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July 26, 2025 | Latest Issue
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SA condemns swastika incident

By Charles Gardner | January 16, 2002

In an rare BlitzMail vote held last night, Student Assembly passed a resolution condemning last weekend's incident in which a swastika was discovered drawn on a student's door. The departure of several voting members over the course of last night's weekly meeting -- which conflicted with many members' Greek rush activities -- denied the Assembly a quorum and necessitated an electronic vote afterwards. The resolution condemned "any act of bigotry or hatred" and was passed following a lengthy session of debate in which members -- as well as a number of nonmember visitors -- discussed the proper response to the Jan.

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Cautiously, groups view revision as opportunity

By Sabrina Peric | January 16, 2002

While campus cultural organizations welcome the prospect of altering Dartmouth's mission statement to emphasize diversity, they hope that the revision will have a practical implication and not simply a symbolic one. "I think that changing the mission statement of the College can be very powerful," Jeff Garrett '02, an executive board member of MOSAIC, said. Many of the organizations contacted by The Dartmouth echoed Garrett's statement about the importance of the gesture. "I think it's a step in making the College promise that the creation of such an atmosphere is one of the College's goals," Reiko Imai '03, president of the Dartmouth Japan Society, said. Imai, however, was quick to add, "I hope that it will become a reality and not just something stated in words on paper." Many cultural groups question the College's resolve to make the recommended changes. "I look forward to seeing the Student Life Initiative follow through with this change and implement policies, programs and other initiatives," Jackson Lee '04, president of the Dartmouth Chinese Cultural Society, said. "This sort of rhetoric about Dartmouth welcoming diversity and flaunting it in our brochures, [is] not an accurate picture ... diversity is emphasized as a recruitment thing and then once they're here, how satisfying of an experience is it?" Garrett asked. In explaining the need to amend the mission statement, the Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity cited a 1998 Dartmouth survey that found that 20 percent of the student body reported feeling rejected by students whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own.

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February date set for mission statement draft

By Devin Foxall | January 16, 2002

Six months after College President James Wright responded to a diversity committee's recommendation to change Dartmouth's mission statement, the President's Office plans to premiere a new College statement within the next few weeks. The new mission statement will seek to eliminate what the Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity said was a "laissez-faire" attitude in Dartmouth's commitment to diversity. While the Committee did not craft specific new language for the mission statement, it did make several recommendations for changes, most focusing on increasing interaction between students of different backgrounds. The current mission statement -- with its emphasis on fostering a "love of learning" -- says little in the way of diversity.

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Halberstam criticizes American 'napping'

By N.F.S. Knight | January 16, 2002

"The decade after the Cold War was a time of trivial pursuits," Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Halberstam told a packed crowd in Filene Auditorium last night. The renowned author of "The Best and the Brightest," which chronicled the debacle of American foreign policy during the Vietnam era, Halberstam spoke on the dramatic changes in U.S.

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Mission statements mirror college's history

By Ryan Samuels | January 16, 2002

From promoting the education of Native Americans to stressing the love of learning in everyday life, Dartmouth's mission statements and proto-mission statements offer telling windows into the College's changing face throughout its more than 200-year history. Signed by King George III of England on December 13, 1769, the Dartmouth College Charter was the first document associated with the institution and, despite predating the modern concept of a mission statement, fulfilled the same goal-setting objectives. The charter characterizes the premises behind the new institution as "the laudable and charitable design of spreading Christian knowledge among the savages of our American wilderness" and "civilizing and Christianizing children of pagans." Though the charter corresponds with the myth of its author Eleazar Wheelock's dream of bringing liberal education, "civilization" and Scripture to Native Americans, Wheelock had given up on Christianizing Native Americans before he even penned the document, according to history professor Jere Daniell, who has written considerably on the history of the College. "Funds were only available for him for education of Native Americans, so he pretended," Daniell said. In fact, Wheelock never made much of an effort to conceal his non-interest in educating the Native American population.

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Burnett '03 will go to Paralympics

By Jenn Coffey | January 16, 2002

Carl Burnett '03 is spending an "off" term in Colorado this winter, but he is hardly relaxing -- he's training for the 2002 Winter Paralympic Games, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Burnett will participate as part of the U.S.

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Experts disagree on function of mission statements

By Fred Yarger | January 16, 2002

What do mission statements do? Never an easy question to answer, most education experts agree that mission statements should conform to one basic philosophy: they should set goals for institutions and serve as a yardstick for measuring their performance. But the consensus stops there. While some in higher education argue strongly that mission statements should never undergo revision -- no matter how the world around them changes -- others believe that colleges and universities should use them to articulate new and evolving objectives. Perhaps the single greatest dilemma that authors of mission statements face is how to capture and guide complicated institutions in a few hundred words.

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Old software forces power users to wait

By Nathaniel Ward | January 15, 2002

The College is working to provide support for the latest Apple and Microsoft operating systems, though their efforts are complicated by incompatibility with Dartmouth's proprietary software. "The big issue for Windows XP and OS X is that there is some software we need for our network that doesn't run on them," said Bill Brawley, Director of Communications Services.

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PAC spearheads new 'green printing' system

By Katie Martin | January 15, 2002

"Green printing," an effort by the Purchasing Advisory Committee and Computing Services to reduce waste, will soon debut at the Berry printing window. Last year, between 25 and 40 percent of documents were printed but never retrieved from public printers. "The new strategy is designed to fix a system with inherent problems," said Mike Hogan, Operations Manager of Computing Services. Students will direct documents to a campus-wide queue and will now have to use a password to print documents in person from one of several "release stations." "Dartmouth is one of the last colleges not to charge for public printing," Hogan said.

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Zaretsky speaks on Klein's matriarchs

By Kay Fukunaga | January 15, 2002

Melanie Klein, a 20th-century psychological theorist, changed her field with the conception of the mother as the central authority figure in a person's upbringing, New School for Social Research history professor Eli Zaretsky argued yesterday. Speaking in front of a small gathering of students and scholars, including historians and psychologists, Zaretsky presented a lecture entitled "War, Women and Psychoanalysis: The Case of Melanie Klein." Klein was born in Vienna and was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud's close associates.

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Muslim prof. fights dismissal

By Sabrina Peric | January 15, 2002

In a press conference yesterday, University of Southern Florida professor Sami Al-Arian said he would fight the dismissal being brought against him due to suspected terrorist links. "I am not the culprit here," Al-Arian, a Palestinian and local Muslim community leader, said at the afternoon news conference, where representatives of national Muslim groups and civil rights organizations rallied around him. USF President Judy Genshaft fired Al-Arian, a tenured computer science professor, on Dec.

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College reviews human subject research rules

By Alison Schmauch | January 14, 2002

The College committee that oversees human subject research is reviewing its policies in response to a recent report calling for the reform of procedures dealing with potential financial conflicts in research involving human subjects. According to the study issued by the American Association of Medical Colleges, academic institutions need to oversee human subject research more carefully, guarding especially against financial conflicts of interest. At least part of the problem stems from the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which the report says allowed institutions and researchers to share in the return on successful inventions arising from federally-funded research. While the report's authors note that the Bayh-Dole Act has facilitated collaboration between academia and industry, they find that, as academics receive more funds from commercial sources, they face more financial conflicts of interest. Such conflicts of interest are especially serious when academics undertake research involving human subjects, according to the AAMC report. Elizabeth Bankert, director of Dartmouth's Institutional Review Board, which oversees research at Dartmouth, said she believes that Dartmouth already has adequate protections against conflict of interest in place. For example, the AAMC defines "significant financial conflict" as benefits of more than $10,000 or 5 percent equity in a company arising from a study.

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Gay comm. searches for identity

By Matt Lewis | January 11, 2002

In response to concerns over inclusion and identity within the Dartmouth gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, many organizations and institutions are debating over whether to change their official names. Focus of this debate centers around the currently entitled LGBTQA Resource Room in Robinson Hall, whose acronym could possibly expand to LGBTQCIA to represent gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, questioning, queer, curious, intersex and ally.

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