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The Dartmouth
April 15, 2026
The Dartmouth
News
News

Zete attracts nat'l attention

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While the recent Zeta Psi controversy has been covered quite closely by student newspapers at Dartmouth, this incident and the wider campus debate over Greek life and issues relating to the Student Life Initiative has made headlines in college and national newspapers across the country, from Texas to Virginia to Massachusetts. The Zeta Psi story was picked up by the Associated Press, the Union Leader and the Valley News among others and was featured in news pieces on CNN and other Boston television stations like Fox 25. Coverage in other college newspapers varied from accurate to inaccurate, and some seem to echo the same diverse, passionate sentiments found on the Dartmouth campus.


News

Stutzman leads presidential race

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Molly Stutzman '02 is the clear favorite in the Student Assembly presidential election this year, while Michael Newton '04 is leading a close vice-presidential race, according to a poll conducted by The Dartmouth this weekend. Stutzman, who garnered the approval of 57.9 percent of those who said they planned to vote in the upcoming election is winning by a substantial margin over her closest competitor, Michael Sevi '02, who gained 18.1 percent of votes according to the poll.


News

30 students attend speech night

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As annual elections enter their final week, student body presidential and vice presidential candidates came together last night to discuss their ideas for the upcoming year. The crowd peaked at 30 students during the presidential debate, although many attendees were identifiable members of the Student Assembly itself. The format of the debate consisted of several parts, including one in which the candidates briefly introduced themselves and then answered questions posed first by moderator and 2001 Class Council President Charles Gussow and then by members of the audience. While presidential candidate Michael Sevi '01, who is running under the slogan "the end of Student Assembly, the beginning of student government" reiterated his plans to "overhaul" the existing Assembly, candidate Molly Stutzman '02 stated her desire to maintain many of the Assembly's structures that she feels work well. Stutzman presented her two years of experience on the Assembly as an asset. Sevi, a transfer student, served on student government at his previous university, but has never attended a meeting of Dartmouth's Assembly. "I know what changes need to be made, and I know what changes won't work," Stutzman said. "It wouldn't make sense just to scrap the whole thing," she added later. Sevi said that, whatever the outcome of the upcoming elections, he would view the results as a student referendum. "I'm taking this as a public pledge," he said, adding that if elected he would act as if the entire student body were behind the sweeping changes he proposed in his seven points. Throughout the debate, Assembly insiders grilled both Sevi '02 and his running mate, vice-presidential hopeful Aly Rahim '02, on their plans for the upcoming year. One audience member accused the Sevi-Rahim ticket of "raping" the current Assembly with their "inflammatory" rhetoric.



News

ORL to replace ACs with professionals

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Students can expect to see some new faces in their dorms next year as the Office of Residential Life will fully phase-out student Area Coordinators, replacing them with professional, full-time Community Directors. In accordance with recommendations in the Student Life Initiative, four new Community Directors will be hired this spring, which adds to the current four positions. A total of eight Community Directors will oversee the staff in residential clusters next year, a job undertaken this year by the four existing Community Directors and seven Area Coordinators.


News

WCI group gathers opinions

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As the World Cultures Initiative Committee continues to solicit feedback from the campus, the committee prepares its end-of-the-month report on pluralism and unity at Dartmouth. The Committee has sought input on the report in a variety of ways; hosting a luncheon in Collis Commonground yesterday and posting a survey on its website. According to committee co-chair Dean of the College James Larimore, the committee will begin drafting its report at a retreat next week. He and fellow co-chair Associate Professor of English Melissa Zeiger will compile and edit the various drafts of the report. According to Larimore, the committee will first release a report listing steps Dartmouth can take immediately to increase diversity.


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2005 enrollment sets records

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Despite initial disappointment that Dartmouth was the only Ivy League school to see a drop in applications, the Class of 2005 could shape up to be the largest and among the most diverse in College history, according to preliminary enrollment figures released by the Admissions Office. So far, a record 1180 students out of the 2220 accepted have enrolled for next year, an unusually high 53 percent yield in which Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg seemed to take particular pride. "We've had a really strong response," Furstenberg beamed yesterday in an interview.



News

Faculty response to the Zeta Psi Sex Papers

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Dear President Wright and Members of the Board of Trustees: In January 1999 the Board of Trustees issued a promising document announcing a program of substantive changes in student life, including substantive changes to the Co-Ed, Fraternity, and Sorority (CFS) system.


News

Zete opts for admin. review over J.C.

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Having recently been placed on probation by its international organization, Dartmouth's Zeta Psi chapter announced yesterday its decision not to have the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council's Judicial Committee preside over its impending hearings. Zeta Psi faces College charges for a series of offensive newsletters attributed to the house and will soon undergo judicial hearings.


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AG releases more evidence on teens

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Prosecutors have disclosed more evidence that links the two Vermont teenagers to the brutal stabbing of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop. Recent documents also suggest that one of the teens, Robert Tulloch, 17, may have been lying to investigators when he told them he had sustained a cut on his leg when he fell on a maple syrup spigot. Three days after the couple was killed, Tulloch, who recently pleaded innocent to the first degree murder charges against him, told his girlfriend, Christiana Usenza, that he actually received the wound when he dropped a hunting knife on his leg. "The defendant admitted to his girlfriend that he obtained the wound by dropping a hunting knife on his right leg," read the court documents, which go on to note that "the defendant's girlfriend observed the wound and saw him walking with a significant limp during the week following the homicides." The court documents seek blood and hair samples, as well as a handwriting specimen from Tulloch. "Sufficient facts exist to support the state's request for blood and hair samples and a handwriting exemplar," reads the eight-page brief. The court document, filed by New Hampshire Assistant Attorneys General Kelly Ayotte and Michael Delaney, is in response to the objection of Tulloch's attorneys to provide prosecutors with those samples. Physical evidence is piling up against Tulloch and his accused accomplice, James Parker, 16, placing them both at the scene of the crime. The newly filed documents show that police discovered a fingerprint on a chair at the Zantops' home that they have now confirmed belongs to Tulloch. In addition, the court documents report, authorities have matched a boot print found at the Zantop's home with a boot belonging to Parker. Prosecutors previously found blood on a boot belonging to Tulloch to be consistent with a mixture of DNA belonging to Susanne Zantop and an unidentified male. In addition, older court documents have noted two knife sheaths were found to have latent fingerprints matching Parker's.During a search of Tulloch's bedroom, police discovered two knives possessing traces of DNA from both Half and Susanne Zantop. Blood discovered on the floor mat of a 1996 Green Subaru registered to Parker's parents matches the DNA of Susanne Zantop, the documents report. Paul Newcity, of Canaan, N.H., said earlier that he saw a green station wagon speeding out of the Zantops' driveway the afternoon before the professors were murdered. He told police the driver of the car appeared to be a thin, dark-haired white male in his early 20s, with no facial hair. This description matches that of both defendants. Ayotte said Tuesday at Tulloch's hearing that a decision on a trial date would be made before the end of this month but that it is unlikely that a trial would begin before next February.



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Housing draw begins

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The annual scramble for corner rooms, half baths and prime locations which students know as room draw kicked off Monday night and will extend through next week. The most visible change to the lottery system this year has been the institution of the "squatting" policy, in which students who currently live in certain dormitories and will be on campus next Fall have the opportunity to remain in their cluster. "This was an attempt to provide some kind of continuity to the [residential] experience," Director of Housing Services Lynn Rosenblum said of the new system, noting that squatting is a common policy at other colleges. Squatting replaces last year's system of "grouping," in which students were able to select up to seven students with whom they wished to share a floor. "We heard from a lot of students that were very unhappy -- people were finding group-mates while at Leede arena [during room draw], rather than grouping with their friends," Rosenblum said. Rosenblum described the dormitories selected for squatting this year -- Ripley/Woodward/Smith, Wheeler/Richardson, The Lodge and the Fayerweathers -- as "second tier." Earlier this week, 83 students squatted rooms in the Ripley/Woodward/Smith and Fayerweathers cluster and 30 students claimed space in Wheeler/Richardson.


News

Zete incident spurs mass faculty response

An open letter to the Board of Trustees and College President James Wright signed by 101 faculty members released early today urges the College to revisit the issue of radically reforming or abolishing the Greek system. Citing recent incidents in the Coed Fraternity Sorority system, the letter suggests the College has not adequately addressed issues of misogyny and racism many faculty say are fostered by the Greek organizations. "We ourselves have never felt more disappointed by the administration's failure to address the systemic and incalculable harm that both our students and our own pedagogical work suffer by Dartmouth's acceptance and support of structures that promote such attitudes of entitlement and disrespect," the letter says. The letter expresses frustration with what faculty perceive as the failure of the Student Life Initiative to live up to expectations of addressing "institutionalized forms of discrimination and segregation that still dominated student social life." "Two years later, we on the faculty still are teaching female students and students of color who suffer from institutionalized practices of sexist and racist humiliation that fester largely unabated within secret fraternity culture," the letter states. Declaring "solidarity" with victims of verbal and sexual abuse, the faculty members who signed the letter are seeking to work with students and College administration to create alternatives to the current system they say is based on "exclusion, self-indulgence and an arrogant sense of entitlement." "It's very important for Dartmouth at this point to re-open the issue and to really explore the very real consequences that the Greek system has for the academic life of this campus," Spanish and Comparative Literature Professor Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, one of the letter's initial sponsors, said. Lugo-Ortiz collaborated with nine other professors in the writing of the letter, which then circulated last week and was signed by many other faculty members, a significant proportion of whom were from the English Department. The letter "reiterates the faculty's feeling that this structure that dominates Dartmouth's social life is antithetical to the intellectual, moral and social life of the College," according to another sponsor, English Professor Ivy Schweitzer. Yet Schweitzer said she feels that it is important for faculty to continue to make their voices heard, especially in light of recent incidents such as "The Zetemouth," the shouting of allegedly racist and sexist slurs from the Psi Upsilon porch and the attempted arson at Chi Gamma Epsilon. Anti-Greek sentiment among the faculty is nothing new -- they have voted against the continuation of the CFS system several times over the past three decades. At a meeting in February last year, the faculty voted 81-0 to urge the administration to withdraw College recognition from all Greek organization as soon as more residential space is available. Many of the letter's sponsors and signers have long been critical of the Greeks, voicing public support for the system's abolition during faculty meetings and public forums. For example, Professor of Religion Susan Ackerman, another letter sponsor, said after last year's faculty meeting that the CFS system "stands so antithetical to our academic message of openness." While expressing support for coeducational, non-exclusive organizations, Ackerman said yesterday, "I believe that selective single sex organizations at Dartmouth need to eliminated." The letter invites members of the Board of Trustees to attend the upcoming public meeting of the general faculty, scheduled for May 14, to discuss the future of the Greek system at Dartmouth.


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Rieff lives 'fraught with hazards'

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For author, journalist, political analyst and some-time professor David Rieff, spending 18 months living amongst refugees in war-torn Bosnia is the sort of decision one simply "stumbles into." Rieff, a specialist in issues of immigration and international emergencies visiting Dartmouth to speak on issues of humanitarian aid, recounted living and working in Berlin during the summer of 1992. "I was trying to write a book on refugees emigrating from Eastern Bloc nations to the West.


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Racist attacks hurt other minorities

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Along with racism and controversy, two perennially intimate bedfellows, Dartmouth College has found itself party to a less than holy trinity in the eyes of other minority communities in recent decades. Take, for example, the infamous 1986 shanty affair.


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SA helps to reduce high parking fines

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Student Assembly's two-year campaign to reform the fees and fines system has made more progress with a resolution to lower parking fines for students that will go into effect this summer. Under the new plan students will pay considerably less for parking violations in the "core" areas, such as behind Mass Row and near the Fayerweathers, Molly Stutzman '02, Student Life chair for the Assembly explained. Stutzman has been working with the Assistant Director of Administrative Services in Facilities, Operations & Management Bill Barr to restructure the parking fine system. Now students that have paid to park in A Lot will pay a fine of $25 for each ticket received.


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Political tensions increase hostility toward Asian-Americans

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Declining popular opinion of Asian-Americans, and especially Chinese-Americans, have worried many in the Asian-American community that racism and stereotyping will always be a presence in American society. According to a recent survey conducted by consulting firm Yankelovich Partners, and commissioned by the Committee of 100, an elite group of Chinese-Americans that includes the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and architect I.M.



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Filmmaker looks for meaning of Asian-ness

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Renee Tajima-Pena, director of tonight's Hopkins Center featured documentary "My America (...or Honk if You Love Buddha)" said that rather than attempting to create a specific message with her work, she hopes that the film will encourage viewers to think critically about both sides of a controversial issue. "I usually make a film because I am really pissed off about something," she said, adding that in the process she often ends up learning just how complex and ambiguous most issues really are. The film, inspired in part by the peripatetic legacy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," takes Tajima-Pena on a physical and metaphoric journal around the country searching for what it means to be Asian American. There is no overarching theme to the film; Tajima-Pena allows each of the Asian Americans to tell their own unique story.