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The Dartmouth
June 12, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth
Kristin Maczko
The Setonian
News

Grants fund minority teachers

By Kristin Maczko | May 23, 1996

Tracy Canard '96 will travel to Utah to teach Native American students and Carmen Schmitt '97 will teach Native Americans in New Mexico as part of the teaching fellowships they recently received from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Each year, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund awards minority students up to $18,100 over a period of about four years to pursue teaching. Schmitt said while she would have gone into education without the award, the fellowship gives her a "better incentive ... by providing money for further education." In addition to providing funding, "it's making me commit to public education specifically... that's what the fellowship is for," she said. Minority students interested in teaching may apply for the fellowship during their junior year, and are required to participate in a teaching project, for which they receive stipends, that summer. The fellows receive up to $12,000 for education-related graduate school work.

The Setonian
News

Yemen talk begins lecture series

By Kristin Maczko | April 16, 1996

Gabrielle vom Bruck began the Ernest Gellner Memorial Lecture series yesterday afternoon with a speech that explored two different strands of Islam in Yemen, a small country at the Arabian peninsula's southern end. The speech was the first in a four-part series that will bring scholars influenced by Gellner to the College to speak on the role of Islam in modern politics. Gellner, a British anthropologist and philosopher who died last fall, was scheduled to be the College's Montgomery Fellow this term. In lieu of his coming to Dartmouth, the lecture series was organized to commemorate his work. Anthropology Professor Dale Eickelman, who introduced vom Bruck, extolled Gellner's academic virtues. Eickelman said Gellner "was always jumping across boundaries of disciplines and ideas." Vom Bruck, lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, was one of Gellner's last doctoral candidates. Drawing from her fieldwork in Yemen, her speech dealt with patterns of political interaction between Sunni and Shi'i Muslims in Yemen. Sunni and Shi'i Islam are the two major strands of that Islam. Vom Bruck began her talk with one of Gellner's main assumptions -- Muslim society is held together by mutual dependence of town and countryside. The balance between the people of each area is maintained over time in balance and unity. Within the Shi'i Sayyids and Sunni merchants show none of this togetherness, vom Bruck said. She described the Sayyids as strongly religious and holding a strong belief in self-sacrifice, charity and scholarship.

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