Think of presidential campaign field offices and one likely pictures phones ringing off the hook, harried staffers plotting campaign strategy and volunteers stuffing envelopes or calling for donations. But on a recent Saturday, the Democratic candidates' local offices were far from hectic. In Lebanon, Connecticut Sen.
It wasn't your usual assortment of familiar Hollywood names, indie-movie insiders or even obscure foreign actors that flashed across the screen in Loew Auditorium Wednesday evening. Instead, the subjects of the student documentaries hailed from just across the Connecticut River in White River Junction, Vt.
To high schoolers browsing through The Princeton Review's 2004 guide to the Best 351 Colleges, life at Dartmouth may seem nearly utopian. Dartmouth's students are among the happiest and the best fed in the nation, according to the rankings released yesterday by the New York based test-prep company.
On first glance, the two scenes could not have appeared more different. The first featured a mix of Latino, black and white students eating EBA's pizza and corn chips and salsa around a dinner table in the Latino and Latin American and Caribbean Studies House.
Some of the best tree"climbers in the world have signed their names in support of preserving the tree that until a few days ago held Dartmouth's latest -- and by some accounts, greatest -- rope swing. Nicholas Dankers '01 wants the College to know it. En route to the Pine Park site of the now-defunct swing yesterday, Dankers presented signed placards, festooned with pictures from his portfolio of landscaping work, to administrators and professors, as though to prove that it he is not some lone, crackpot tree hugger. Dankers has been intimately invested in the swing from its conception in the fall of 2001 and regards himself as its current caretaker.
For the third time in three years, authorities have decided to cut down the rope swing hanging over the Connecticut River.
Its name sounds like the kind of sarcastic epithet critics might concoct. But members of the Blabberforce, an informal collection of students and administrators intent on creating a more definable image for Dartmouth, describe their efforts with the sincerity and idealism that they say only befits a school this impressive. The question of Dartmouth's image has been a recurring debate in the College's history -- whether it be discussing the extent to which the 1970s slapstick film "Animal House" accurately represents the school or sparring over whether the College's administration wants to emphasize Dartmouth as a research, rather than a so-called teaching, institution. But the Blabberforce, which after less than a term in existence boasts nearly 90 members, including top administrators, says that pinning down a coherent image is the first step -- and that its primary concern is celebrating what makes Dartmouth great, rather turning it into an imitation of the more well-known Harvard, Yale or Princeton. "The Blabberforce isn't here to transform the College into a university," member Brent Reidy '05 said.
The T-shirts and posters boldly proclaim the drinking habits of the average Dartmouth students -- but they may do nothing to reduce alcohol abuse at the College.
Steeped in Scottish history and culture and home to an ancient Christian divinity school, Edinburgh might seem like the perfect place to hold the Religion department's Foreign Study Program. But a number of professors and students alike said that the program's location in Scotland's capital city, while full of interesting out-of-class opportunities, is far from ideal academically. Students who have attended the program said that the courses they took at New College Divinity School came up short intellectually -- in large part because of the institution's theological focus.
From Commencement to MLK Jr. Day, office plans the show