September 2005 Issue
Making the Most of a Liberal Campus
Melissa Rudd '08Freshmen arriving on campus this Fall with the mistaken impression that Dartmouth is a conservative institution: be warned. Those expecting a balanced political environment where conservative ideas are received with as much respect as liberal ones: be warned. You will encounter roughly one Republican for every twelve faculty members you meet. In fact, a given student’s chances of admission to Dartmouth, slim as they are, are 2.4 times better than the odds that his first professor will be a Republican. With the exception of the economics department (home to a trio of right-leaning thinkers) students of liberal arts and public policy are taught by a faculty nearly devoid of conservative representatives, in a nation famously composed of two near-commensurate sides.
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Close, but no Cigar: Dealing with Castro
Veronica DeZayas '08
It is apparent that the “Red Scare” fomented by Senator McCarthy is long over, and thankfully so. The regimes that once had us cowering in our makeshift bomb shelters are now threats of the past; the Soviet Union has collapsed, we now trade with China, and it would appear that the rapid spread of Communism has halted almost entirely. The new ideological phantasm is Islamic fundamentalism and its terrorist tactics, and although Communist countries such as North Korea and China continue to be viable threats to Democratic nations, recent administrations have been content (if not enthusiastic, in Nixon’s case) to suffer amicable—or at least diplomatic—relations with them. So why are dealings with Cuba, our tiny island neighbor, so drastically different?
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Che Guevara: The Man Behind the Head
Joe Malchow '08
For Cubans living in America, Che Guevara represents every reason they fled their Communist native land. That’s why Cuban-American groups shoulder the load of countless protests whenever his ratty mug threatens to adorn modernist art galleries and otherwise-pure white t-shirts. At UCLA, for example, Professor emeritus Sara Lequerica de la Vega confronted her administration when the Fowler Museum of Cultural History decided to mount an exhibition called "Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message". She wrote emphatically that, “The revulsion of Cubans to this event is as valid and honest as would be that of the Jewish community if confronted with the idealization of Adolf Hitler.”
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Back in the USSR
Diane Ellis '08
Commies aren’t cool. This summer I learned that first hand by living in St. Petersburg, Russia, a city and country still devastated from years of oppressive communist regimen. On my homecoming, a friend asked me to summarize Communism. I think John Lennon does a relatively good job outlining it in his song “Imagine,” so I borrowed a line.
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Editorial
Amanda Morris '06
As fall term begins and I watch freshman grow acclimated to Dartmouth, I can not help but recall my first year at college with a nostalgia bordering on longing. When I arrived on campus for orientation, I was overwhelmed by the opportunities before me; opportunities I had never dreamed of back in my home town. There were hundreds of fascinating courses, foreign study programs, clubs for every imaginable interest and hobby, and students from all over the country and the world. I had never been in a place with such racial, ethnic, religious and socioeconomic diversity. (With the regrettable exception, of course, of ideological diversity.) I was raised by a New York City police officer, so the newfound freedom afforded by dorm life was entirely new to me. The sky seemed the limit.
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Back Page: Letter To Katrina
Editorial
Dear Katrina,
We must eschew eloquence for accuracy: you were a miserable, predictable cur. For all of the prescience that our meager meteorological efforts bore, Norman Mailer bested us back in ‘59. Here was his forecast: “America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”