universities take on a leadership position to improve their communities. Silber, a 1990 Democractic gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, said it is wrong to think the university campus is isolated from the rest of the world. "There is no world more real, or any world as real, as the world you are in right now," Silber said, "The world of ideas in which students are absorbed when they are students and the world in which faculty are absorbed for most of their lives is an intensely real world." Silber said activism exists in subtler forms than just "marches and protests." "I don't think you should suppose that because you get out there and wave flags and join political movements that suddenly that is the way to be an activist," Silber said. "One can be an activist by being a serious intellectual, or a poet, or an artist, or a historian, or a mathematician or a scientist," Silber said. Silber focused his speech on how two programs at B.U.


News

Dining Services delivers here

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Beginning Sunday, Food Court will deliver food from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. to all campus locations and students can charge their purchases to a College Identification card. A service charge of $1 will be added to each order.


News

Panel addresses education

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A panel that included two Dartmouth graduates discussed educational equity, activism and Generation X as part of the Senior Symposium yesterday afternoon in the Collis Common Ground. The panel, which was attended by more than 70 people, included Crystal Crawford '87, a lawyer and College counselor; Daniel Porter, Teach for America president; John Ritchie '71, a high school principal; Sergio Quesada, University of Queretaro anthropology professor; and Robert Binswanger, acting education department chair. Porter said many young people feel disempowered.


News

Fahey elected new Trustee

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Alumni elected Peter Fahey '68, Th'70, a former partner at a leading international investment banking firm, to the Board of Trustees, the College announced yesterday. Fahey, 47, recently retired from Goldman, Sachs & Co. as head of its corporate finance division after 15 years at the firm.


News

French house to open

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A new French affinity house will open next fall, enabling students to immerse themselves in the language without leaving Hanover. The affinity house will be located at 16 North Park Street, one block South of Lyme Road, in the building previously occupied by the International Students Center, said John Wilson, project architect for Facilities Planning and Architectural Services.


News

Too much exercise - a disorder?

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A compulsive exerciser might be someone who runs 60 miles and eats 5,000 calories per day, comprised of apple slices and rice cakes, said Alayne Yates, a former professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Arizona. Yates spoke in a public lecture titled "The Over Committed Athlete: Heroic Achievement in Scholars and Athletes" to an audience of over 50 people in Cook Auditorium last night. Compulsive exercisers are generally healthy people who get "hooked on athleticism" and cannot stop exercising - even when it becomes detrimental to their health, as in cases of injury, Yates said. She said the condition is a disorder when the exercising "impairs their functioning in other parts of their lives." "They felt they had to control their bodies and do without food, rest and care," she said.


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Tests reveal Freedman has cancer

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College President James Freedman will undergo six months of chemotherapy to treat lymphoma discovered following surgery in Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital on Monday, according to a College statement. Freedman had surgery to remove a testicular tumor, which laboratory tests confirmed was cancerous, according to the statement.



News

Forbes reads from novel

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Upper Valley resident Edith Forbes read from her first novel, ''Alma Rose," yesterday to a gathering of 23 people in Sanborn House. "Alma Rose" tells the story of a young lesbian woman who grows up in a small town in America and, after a romantic affair with a boisterous female truck driver, gradually sheds her shy exterior. Forbes said one of her friends aptly described "Alma Rose" as "a book about the inner life of the terminally shy." She explained that the novel told the story of a young woman discovering her lesbian sexuality and growing up in the West. Forbes read three excerpts from her novel in a quiet, monotonous voice.


News

Freedman doing well, remains in hospital

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College President James Freedman, who is in good condition, remains in Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital despite earlier reports that said he would be released yesterday. Hospital spokeswoman Peggy Slazman said Freedman's continued hospitalization is not abnormal. Freedman underwent surgery Monday to remove a testicular tumor.


News

Books, safes, cameras and locks

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A system of vaults, padlocked doors, underground rooms, locked drawers and closed bookshelves protect more than $100 million worth of manuscripts, books and photographs in Baker Library's Special Collections. A discussion of the library's security system, which followed the recent theft of a $150,000 rare book from a public library in Vermont, has determined the system is "tight," Special Collections Librarian Philip Cronenwett said. Two weeks ago a thief pried open bars on a basement window, cracked the book's case and stole an antique chromolithographed edition of John James Audubon's "Birds of America" from the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock, Vt. The mammoth original edition of Audubon's colorful anthology of American birds is on display in Baker in an open-faced glass case in the middle of the Special Collection's reading room.