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August 15, 2026
The Dartmouth
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Study: freshmen face depression

By Sarah Betts | February 5, 2002

The freshman year of college can take a serious toll on the well-being of students, according to a survey published in the February issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The study polled 3,680 students at 50 different colleges during orientation and again at the end of their first year, finding that while 52.4 percent rated themselves "above average" in emotional well-being at the start of the school year, that number dropped to 44.9 percent by the year's end.

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Groundhog predicts six more weeks

By Alison Schmauch | February 4, 2002

Unfortunately for frozen freshmen experiencing New Hampshire's winter wrath for the first time, groundhog Punxsutawney Phil's sighting of his shadow this weekend -- forecasting six more weeks of winter -- does appear to be consistent with long-range weather trends. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, some meteorologists expressed skepticism about the general accuracy of the groundhog's predictions. Mark Bacon, a forecaster for AccuWeather, noted that weather across the East Coast will be colder than usual throughout the month of February and that precipitation will be average. "We can't forecast weather much ahead of that, though," he said. Bacon tends to put little stock in the groundhog's predictions, he said. "The groundhog has seen its shadow 92 times and not seen in shadow 14 times," he said.

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Non-trad. piercings flourish

By Sabrina Peric | February 4, 2002

More than 50 percent of college students have non-traditional body piercings and 23 percent have tattoos, according to a study published in this month's issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. "Oh yeah, [piercing] is getting more and more mainstream," Bruce Bernier, owner of TLC Body Piercing in Fairlee, Vt., said.

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Rieser '76 discusses U.S.'s Colombia policy

By Richard Lazarus | February 4, 2002

Timothy Rieser '76, a senior advisor to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, spoke frankly Friday about the United States' involvement in Colombia, the making of foreign policy and how students and other citizens can influence it. Leahy, a Democrat, is chairman of the Senate's Appropriation subcommittee on foreign aid, and Rieser is the senior of his two foreign policy advisors.

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Spanish dept. FSP has unclear future

By Megh Duwadi | February 4, 2002

Although the leader of the Spanish department's Spring term Foreign Study Program last week told participants the program would almost certainly be relocated from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Montevideo, Uruguay, the administrator in charge of off-campus programs said the future of the FSP remains undecided. The FSP's relocation "has not yet been decided," Assistant Dean of the Faculty Peter Armstrong said. FSP leader Juan Medrano-Pizarro announced the change Wednesday at a group meeting, FSP participants said.

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College 'Net security gets $1.5M

By N.F.S. Knight | February 1, 2002

The Mellon Foundation recently awarded Dartmouth's Public Key Infrastructure team a $1.5 million grant to for research that looks to revolutionize Internet security at academic institutions across the country. Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, refers to a digital technology that utilizes an infrastructure of private and public keys to encrypt and decrypt information in order to send it securely over the Internet. The purpose of the Mellon grant and the goal of the PKI team at Dartmouth will be to create and deploy such an infrastructure on a large scale to be used across America. "Within a year we should have some good prototypes running.

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Summers: Offer tenure to younger professors

By Fred Yarger | February 1, 2002

Tenure programs at some colleges across the country are being reexamined after Harvard President Lawrence Summers suggested that Harvard should tenure more young professors rather than the older, more established faculty already famous in their fields it usually hires. Dartmouth already has a firmly rooted policy of hiring younger professors, however, and there are no plans to reconsider the College's emphasis on long-term faculty development. According to Dean of the Faculty Jamshed Bharucha, while some new faculty do begin work as tenured professors, Dartmouth hires most often at the assistant professor level. "When we hire an assistant professor, we hope that the person will succeed in the tenure review and we seek to provide support and mentoring," he said. Earning tenure means that a professor's position is permanent and does not require periodic contract renewals.

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College offers new $5,500 grants

By Charles Gardner | February 1, 2002

Students wishing to spend leave terms engaged in on-campus research will soon find their financial burdens lightened considerably due to a recently-approved College program offering substantial grants to support undergraduate researchers. In the past, limited funds have been available to support the travel and campus expenses of such students, but the new grants -- at $5,500 apiece -- will constitute a proper salary for research work. "The idea is that if a student wants academic experience but needs to get a leave-term job to save up money, we would provide them with a job that pays the equivalent of a summer job to conduct research," Dean of Faculty Jamshed Bharucha said. New faculty mentoring awards -- intended to recognize faculty who devote significant time and energy to advising students on a variety of issues outside of the classroom -- were announced alongside the research grants. Honoring faculty members who have worked with students on topics as varied as honors theses and independent research, the awards will acknowledge areas of excellence "that typically do not get explicitly recognized," according to Bharucha. A monetary grant will also accompany the awards, and faculty recipients will be expected to hold a seminar on the complementary roles of teaching and research. Bharucha, whose office was responsible for the creation of the new programs, said that the student grants were necessitated by a desire to improve the overall undergraduate academic experience, particularly in the area of undergraduate research. "We believe that opportunities for students to work one-on-one with professors in the actual act of discovery and creation is a very powerful learning experience," Bharucha said, noting that the grants were partly in response to Student Assembly's passage of the Undergraduate Teaching Initiative last term. "We were delighted when the Student Assembly launched the UTI," Bharucha said.

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Dining Serv. may deliver to dorms

By Matt Lewis | February 1, 2002

As early as the start of Spring term, students will be able to pay for food delivered to their door on their Declining Balance Accounts when Dartmouth Dining Services restarts campus-wide dormitory delivery. Plans are still very tentative, with no firm proposal yet that lays out precisely how the delivery service will work. "I support that we should attempt to do it and see how successful it is," Director of Dining Services Tucker Rossiter said, "but I think we have to find out how strong student support is first." The Student Assembly hopes to survey random students within the upcoming week to gauge interest in DDS deliveries.

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College revises military policy

By Kay Fukunaga | January 31, 2002

The summons to active duty received in the wake of Sept. 11 by some military reservists and National Guardsmen working at Dartmouth was one of the factors that precipitated a recent revision of the College's military leave policy. The policy provides for giving leave and eventual reinstatement in their position to employees who are called up for military duty. The new policy, which is retroactive to Sept.

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Bosnian youth go home motivated

By Megh Duwadi | January 31, 2002

A Dartmouth program designed to teach Bosnian youths about democratic values is in its final week, but the lessons learned will not soon be forgotten. Twenty-two high school students and teachers traveled from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Hanover to participate in the Youth Leadership Program, intended to encourage community involvement in a nation torn by a decade of war and polarized by religious and ethnic differences. National identity and other civic issues were discussed at length during lectures conducted by Dartmouth professors. "Before I came here, I was not as open to participate in community organizations," program participant Jasmin Omaragic said.

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Students talk inter-group dating

By Jenn Coffey | January 31, 2002

The tendency to put people into categories based on their race or religion and the segregation that results from such distinctions were the main topics of concern at last night's informal discussion on inter-group dating and marriage. "If you really want to be open minded you have to stop categorizing people," Michael Sevi '02 said. The purpose of the discussion was "to examine an area that is still unfortunately a taboo in the year 2002, despite how far we've come," according to Sevi, who organized the event along with Aquilla Raiford '03 and Myesha Jackson '02. Sevi began the discussion -- attended by about 50 people of widely-divergent ethnicity-- by talking about his own experience growing up Jewish and being expected to marry a Jewish woman. He expressed an attitude that he believes a lot of people share about inter-group dating: "It's okay for other people to do it, but it's not okay for me to do it." Speaking from her own experience, Diamond Hicks '03 responded by saying, "I don't think people really understand because they never even consider it." Several students mentioned that the problems associated with inter-group dating are made worse at a small campus like Dartmouth. "The biggest difficulty on this campus is honestly interacting with other cultures.

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OAC gives Bones Gate three weeks' probation

By Richard Lazarus | January 31, 2002

Bones Gate fraternity was slapped with three weeks of "full social restrictions" at an Organizational Adjudication Committee hearing last Thursday after the house was found to have hosted an unregistered social event early this month. The ruling was the fourth the term-old OAC has made.

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UMass RAs may form first undergrad union

By Jenn Coffey | January 31, 2002

A recent decision by the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission granted residential advisors at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst an unprecedented right to unionize, but it appears unlikely that the push for unionization of undergraduate students will spread to Dartmouth anytime soon. UMass-Amherst RAs are pushing to unionize in response to low wages, a problem not significant for Dartmouth's undergraduate advisors. Jeff DeWitt, Dartmouth's Assistant Director of Residential Education, described the push for undergraduate unions as a limited phenomenon dealing with "a very specific situation." There has been no talk of unionization among the UGAs at Dartmouth, according to UGA Virginia King '04. "My experience has been that the pay is very sufficient, and they definitely provide us with enough support," King said. Unlike residential advisors at other colleges, Dartmouth's UGAs do not have the primary responsibility of dealing with disciplinary issues in their residence halls. Instead, their main roles are as "resources and advisors to their residents," DeWitt said. "They are responsible for taking a leadership role in taking care of any community issues that arise," DeWitt said.

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Judge denies two Tulloch motions

By Nathaniel Ward | January 31, 2002

Grafton Superior Court Judge Peter Smith has denied two pretrial motions by lawyers for Robert Tulloch, accused of murdering Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop last January. In a written order released earlier this week, Smith ruled that the defense will not be allowed to hear recordings of prosecution interviews with Tulloch's alleged accomplice, James Parker.

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Signs of Clinical Depression

By David Schnur | January 30, 2002

Concentration is often impaired Inability to experience pleasure Increase in self-critical thoughts with a voice in the back of one's mind providing a constant barrage of harsh, negative statements Sleep disturbance or inability to fall back to sleep Change in personality Increased isolation Decrease in appetite or food loses its taste Feelings of guilt, helplessness and/or hopelessness Thoughts of suicide Feelilng fatigued after 12 hours of sleep Missing deadlines or a drop in standards Increased sexual promiscuity Increased alchohol/drug use Information from the Dartmouth College Health Service

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Mental illness transforms into rights movement

By Ryan Samuels | January 30, 2002

Although Americans have long kept depression and other psychological disorders as dirty secrets, a growing popular movement hopes that politicians, insurance companies, and ordinary citizens will soon view mental illness as they would any other health affliction, such as a toothache, that could qualify an individual for insurance coverage. Analysts say the work of activists such as Tipper Gore and mental health advocacy groups, along with a generation of baby boomers less hesitant to talk about issues formerly considered too personal, has led to the de-stigmatization of psychological illness. The result has been a popular mental health movement that, among other things, has politicized mental health care coverage. "Formerly, mental health was pushed off into a different realm which people did not want to talk about.

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