Stick to intramural?

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

So the Dartmouth College basketball team has voted to unionize by joining the Service Employees International Union, setting off a loud explosion in the cartel called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The team’s theory is that playing on such teams helps promote the college’s PR, and thus finances, and so they should be paid as employees, even though Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., provides among the most generous financial aid of any such institution in America, and academics, not athletics, is primary at such “elite” colleges unlike, it seems, at many schools.

I wonder if forcing even fairly small private colleges, such as Dartmouth, to treat athletes as employees will lead some institutions to stop competing in some inter-collegiate sports, including basketball. That sport has never been very big at Dartmouth, by the way.  So maybe the college will consign it to merely intramural competition. A reasonable decision.

Llewellyn King: When will Trump and Biden talk about the looming tsunami of AI?

“Artificial intelligence” got its name and was started as a discipline at a workshop at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., in the summer of 1956. From left to right, some key participants sitting in front of Dartmouth Hall: Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Ray Solomonoff, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John McCarthy and Claude Shannon.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Memo to presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump:

Assuming that one of you will be elected president of the United States next November, many computer scientists believe that you should be addressing what you think about artificial intelligence and how you plan to deal with the surge in this technology, which will break over the nation in the next president’s term.

Gentlemen, this matter is urgent, yet not much has been heard on the subject from either of you who are seeking the highest office. President Biden did sign a first attempt at guidelines for AI, but he and Trump have been quiet on its transformative impact.

Indeed, the political class has been silent, preoccupied as it is with old and – against what is going to happen — irrelevant issues. Congress has been as silent as Biden and Trump. There are two congressional AI caucuses, but they have been concerned with minor issues, like AI in political advertising.

Two issues stand out as game changers in the next presidential term: climate change and AI.

On climate change, both of you have spoken: Biden has made climate change his own; Trump has dismissed it as a hoax.

The AI tsunami is rolling in and the political class is at play, unaware that it is about to be swamped by a huge new reality: exponential change which can neither be stopped nor legislated into benignity. 

Before the next presidential term is far advanced, the experts tell us that the life of the nation will be changed, perhaps upended by the surge in AI, which will reach into every aspect of how we live and work.

I have surveyed the leading experts in universities, government and AI companies and they tell me that any form of employment that uses language will be changed. Just this will be an enormous upset, reaching from journalism (where AI already has had an impact) to the law (where AI is doing routine drafting) to customer service (where AI is going to take over call centers) to fast food (where AI will take the orders).

The more one thinks about AI, the more activities come to mind which will be severely affected by its neural networks.

Canvas the departments and agencies of the government and you will learn the transformational nature of AI. In the departments of Defense, Treasury and Homeland Security, AI is seen as a serious agent of change — even revolution.

The main thing is not to confuse AI with automation. It may resemble it and many may take refuge in the benefits brought about by automation, especially job creation. But AI is different. Rather than job creation, it appears, at least in its early iterations, set to do major job obliteration.

But there is good AI news, too.  And those in the political line of work can use good news, whetting the appetite of the nation with the advances that are around the corner with AI.

Many aspects of medicine will, without doubt, rush forward. Omar Hatamleh, chief advisor on artificial intelligence and innovation at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the thing to remember is that AI is exponential, but most thinking is linear.

Hatamleh is excited by the tremendous impact AI will have on medical research. He says that a child born today can expect to live to 120 years of age. How is that for a campaign message?

The good news story in AI should be enough to have campaign managers and speech writers ecstatic. What a story to tell; what fabulous news to attach to a candidate. Think of an inaugural address which can claim that AI research is going to begin to end the scourges of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Sickle cell and Parkinson’s.

Think of your campaign. Think of how you can be the president who broke through the disease barrier and extended life. AI researchers believe this is at hand, so what is holding you back? 

Many would like to write the inaugural address for a president who can say, “With the technology that I will foster and support in my administration, America will reach heights of greatness never before dreamed of and which are now at hand. A journey into a future of unparalleled greatness begins today.”

So why, oh why, have you said nothing about the convulsion — good or bad — that is about to change the nation? Here is a gift as palpable as the gift of the moonshot was for John F. Kennedy.

Where are you? Either of you?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Fall down before a Frankenstein deity

How deep learning is a subset of machine learning and how machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence

— From British Wikipedia

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Those who work with language have reason to worry about the effect of artificial intelligence and its awesome skill with words.

You can, for example, ask ChatGPT to write an article on almost any subject, and it will mostly come back with something ready for the page, untouched by a human editor. If you want it in Washington Post style and it is in Guardian style with British spelling, faster than you can type in the request, it will reformat the article into the style and usage you want and, presto, it is ready to print or publish digitally.

Writers, lawyers and college professors will feel the sting first. Writers in Hollywood are on strike because of the threat posed. College professors are going into the new term unsure whether they will deal with original work or whether students are substituting AI-generated essays and theses.

Journalists, already reeling from the closure of so many newspapers, are wondering about their future.

But what about religion?

AI ramifications in organized religion are good and bad. In fringe religions and cults, it will be open season on worshipers. And some will find comfort in speaking to God as though the Almighty is resident in AI.

On the good side, many pastors approach Sunday in trepidation. The sermon, which is supposed to be instructional, uplifting and erudite, is a source of torture to those who aren’t good writers or have difficulty sharing their own faith with the congregation.

There are newsletters to help sermon writers and a wealth of diocesan support. Still, sermons are a trial for many pastors. You can read an old sermon or plagiarize another cleric, but that leaves sincere preachers feeling they are cheating and letting their congregants and their mission down.

Enter AI. By feeding a few thoughts to a chatbot, a polished sermon incorporating some of the preacher’s ideas appears almost instantly.

This hasn’t been wasted on the established churches, I learn from the BBC. The churches are looking at ways of embracing AI, using it as a tool, a gift to help with preaching and pastoral work, comforting the sick, composing notes of sympathy, and research.

The rub comes when people, as some surely will, confuse concepts of God with AI simulations and start to think that AI is a deity.

It has the characteristics usually associated with a deity: ubiquitous and seemingly all-knowing.

Indeed, it may claim to be a god if it hallucinates, as it sometimes does. What, then, for the unsuspecting? Do they fall to their knees?

I asked ChatGPT, and it sent me a 10-point list of the possibilities, noting that it is a subject that is complex and evolving.

These three points are scary:

—“Customized Spiritual Experiences: AI algorithms could be designed to tailor spiritual experiences to individual preferences and beliefs. These experiences might include personalized prayers, meditation sessions, or virtual pilgrimages, designed to resonate with each person’s spiritual inclinations.”

—“Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Guidance: AI might be used to explore complex ethical questions and provide guidance based on religious teachings. For instance, AI systems could analyze various religious perspectives on a given moral issue and help individuals navigate their choices.”

—“Exploration of Spirituality and Philosophy: AI’s ability to process vast amounts of information could be harnessed to delve deeper into philosophical and spiritual questions, potentially offering new perspectives on the nature of existence, consciousness and the divine.”

Would it be safe to call it Frankenstein worship?
 

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Dartmouth Hall at the eponymous college in Hanover, N.H.

Editor’s note. This is from the Council of Europe:

“The term ‘AI’ could be attributed to John McCarthy of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which Marvin Minsky (Carnegie-Mellon University) defines as ‘the construction of computer programs that engage in tasks that are currently more satisfactorily performed by human beings because they require high-level mental processes such as: perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning. ‘ The summer 1956 conference at Dartmouth College (funded by the Rockefeller Institute) is considered the founder of the discipline. Anecdotally, it is worth noting the great success of what was not a conference but rather a workshop. Only six people, including McCarthy and Minsky, had remained consistently present throughout this work (which relied essentially on developments based on formal logic).’’

Stephen J. Nelson: Painful lessons in college leadership: Dartmouth College and the University of Florida

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, soon to be president of the University of Florida, speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing Republican event.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In April 1981, David McLaughlin was named the 14th president of Dartmouth College. Though separated by four decades, there are striking similarities between Dartmouth’s appointment of McLaughlin and the University of Florida’s selection last week of its next president, Ben Sasse. If the past is prologue, Sasse and Florida are in for a rough ride.

McLaughlin was an alumnus of Dartmouth, both as an undergraduate and subsequently with an MBA from the Tuck School. While not from the Senatorial arena of Sasse, McLaughlin was a highly political animal. Dartmouth’s choice of him as president came at a moment for the college when disaffected conservative alumni were outraged about racial diversity and the opening of their male bastion to women. McLaughlin’s conservative politics and his purported fiscal belt-tightening reputation and presumed budgetary savvy as a corporate CEO at Champion Paper and Toro Corporation were thought by supporters to be great assets.

The conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, was about a year old. Conservative alumni, led by monied outside supporters, were opening their wallets and clamoring for more of the contentious voice of the Review. McLaughlin was expected to appease those forces. He promised reinstating ROTC, which had sat dormant for over a decade dating to when the faculty, in the heat of the Vietnam War, cut Dartmouth’s academic ties to the program. Conservative alumni and students cheered his arrival. McLaughlin was to be the fixer for conservative complaints about a new progressive Dartmouth—minorities, women and other changes—that they could not stand.

Sasse carries into his presidential tenure similar conservative baggage. His supporters have grand hopes that he will use the cudgels for which he is famous in the world of politics—decrying gay marriage, advocating overthrow of the Affordable Care Act, and being against abortion—to instill his social brand and edge into the culture of the university. He claims that will not be the case. But given his undeniable high-profile public positions on gay and lesbian issues and rights, abortion, healthcare, affirmative action and the MAGA agenda, the idea that Sasse will change his stripes and that his conservative political bent will now somehow disappear strains credulity and credibility.

As part of his welcome to the campus, the University of Florida faculty have already voted no confidence in the board’s selection process, a tantamount rejection of how and why Sasse was appointed in the first place. Again, if the Dartmouth experience with McLaughlin is any gauge, this vote is only the first salvo in what will be a continuing debate about Sasse as a university president.

From the outset of McLaughlin’s appointment, the Dartmouth faculty, like their Florida counterparts, voiced immense skepticism about the board’s process that resulted in his selection. In the introductory open public faculty meeting that April 1981—I was in the room, then a student affairs administrator—McLaughlin was greeted by pointed criticism from Dartmouth professors. They questioned his capacity to lead in a college and academic culture that was the antithesis of his exclusive corporate sector autocratic and top-down experience. Several faculty members railed to his face about his glaring lack of academic credentials—an MBA, but no Ph.D.—about having no experience teaching and leading a college, bringing only business experience that would never translate to being Dartmouth’s voice in the presidential pulpit.

There was no vote of no confidence in the trustees at the time of their decision. That came four years later dressed in the garb of the unprecedented impaneling of a committee to review McLaughlin’s performance as president. But the Dartmouth faculty restiveness and fear was unmistakable. Their misgivings and judgment that day were born out in a tumultuous, contentious and divisive presidential tenure marked by aggressive, vindicative grudge-based senior administrative turnover, duplicitous leadership, e.g., saying one thing to one group or individual and then the direct opposite to someone else, and a divide-and-conquer style that pitted campus constituencies against each.

For many observers, the Sasse and McLaughlin appointments are sadly only grasped as institutional overreach designed to satisfy certain constituents, rather than aspiring to the greater good of the entire university. McLaughlin lacked fundamental leadership abilities in a president of a college or university. As Sasse assumes the presidency of the University of Florida, there are eerie parallels to Dartmouth’s experience more than 40 years ago. This reality dictates that the Florida faculty must be robust in their scrutiny of how Sasse carries himself, the decisions and actions he takes and his leadership of their university community and its culture. Based on the experience of McLaughlin at Dartmouth, that means the Florida faculty must be vigilantly tuned in to what goes on in the who’s and why’s of senior leadership turnover and new appointments and to kneejerk tendencies to favor conservative causes and to support conservative over liberal professors, student groups and leaders. They must also be attentive to any fiscal and fundraising sleight-of-hand and abuse of the books to make the president look successful.

What is always essential in the leadership of America’s colleges and universities is the naming of presidents who possess critical capacities and commitments: moral grounding, the broad center of understanding and the intellectual gravitas essential in the quest to engage academic communities in the forthright pursuit of intellectual inquiry, freedom of ideas and discourse, and the common good.

Worthy and great college presidents are not accidents or the result of luck. Ill-fitted, ill-suited presidents can do great damage. Early glimmers of what is in the offing reveal what the path might be. Sasse, his faculty and all the constituencies of the University of Florida are on a precipice.

They should look at what happened at Dartmouth in the 1980s, when pressures for conservative, return to a bygone era leadership overwhelmed common sense calling for an academically, intellectually and balanced credible presidential appointment, one truly fit for the complexities and diverse voices in a university community. At Dartmouth, McLaughlin’s selection sorely damaged the esprit de corps of administrative staff, eroded \ the stature and public image of the college and caused a corrosive cynicism in the campus community about its culture. The realities of such presidencies should make all wary indeed.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency. His forthcoming book, Searching the Soul of the College and University in America: Religious and Democratic Covenants and Controversies, will be released in 2023. Nelson served on the student-affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1987.

Climbing Moosilauke: Pride goeth before the fall

On the mountain: From left, college classmates Win Rockwell, Josh Fitzhugh, Chris Buschmann and Bob Harrington.

— Photo by Jane Andrews

Truth be told, I prefer paddling to hiking, and one thing I’ve learned from the former is that sometimes it’s good to go with the flow. So when two classmates from my Dartmouth College days invited me to join them at our 52th reunion (the big 50th, in 2020, was cancelled because of COVID) and hike up to the top of Moosilauke Mountain, in New Hampshire, I said sure, count me in.

I had another, nostalgic reason for going besides friendship and bravado. Thirty three years ago, when my father was 75, he hiked up and down Moosilauke with a little help from his two sons. Both my father and my older brother were also Dartmouth graduates. “If he could do it, so can I,” went the message in my mind. The fact that, at 74, I was a year younger compensated in my mind for the other fact: I have early-stage Parkinson’s disease.  (Symptons of Parkinson’s include tremor and instability.) 

Now Moosilauke, elevation 4,803 feet, is sometimes called Dartmouth’s Mountain,” partly because the college owns quite a bit of the land surrounding the peak, partly because it used to hold ski races down its flank in the 1920s and 1930s, and partly because it has a timbered lodge at its base that welcomes students, faculty, alumni and sometimes even celebrities alike into what for many is iconic about Dartmouth: its connection to the wilderness of northern New Hampshire.  Recently, the lodge has been extensively rebuilt using massive timbers, and, of course, New Hampshire granite. 

I met my classmates, Win Rockwell and Bob Harrington, and Bob’s partner, Jane Andrews, at a park-n-ride near my home in Vermont at 7 A.M. and we drove over to the base lodge, arriving at 9. 

It was a warm June day, with the sky almost cloudless. I had grabbed a coffee and roll for breakfast on our way, and the lodge had packed us a bag lunch consisting of cheese, tomato, bread, peanut butter and jelly sandwichs and  brownies. I had two 8-ounce water bottles. In my knapsack I carried warmer clothing for the top in case I needed it. (In my father’s climb, one obstacle was snow at the top. The temperature in the White Mountains can sometimes rapidly drop 50 degrees at the summits, with wind gusts  of 40 miles an hour or more.) It was warm enough for shorts. I had climbing boots but very light socks, which were intended to give my toes more room.  (I like the boots but sometimes my toes banged into the leather.)  I suffer from peripheral neuropathy in both feet, but the tingling I usually experience had not  previously bothered me walking.

After discussion amongst my friends, I also decided to take a pair of bamboo cross-county ski poles to assist in balance and motion if necessary. Many people now hike with poles, some extendable, regardless of age. 

We left on the main trail from the lodge at 10 a.m.  The straightest route to the summit (the route we took) is about 3.5 miles up  the Gorge Brook trail, with an elevation climb of  2,933 feet. Hikers in good condition traveling in dry conditions should be able to make it to the peak and back in about 3 hours, with a 20-minute break at the summit.

As we started our hike, I tried to recall my last outing three and a half decades ago.  The trail seemed a bit rockier this time and I didn’t recall hearing the water tumble over rocks in the nearby brook. At first all seemed fine. Gradually, however, I felt more and more as though I was walking in the brook, not because the going was wet but because I was having to step rock to rock rather than walk on soil or gravel. In places the soil had eroded so much that the college (through the Dartmouth Outing Club, I believe) had placed large flat stones in a kind of stairway, with the rises varying from 6 inches to a foot and a half.

We stopped after about a mile to eat some of our provisions and enjoy the view to the north.  I felt fine if a bit tired. We were passed periodically by younger hikers, some alone and many with dogs. At about the two-mile mark I began to ask hikers coming down the time to the summit. “Oh, it’s not too far,” was a common response.

At about 2.5 miles in I started having balance issues. Now, though I have Parkinson’s, I had not had before one of the common symptoms, instability. Mostly I have a slight tremor in my right hand and some slurring of speech. I tend to walk slowly with a forward hunch.  I’m a former soccer fullback, downhill skier and amateur logger, and I’m still in decent shape. But here on Moosilauke, I found myself losing my balance to the rear. In short, I kept falling backwards!  My poles helped a bit, but sometimes I found myself having to take two steps back. Then, in one fall, I slammed my left temple hard into a rock in part of the trail that was mostly boulders.

Now you’ve done it, I said to myself, fearing a subdural hematoma, swelling, loss of consciousness and death. Luckily, my friends came to my rescue, checked my vision and saw no bleeding. I had no headache.  We continued, but more slowly, with one classmate walking just behind me. I thought of the  old Dartmouth song that refers to its graduates having the granite of New Hampshire “in our muscles and our brains.” It’s a good thing, I thought.

At about the two-mile point of the hike, there is a false summit. You are above the tree line and the view opens up. Solid granite outcroppings replace the big boulders we had been walking on.  Thinking  that we were close to the top, I exulted until, looking again, I saw another rise ahead. “Is that where we have to go?” I asked wearily. “’Fraid so,” said  Win, whose father had hiked all over these mountains as a student at Dartmouth in the 30s.  “I think I better turn back,” I responded to the general agreement of my team. It was about 2:30 p.m.

Bob agreed to monitor me down the trail, although that meant he lost his opportunity to reach the summit.  The other two, Win and Jane, seemed very fresh and expressed their desire to push on and catch up to us on the way down. 

Bob Harrington and Jane Andrews made it to the top.

Now most hikers learn quickly that “down” does not necessarily mean “easier.”  While I need to lift 219 pounds (my weight) with each step going up, I need to stop the inertia force of 219 pounds going down. In addition, at least for me, on rocky terrain I fear falling downhill more than I fear falling uphill.  Gravity will aggravate the momentum falling downhill, I reason.

For me and Bob, then, the trip to the lodge became slower and slower. My legs were weakening and I was becoming very careful about each step. The routine was the same: Get yourself steady, examine the terrain ahead, identify a landing spot, plant poles, transfer weight to the downhill foot in a kind of leap of faith, say a small prayer when you succeeded, repeat. 

At about 4 p.m., Jane and Win caught up with us on their downhill journey. Bob and I were only about a mile into our descent. We were stopping every 100 yards or so to let me rest. The decision was made to send Bob and Jane back to the lodge for possible assistance while Win would try to assist me. (We were joined about then by another Dartmouth graduate and his wife, Rick and Lucie Bourdon, who altered their plans to help both physically and emotionally in what was increasingly becoming an ordeal for all of us.)

It’s worth noting here a word about Moosilauke. When the mountain was first developed, in the early 1900’s, a cabin was built at the peak for overnight lodging.  (It  burned to the ground in 1942.) To help construct and provision that cabin, a dirt road was constructed to the peak. With the destruction of the cabin, that road got less and less traffic and is now mostly overgrown. You can hike on that road, but it is not much easier than the other trails. You also need to be at the peak or the base lodge to access that “carriage road,” so we had no choice but to go down the way we had come up.

In short, once you climb up on Moosilauke, the only way down is to walk, or be carried. Despite my wish as expressed during the descent, there is no zip line or chair lift for exhausted duffers like me. I stopped and sat on rocks or tree stumps with increasing frequency. (“Josh you are doing fine,” Lucie would say. “You have a team behind you!”) At one point Win and I decided that it was better to bushwack off the trail than struggle rock by rock while on it. At least  then when I fell the branches and moss- covered rocks I hit were softer than the rocks in the trail, and saplings sometimes provided handholds to brake my descent.

Thankfully, this was one of the longest days of the year and the weather was clear and mild. Nevertheless, by 7 p.m. it was getting dark and we were still a half mile from the lodge. There was still a steep rocky trail ahead. I stumbled off the trail near the brook that I had heard on the way up. Losing my balance I fell, and could not get up.  The muscles in my legs were too tired. After Win (who is probably 60 pounds lighter than me) dragged me to a soft spot off the trail, I remember saying, “You guys will have to figure out what to do. I’m done.” I stretched out, closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

By this point, Lucie and Rick had gone on ahead to report my condition and check on help. It began to rain and Win loaned me a parka. It wasn’t expected to be a cold night, and so I said, “Just get me a tarp and my sleeping bag at the lodge. I’ll just spend the night here!”  “No way,’’ said Win.

It was dark by the time that two Dartmouth students, Alex Wells ’22 and Jules Reed ’23, arrived. Both were working in the kitchen at the lodge, but had hiking experience, and they had head-mounted flashlights. After they lifted me by my shoulders, I slung one arm over each of their necks. Then, like some six-legged decrepit spider, or a drunken Rockettes threesome, we inched our day down the trail with each of us simultaneously deciding which rock to step upon. When either of them tired, Win took their place.

  Forty minutes later we could see the lights from the lodge, and closer still, the lights from the cabin I was sleeping in. No dinner for me, I told them, just get me to my bunk and bring me a bottle of wine.  They did and I collapsed in bed, thankful to have made it down and for the help that made that possible. The next morning I learned that Win had used the lodge’s one telephone (there is no cell service at Moosilauke) to call my wife and leave a message.  “First of all, let me tell you that Josh is okay,” he had begun.

Postscript

Decades ago, while in high school, I would occasionally quote Socrates,  the Greek philosopher, who had said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” When I have encountered traumatic moments in my life, I have sought to learn from the experience. This was no different. What caused my collapse on the mountain? Should I ever hope to hike again? Could others learn from my ordeal?

Looking back, I clearly should have prepared more for this hike, by taking some shorter hikes with lesser elevations, by having boots that fit better, by using proper hiking poles rather than old, bamboo cross-country poles, and by having a better breakfast and more robust lunch. I should have taken more water and less cold-weather gear in my backpack.  

Maybe with Parkinson’s I should not have gone at all. The stress of the climb certainly exacerbated my instability, and my condition put a big burden on my friends. For them, it turned  what could have been a delightful summer hike into a memorable, anxious ordeal.  Of course, it also reaffirmed the value of friends and the Dartmouth “family.” I would have stayed on that mountain were it not for my saviors.

I do think that the college shares some responsibility for the episode. While I did not inquire, there were no notices that I saw of trail conditions or warnings that the Gorge Brook trail might be unsuitable for people over the age of 70 or suffering from ambulatory instability. Stating the obvious perhaps would be a caution that climbing the mountain is not the hardest challenge; you still have to get down! 

In the years since I last climbed Moosilauke, with my father and brother, the trail to the summit has deteriorated greatly from the flow of rain and melting snow. Rather than relocating the trail, the college has sought to remedy it by making a staircase in many locations This works for those with strong knees, hips and ankles but for those like me, hundreds of 12-inch risers exhaust quite a bit of energy both going up and coming down.  A better solution to trail washout might be to deposit 1-or-2-inch crushed stone in the interstices between the larger boulders to create a kind of stone path to the summit. This would be difficult and expensive and certainly change the nature of the hike, but  it also would improve accessibility and safety, in my humble opinion. If this is feasible I’d be happy to contribute. I have a debt to repay. 

From left, Josh Fitzhugh and Good Samaritans Jules Reed and Alex Wells with me after my misadventure.

John H. (“Josh”) Fitzhugh is a writer, former insurance-company CEO, former newspaper editor and publisher and former legal counsel to two Vermont governors. He lives in Vermont,  Florida and on Cape Cod.

Stephen J. Nelson: Of visionary John Kemeny and decades of court battles over affirmative action at colleges

John G. Kemeny (1926-1992), Hungarian-born mathematician, computer scientist and president of Dartmouth College in 1970-1981

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking up affirmative action at colleges and universities for the sixth time in 50 years. In that litany, an early case was the University of California vs. Bakke. Bakke complained about being denied admission to the university’s medical school because seats were guaranteed for minority applicants, thus barring the door to him and other white applicants.

When the Bakke case was on the court’s docket, John Kemeny was president of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. The Dartmouth board of trustees wanted a public statement by the college on Bakke. Given their strong confidence in Kemeny, they gave him sole authority to craft Dartmouth’s stand on affirmative action. Kemeny’s voice from his bully pulpit into the public square about the Bakke case echoes today.

Kemeny’s argument displays ahead-of-the-curve insights. His major concern, one still very much at stake in the outcome of the court’s deliberations today, was that colleges had to be able to maintain their fundamental purposes in the face of any court judgment. Should the court mandate a cookie-cutter approach for college admissions, the unintended consequence would be to reduce diversity among institutions of higher education something that Kemeny said simply would be “highly undesirable.”

Using Dartmouth’s example, Kemeny underscored that the board had affirmed the college’s purpose as “the education of men and women with a high potential for making a significant positive impact on society.”

The board did not define that purpose as “the education of students who have the ability to accumulate high grade-point averages at the College,” a statement that would be “ludicrous!”

Kemeny pushed back against the court going over the edge if it were to compel colleges and universities exclusively to use test scores and presumed objective measures to decide which students to admit. That legal edict would restrict colleges from recruiting and admitting musicians, athletes and any student uniquely qualified to contribute to a student body and a college. Quotas of any sort were in his judgment “abhorrent.” Beware what you wish for.

Years after Bakke, in the 2003 University of Michigan cases, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asserted that colleges had roughly 25 more years to solve their equity and equal-opportunity problems. After that time, reliance on affirmative-action policies would run out. O’Conner’s clock continues to tick.

Getting to where she urged has proved difficult. Progress on the diversity front in the Ivory Tower is glacial and complicated because competing interests must be addressed and give their blessing or at least not actively resist new programs and initiatives. More time than O’Conner predicted is clearly needed. Ideological players on all sides agree that substantive changes in fairness and equity is the arrival point, though there will always be huge differences about the roadmap.

Greater diversity at colleges and universities makes their campus communities more engaging, more demanding, more rewarding and their members more fully educated. Absent diversity, the highest values of what we want a college education to be will remain outside our grasp. That is true for our body politic inside and outside the gates as graduates take their places in the social of communities and the nation. This picture is the goal, but how to get there and how long it will take are the great unknowns.

The new challenge brought by Students for Fair Admissions alleges that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American students and the University of North Carolina discriminates against white and Asian- American applicants by continuing the use of race as an upfront criteria in admissions rather than observing a race-blind approach that would place more credence and consideration on an applicant’s struggles with discrimination in their life experiences.

The Supreme Court, of course, relies on arguments. The presidents of our colleges and universities must as a group get in the arena, present their case and gather defenders in amicus briefs. The cards will fall as the court dictates. However, jousting over what the Justices will say has to be embraced. It must be made clear to the court’s justices that they must not do harm to hard-fought policies designed to make our colleges and universities equitable, fair and open to diverse populations. Confining latitude and judgments about the scope of admissions procedures and aspirations to add greater diversity to their student bodies would rob colleges and universities of the very autonomy and freedom in their affairs that makes us the envy of the world. The shape of the future of diversity at our colleges is at stake and college presidents must weigh in with all the authority they can muster.

The voices of college presidents have to be front and center in this debate and in the court’s verdict. John Kemeny’s wisdom is a mantle that today’s presidents and those of us concerned diversity and equal opportunity on our campus must take up.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency. He has written several NEJHE pieces on the college presidency.

‘The New England idea’ could no longer serve

Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.

“Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture —the ‘New England idea’ -- could no longer serve.”

— Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), American writer, best known as a literary critic. He wrote a lot about the immigrant experience.

Using AI in remote learning

Silver didrachma from Crete depicting Talos, an ancient mythical automaton with artificial intelligence

From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

BOSTON

“In partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) company Aisera, Dartmouth College recently launched Dart InfoBot, an AI virtual assistant developed to better support students and faculty members during the pandemic. Nicknamed “Dart,” the bot is designed to improve communication and efficiency while learning and working from home, with mere seconds of response time in natural language to approximately 10,000 students and faculty on both Slack and Dartmouth’s client services portal.

“The collaboration with Aisera allows for accelerated diagnosis and resolution times, automated answers to common information and technology questions, and proactive user engagement through a conversational platform.

“At Dartmouth, we wanted our faculty and students to have immediate answers to their information and technology questions online, especially during COVID. Aisera helps us achieve our goals to innovate and deliver an AI-driven conversational service experience throughout our institution. Faculty, staff, and especially students are able to self-serve their technology information using language that makes sense to them. Now our service desk is free to provide real value to our clients by consulting with them and building relationships across our campus.” said Mitch Davis, chief information officer for Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H.’’

The field of artificial intelligence was founded at a workshop on the campus of Dartmouth during the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation.

Beer and Motown

The Hitsville U.S.A. Motown building, at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Motown's headquarters from 1959 to 1968, which became the Motown Historical Museum in 1985.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The death of The Supremes’ Mary Wilson brought back ‘60s memories of the smoky basement of my Dartmouth College (in Hanover, N.H.) fraternity house, where I cemented many friendships, some of which are now being revived via the ambiguous charms of Zoom.

But rather than details of our conversations in that bar- (half keg on Wednesday nights and full keg on Saturday nights)-and-ping-pong-table- equipped cave, the sounds I most remember are those of Motown on our juke box. This was the favored music of the fraternity’s leadership. I had heard little Motown before arriving; the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Mamas & the Papas were the leaders in my Connecticut high school.

Maybe that so many of my fraternity brothers came from big cities (as opposed to the suburbanites that dominated my high school) explains the love of this “Black music”. I got a bit tired of it over three years, but it sure got into my bones and to hear it takes me back to relatively happy days (for me) more than half a century ago.

Birth of oil industry

Plaque at Crosby Hall, at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H.

Three springs

1910 postcard

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

As the leaves push out, I think of three memorable springs, for me, anyway. The first is the spring of 1966, when we seniors were rapidly heading for graduation at our  boarding school at the edge of the lovely Litchfield Hills, in Connecticut. While we faced the pressure of final papers and exams, and saw the Vietnam War looming, all in all, it was a delightful time.  One reason is that a nice youngish married couple – the Woods -- with a couple of  kids lived in a house down the road. They were friends of one of my classmate’s parents.

A bunch of us, ranging from four people to seven, would often bicycle to their rambling white 19th Century house, in nearby Middlebury, and hang out. On a couple of occasions, they had us to dinner, where illegally (?) they served us wine, and everyone would smoke in their backyard, whose spring lushness and freshness I still recall. Thus, we enjoyed the pleasures of adulthood without its responsibilities. It got better and better as the leaves thickened and we luxuriated in the first  hot days. It may have just been the fact that it was a time of transition for us, and so everything seemed intensified, but I can’t remember a more beautiful spring.

Finally, a few days before graduation, which I was slightly dreading because as the head of the student government I had to speak before the commencement multitudes, the Woods gave us a farewell dinner, which I found moving. That was the last time that our group all met together.  And, not surprisingly, several of us have been dead for years.

Then there was the spring of 1970, during my senior year at college, when everything was disrupted by partial college closings associated with protests against the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. The proximate cause was the fatal shooting of four anti-war student demonstrators at Kent State University, on May 4. Many colleges, including mine, Dartmouth College, decided (wrongly, in my view) to let everyone take all courses pass/fail and took other measures that turned the final weeks of that academic year into an excuse to have a hypocritically good time. As President Nixon reduced our military in Vietnam, and then the draft was ended, the protests faded, whatever was happening to the Vietnamese.

In any event, the Upper Connecticut Valley was much warmer than average that year and gorgeous. That late spring almost felt like summer camp. Frisbees flying everywhere.  I left with only vague ideas of what I’d be doing next.

And now, half a century later, the Class of 2020 has had its in-person commencement postponed  to June 2021, as the black swan of COVID-19 flies over.  I wonder how many graduates will make it to that one.

The third spring I vividly remember came in 1972, as I was preparing to get my master’s degree at Columbia University, which was then still recuperating from the student unrest of the previous few years. Although graffiti-splattered-New York City was then in decline because of old industries leaving and/or shrinking, corporate headquarters fleeing to Connecticut, crime, labor strikes and municipal mismanagement, “The City’’ to many young people was still the most exciting and alluring place to be in America, and not all that expensive compared to most of the stretch from the ‘80s to the last couple of months, when COVID-19 has driven down housing and other prices.

I remember how easy it seemed to get a job, which I did before commencement, and the bright prospect of adventures to come. I felt, briefly, fancy free, as I strolled through Riverside Park up to Columbia, at 115th Street, from the  big apartment at West 88th Street I shared with, numbers depending on the month, three to five people directly or indirectly connected with the movie and TV business. The rather ugly, city-tough, plane trees were unfurling and I smelled the inexplicable scent of wet bread. The city seemed full of promise, and it will again.

N.E. virus response: Beth Israel making swabs; Home Base director takes role; Dartmouth working on better test

— Photo by Raimond Spekking

From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

As our region and our nation continue to grapple with the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, The New England Council is using our blog as a platform to highlight some of the incredible work our members have undertaken to respond to the outbreak.  Each day, we’ll post a round-up of updates on some of the initiatives underway among Council members throughout the region.  We are also sharing these updates via our social media, and encourage our members to share with us any information on their efforts so that we can be sure to include them in these daily round-ups.

You can find all the Council’s information and resources related to the crisis in the special COVID-19 section of our website.  This includes our COVID-19 Virtual Events Calendar, which provides information on upcoming COVID-19 Congressional town halls and webinars presented by NEC members, as well as our newly-released Federal Agency COVID-19 Guidance for Businesses page.

Here is the April 21 roundup:

Medical Response

• Beth Israel Producing Testing Swabs to Combat Shortage – Faced with a dwindling supply of testing materials, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has begun producing their own testing swabs in collaboration with local academics and manufacturers. The new swabs are already being used to test potential COVID-19 patients and will begin production on a larger scale soon. Read more from WBUR.

• Home Base’s Gen. Jack Hammond Tapped to Lead Boston Hope Medical Center – General Jack Hammond, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Red Sox Home Base Program, has been chosen by Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) to serve as co-medical and operations director at Boston Hope Medical Center. Gen. Hammond will draw on both his personal experience serving in the military and in his role at Home Base to work with state and local officials to coordinate care for the unsheltered and those in post-acute care. Read more in The Boston Globe and the press release.

• Dartmouth College Researchers Developing Improved Test – Researchers at Dartmouth College are working to create a new, improved test for COVID-19. The lab has partnered with a California biotech company to make the test more reliable and quicker to produce results. The test awaits FDA approval as it is being compared to the test currently being used in the United States. Read more from The New Hampshire Business Review

Economic/Business Continuity Response

• Worcester State University Receives $484,000 Grant to Improve Remote Learning – To support its transition to remote learning, Worcester State University (WSU) has received over $484,000 in grants from a Boston venture philanthropy firm. The funds will be used to cover a variety of expenses, such as laptops and a university-wide texting system to remind students of upcoming deadlines. The measures are designed to especially help first-generation students, a demographic already more likely to drop out of school. The Worcester Business Journal has more.

Community Response

• City of Providence Buys 34,000 Masks for Frontline Workers – The City of Providence has partnered with its firefighters union to purchase 34,000 N95 masks for first responders directly exposed to the virus. Masks, along with other protective equipment such as gloves, will be distributed to responders and other essential personnel who require them. Read more from WPRI.

• UnitedHealth Announces $5 Million to Support Healthcare Workers – UnitedHealth Group, as part of its initial $60 million commitment to combating the coronavirus pandemic, has announced a $5 million initiative to support the healthcare workforce. Specifically, the funds will be directed toward efforts to procure more personal protective equipment (PPE) and to provide mental health support to those working directly with COVID-19 patients. Read the press release here.

Stay tuned for more updates each day, and follow us on Twitter for more frequent updates on how Council members are contributing to the response to this global health crisis.

He didn't go for the night life

Downtown Cavendish, Vt.

“Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not have imagined a better place to live, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont.’’

— Russian novelist, historian, short story writer (and Nobel laureate) and anti-Soviet political activist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) in a 1994 letter to the Town of Cavendish. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned in 1994, after that empire fell apart, in 1991.

From dartblog.com:

An article in Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ magazine, “A Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,’’ describes Solzhenitsyn’s time in Vermont.

After traveling throughout the region in 1975, they decided Cavendish would be their new home. Its small size (population: 1,264 in 1970) meant that privacy wouldn’t be a problem. Its remote location was far away from reporters, fans, and the Soviet security services. And its proximity to Dartmouth College provided easy access to a wealth of library and research resources. The entire family, including Natalia’s mother, Ekaterina, moved to a large wooded property there in 1976 [where they stayed until 1994].

Stephen J. Nelson: The lessons from Kemeny of Dartmouth

John G. Kemeny

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Nelson what lessons today’s leaders could learn from his latest book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency (Lexington Books, September 2019).

Harney: Your new book explores the life of Dartmouth College President John Kemeny. Why is Kemeny’s story particularly relevant today?

Nelson: John Kemeny was inaugurated as president of Dartmouth on March 1, 1970, two months almost to the day before the killings at Kent State. To say that the times were tumultuous both inside the gates of Dartmouth and outside is an understatement for sure. How different were those times from ours today? We don’t need to go through the entire litany of major issues and upsets in the contemporary era: terrorism foreign and domestic; economic crashes and rebounds; and political polarization and ideological loggerheads to suggest that current times are not a hallmark of stability. How Kemeny handled his times as the leader of a college ranging from the strains of internal and external political and ideological battles to fiscal stability in unstable economic cycles informs well and fully how and what college presidents today should do.

One important feature of Kemeny’s story that stands out today is that he was a man who came to America as a Hungarian immigrant, his family in 1940, fleeing the onslaught of Hitler’s horrors. When Kemeny arrived in New York City, he knew virtually no English, learning it on the fly as a 14-year-old high school sophomore as George Washington High, one of the elite city schools in the 1940s. Then just two years later, he graduated as valedictorian. He went directly to Princeton University, double majoring in math and philosophy.

During his third year there, he left the undergraduate life for one year, joining the Army. He was not yet a U.S. citizen, which he had to become rapidly because he was quickly assigned as a new private just through basic training in January 1945 to Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project working in the final stages of the development of the atom bomb. He returned to Princeton, graduated in four years from matriculation and staying on for his Ph.D. in math and serving as a research assistant to Albert Einstein.

His faculty leadership at Dartmouth is unparalleled—building a math department, co-inventing BASIC, the very influential computer language, and pioneering college computing through the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and then on to the college’s presidency. He came to our shores as a stranger, fully embraced being an American and had an enormous impact on education and the life and affairs of the colleges and our nation. Those contributions as citizen, educator and leader included toward the end of his presidency chairing the Three Mile Island Commission.

It is trite to call his life the fulfillment of the American Dream, but it was that and more, and his footprint remains large and lasting today. And in the current environment, might a family like the Kemenys and a contributing citizen like John be prevented entry to our country? We could hope not, but there would be no guarantee. Taking “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” was the right thing then and should still be considered the right thing today.

Harney: What were some of the key challenges of the time?

Nelson: John Kemeny’s and Dartmouth’s challenges were many. The country was torn asunder by a debatable and highly contested war. There were continuous strains and pressures of protests to insure full citizenship and equity to Black Americans as well as other minorities, including women. The nation, with enormous impact on the budgets and financial stability of colleges and universities, faced three major recessions one of which in 1973-74 was by some measures as disastrous as the Great Recession of 2008. The reality became clear that the post-World War II through part of the 1960s public funding of colleges and universities was not going to be sustained. And that led quickly to massive belt-tightening brought about by enormous cutbacks (not stanched in the decades since) in federal funding of higher education.

Finally, the drumbeat of the leftover political animus and polarization begun in the 1960s continued to build through the 1970s to what came to be known as political correctness and the ideological battleground that has persisted now for five decades since.

Harney: You have a chapter on “Navigating Affairs Inside the Gates: The Horrors of “Animal House, ” the Indian Symbol, and the right-wing Dartmouth Review.” How did Kemeny’s tenure change Dartmouth’s place in the higher education landscape?

Nelson: Dartmouth in the 1970s had much of the best of worlds mixed with the worst of worlds. Overall, Kemeny’s presidency placed a highly positive imprint on the Dartmouth of those days and its future. He navigated the most difficult decision in Dartmouth’s then 200-year history when he moved—really educated—the campus, the alumni body and the trustees in the successful transition to coeducation. Not only did the college admit women for the first time in a previously all-male history, but doing it did so in a way that within a few short years found women students fully participating (certainly notwithstanding push back from disgruntled alumni in the early years) in the academic, athletic and social life of the campus.

That decision alone raised Dartmouth’s profile as a major player among the elite colleges of the day, some of whom also recently had become coeducational and others that had women in their student bodies for many years. Kemeny knew and argued publicly that if the college had shirked and shrunk from co-education, it would have decided tragically to consign itself to second-class status for the next chapters in its history. He was determined that could and would never be Dartmouth’s fate.

The Dartmouth Review was a thorn in Kemeny’s side in his last year in office (the paper distributed its inaugural issue at his penultimate commencement as president in 1980). Kemeny fought the paper even if in the short time he had remaining in office, he was not able to duke things out with them as he might have been able to do had he had longer. However, in the face of their charges and complaints about diversity, a changing Dartmouth and a litany of other allegations, Kemeny was able to maintain his and the college’s focus on equity in continuing to diversify its student body, faculty and administrative ranks and to keep Dartmouth on an even keel even as the institution evolved so significantly in the short space of the decade of the 1970s. And the gathering strength of the college that he set in motion created the stage that James Freedman as president in 1987 was able to stand on as he pricked the balloon of the Review once and for all, leaving them with vastly diminished credibility and stature. Without the platform that Kemeny had put in place, Freedman would not have had the leverage he was able to utilize to face down the Review (over their “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedman” front page banner) in his first months in office.

Harney: You also have a chapter on the “Economic Shocks of the 1970s.” Do you think presidents today are prepared for an overdue economic slowdown?

Nelson: One of Kemeny’s great genius creations and something initiated at Dartmouth and modeled by almost every college and university since, was the change he made in how endowment income should be conceived and utilized. He knew that having annual college budgets sway with the good or bad fortunes of the market, and investment income and portfolio performance was unnecessarily unstable and unsustainable.

Mathematician that he was, though it was not rocket science, he figured out the calculus of how to get around those undulations. It was simply to establish a conservative, he thought about 5 percent annually, using an average drawdown calculated on a five-year basis for endowment income. Thus in a good year of market performance, the positive difference would be plowed back into the endowment. That then created a rainy day fund for those years when the market fell below five-year average such that the annual operating budget built for the roughly five percent would be able to run without a deficit.

Today, most colleges and universities have partial preparation and security in the face of economic slowdowns if they, as most do, handle their portfolios and the use if their endowment incomes in this way.

The second thing he initiated on the fiscal affairs front at Dartmouth that has now also been mimicked by many, maybe most colleges and universities, was that when building a new building or even undertaking a large renovation of an existing one, that the total budget for the project had to include maintenance and depreciation. That is, it is going to cost money, real money to keep any building running and maintained: heat, light, custodial coverage, roof, plumbing and maybe even a next major renovation.

That continuing, unrelenting and unforgiving cost had to be planned for as a way of overcoming the oxymoronic idea of “deferred maintenance.” That brought further annual stability to Dartmouth’s budgets and plant operations. While that alone doesn’t solve every part of ensuing economic challenges, it is a further hedge against having any one or two annual budgets be overly struck and stymied by national and global economic cycles and even major downturns.

Jessicah Pierre: Those elite college 'legacy' admissions

Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H.

Via OtherWords.org

In what’s being called the largest college admissions scam ever, a number of wealthy parents, celebrities, and college prep coaches have been accused of offering large bribes to get rich students into Ivy League and other elite schools, regardless of their credentials. The Ivy League includes Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale.

The parents facing charges allegedly paid up to $6.5 million to get their kids into college.

Shocking as it is, this is hardly a new phenomenon in higher education. Wealthy and privileged students have always had an upper hand in being accepted to prestigious universities.

They’re called “legacy preferences.”

“Many U.S. colleges admit ‘legacies,’ or students with a family connection to the university, at dramatically higher rates than other applicants,” The Guardian explains, because “they are widely seen as a reliable source of alumni donations.”

Some of our countries most prominent figures have benefited from legacy preferences. When applying to Harvard, future president John F. Kennedy noted that his father was an alumnus. And although his academic record was unspectacular, he was admitted into the Ivy League school.

The same can be said for George W. Bush, whose father and grandfather graduated from Yale. Despite his “lackluster grades,” The Guardian reported, Bush was accepted.

This overt — and legal — preference for the wealthy and powerful goes back at least a century. Yet when the children of middle class families are denied admission, some families have laid the blame on affirmative action programs for students of color, who’ve historically faced discrimination.

As the college admissions process becomes more competitive, campaigns against affirmative action have revved up immensely. In 2016, Abigail Fisher challenged the University of Texas at Austin’s race-conscious admissions program after being rejected when she applied for a university program designed for the top 10 percent of her class.

Despite not having the credentials to get into the program, Fisher cited affirmative action as the reason why she was denied. In other words, she claimed she was being discriminated against because she was white. Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that affirmative action is in fact constitutional and doesn’t hurt white students.

In fact, even with programs like affirmative action, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, racial divides at universities still remain. While college enrollment is increasing across the board, it found that enrollment rates for college-aged white students (42 percent) remain higher than for both black students (36 percent) and Hispanic students (39 percent.)

Meanwhile, a 2018 analysis of Harvard’s admissions process found that legacy applicants were accepted at a rate of nearly 34 percent from 2009 to 2015. That’s more than five times higher than the rate for non-legacies over the same six-year period: just 5.9 percent.

It’s clear that students like Abigail Fisher are picking the wrong fight when it comes to discrimination in the college admissions process.

The high-level of corruption of legacy admissions hurts the majority of students, regardless of race. So too do the parents spending millions on bribes. But that’s how inequality thrives.

Today’s college admissions scandal is just another illustration of the rich encouraging working- and middle-class people to turn against each other — and blame people of color — while they quietly rig the game for themselves.

Instead of pointing the finger at each other, the victims of these manipulations should come together to take the monster of economic privilege down.

Jessicah Pierre is the inequality media specialist at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Images from Out West

One of the works by Nan Darham in her show at the Russo Gallery at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., through Feb. 9. She is from Bozeman, Mont.

Her artwork and stories chronicle the culture, landscape, wildlife and characters that populate her life in the West. She configures a changing geography that includes immense historical and contemporary issues of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Trump move against colleges' affirmative action on race is good news for affluent white students

Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. Dartmouth is one of the four Ivy League universities in New England. The others are Harvard, Yale and Brown.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

That the Trump administration has decided that the federal government will no longer encourage colleges and universities to use race in the admissions process, reversing Obama-era guidance meant to promote diversity, will have the least effect on the nation’s richest, most prestigious and thus hard-to-get-into colleges and universities, of which New England has a lot. They get so many applicants and have so much financial aid to give out that they can easily create very diverse classes.   The schools want to show such diversity in part because it reinforces their position as national and even international institutions. They want their students’ faces to look like the, well, world.

Using race as one criterion among others also has socio-economic-diversity effects– e.g., African-American and Hispanic students tend to come from poorer families than white and many Asian families.

Meanwhile, the Feds are investigating Harvard for alleged racial bias after complaints from some Asian-Americans that the admissions process is skewed against them.

Harvard has argued that it “does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans’’ and notes that this group currently makes up a hefty 22.2 percent of students.  But some rejected applicants say that’s too low considering their high marks and other indicators of future success.

We should leave  to the colleges what sort of mix they  need and want.  Barring provable racial bias,  the Feds shouldn’t try to manage colleges’ decision-making.

Trump’s policy, which will appeal to his mostly white base, will mean that poorer schools (public and private) will be less likely to offer admission to minorities. They’ll become whiter even as the Ivy League  and other highly selective colleges maintain their affirmative-action programs. Poorer, less prestigious schools could try to maintain racial diversity indirectly, especially by providing more financial aid on the basis of a family’s finances – again, African-Americans and Hispanics tend to be considerably poorer than whites – but in a time of fiscal austerity for many colleges and universities and a shrinking number of overall applications because of demographic change, don’t bet on it.

The Trump policy will tend to favor affluent whites and widen the class divide.

Horsefeathers

"Dive'' (feathers and sticks), by Alysa Bennett, in her show "A Change of Horse,'' at AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through May 25. The gallery says her "career inspiration and artistry have been of subjects that bring movement and mystery. Horses have been a core subject for the artist for many years and are shown in multiple mediums of drawings, prints and sculptures. ''

Lebanon is an old Connecticut River Valley mill town, chartered in 1761, that was revolutionized by the routing, in the 1960s, of Interstates 89 and 91 through the town and nearby  White River Junction, Vt. (where Amtrak and freight trains stop), in addition because of the growth of Dartmouth College.
 

That's especially with the expansion of  Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, which is affiliated with the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, in Lebanon,  and  with the growth of storied Dartmouth College itself, whose main campus, in Hanover, is just to the north. Dartmouth Hitchcock is the largest medical center in northern New England. The Geisel School is named after Theodor Geisel, aka "Dr. Seuss,'' a member of the Dartmouth College class of 1925.

So the former small-factory town now has a mixed economy based on education, medical services, high-technology and retail. It and White River Junction also have some good restaurants.

Tree-killing Southern Pine Beetle moving into southern New England

Southern Pine Beetle.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Pitch pine forests are at greater risk of attack from the Southern Pine Beetle than forests with a mix of tree species, according to recent research by Dartmouth College. The study shows that the composition of forests is more important than other factors when predicting where the destructive pest will strike next.

The research, published in Forest Ecology and Management, adds to understanding of the Southern Pine Beetle and confirms previous research from the beetle’s southern habitat on the importance of characteristics that increase forest susceptibility to the pest.

The research finding has important implications for forest managers who need to predict and prevent infestation by a pest that is already responsible for significant forest damage and that is continuing its climate-induced move northward, according to researchers.

“Knowing which tree stands may be most susceptible to this beetle is extremely important information for managers working to protect our forests,” said Carissa Aoki, a post-doctoral research associate at Dartmouth and lead author of the study. “This research not only tells us that preventative treatment such as thinning can be effective, but also helps prioritize tree stands for treatment based on structural characteristics."

Southern Pine Beetles have a hard reddish brown to black exoskeletons and measure about 0.12 inches, about the size of a grain of rice.

For the study, researchers focused on southern pine beetle infestations in the New Jersey Pinelands, a forested area that spans the southern and central portions of the state. The  average coldest night of the winter in this region has warmed by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, creating favorable conditions for the Southern Pine Beetle to increase its range.

The last documented outbreak of Southern Pine Beetle in New Jersey occurred more than 80 years ago, but the mid-Atlantic states may see more regular outbreaks in the future. The northern New Jersey Pinelands, and pitch pine stands in the New England states with similar structural characteristics, are particularly at risk of infestation as the  beetle continues to move northward, according to researchers.

As of 2014, a new outbreak was detected on New York’s Long Island, and scattered throughout Connecticut the following year. These beetles have additionally been trapped as far north as Rhode Island and Massachusetts, though large-scale tree mortality hasn’t yet occurred in these southern New England states.

“The northward movement of the southern pine beetle is just one example of how climate warming is permitting rapid range expansions,” said Matthew Ayres, a professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth. “We can expect many more cases because the warming continues. This might mean you can grow a cherry tree where you couldn’t before, but you and your plants can also expect a growing battery of pests that weren’t there before.”

The researchers found that Southern Pine Beetle infestations in both wetland and upland areas were far more likely to occur in pure conifer stands than mixed stands of oak and pine. While wetland conifer areas were especially affected, wetland mixed sites had fewer spots than expected.

While the study confirms some of what was previously known about the species, the finding in the Pinelands — that a high percentage of pine trees in a stand is a more important factor than moisture levels — is in contrast to previous research that indicated strong evidence for the connection between high moisture and stand susceptibility.

Researchers also found that stands of intermediate age — about 25 to 75 years for pitch pine — were disproportionately infested. Forest stands comprised of older, larger trees tended not to be very susceptible, while young trees are known not to be susceptible and weren’t sampled. The volume of trees in a stand and the percentage of each tree that is green were also found to contribute to stand susceptibility.

The results indicate that the same tactics that have been effective at limiting beetle impacts in the South could also be effective in newly occupied northern ranges. Those tactics include monitoring to detect population increases, rapid suppression of spots when they are still rare, and thinning of trees for prevention.

Southern Pine Beetle activity occurs in extremes — either very rare or through infestations that involve millions of pests. During episodic outbreaks, the beetles readily kill even the healthiest pines through synchronized attacks that overwhelm tree defenses.

“The Southern Pine Beetle is one of the most aggressive tree-killing insects in the world. Outbreaks tend to be self-sustaining because the more beetles there are, the better they succeed,” said Ayres, a co-author of the report and with 25 years of experience studying the beetle species.

Stephen J. Nelson: John Hennessey, a great academic and a great reformer

John Hennessey speaking at a Tuck School function.

 Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

John W. Hennessey  Jr. lived a remarkable, full life as a professor, as a leader in his field of management and business, and moral, ethical leadership, and as dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and provost at the University of Vermont. He was extraordinary on many fronts, a great man who lived in tumultuous times marked by world war as a young man, later as a graduate student and then professor and dean during the massive social and culture changes wrought by the 1960s and ‘70s. He was ahead of his times in ways that were noteworthy then, but now are even more so as we look retrospectively at his life. He died Jan. 11 at 92. 

Hennessey was part of “the greatest generation,” those who were teenagers as a horrific war broke out, served as young men and women, and then came home to continue college careers and get on with their personal and early professional lives. Following his recent death, an article about his life in The Boston Globe captured Hennessey’s early-on bewilderment and criticism of the many discriminations of his time.

Of particular note for him were the barriers  that many institutions, among them our most elite, constructed against women, including his wife. After graduating from the Harvard Business School, Hennessey wondered about whether attending there made him complicit in Harvard’s discrimination policies. After all, his wife who wanted a law degree, could not even apply to Harvard’s Law School. Those personal lessons, coupled with the feminist activism of his mother as a suffragette at Vassar College and a similarly inclined sister at Vasser decades later, were in Hennessey’s gestalt as a young faculty member at the Tuck School.

When in 1968, Dartmouth’s president, John Dickey, approached Hennessey to become the dean of the Tuck School, his response was clear. Hennessey's quid pro quo: He would become Dickey’s dean only if he agreed to permit Hennessey to accept women to the Tuck School, which at the time, like all of Dartmouth College, was an all-male institution. Dickey agreed and the first women came to Tuck three years before Dartmouth decided to admit women undergraduates and four years before their arrival on campus. Hennessey was graduating his first women from Tuck before Dartmouth made the move to co-education in its undergraduate ranks.

But he was by no means done with that stroke. While making those commitments for women in business, he was also actively involved both at Tuck and with business school colleagues across the country to recruit racial minorities and opening doors for them into the business and corporate world. He invented the case-study approach to teaching business ethics, led the Tuck School to growth and expansion, and was an enormous influence in the leadership and wisdom of Dartmouth.

A fellow alumnus from the late 1940s at Princeton, John Kemeny, was Dartmouth’s president, in the 1970s. Kemeny turned to Hennessey repeatedly for advice and counsel. When Kemeny left the presidency, in 1981, many a rumor at Dartmouth had it that Hennessey was on the short list of successors. That did not turn out to be the case, one might say sadly for Dartmouth. Here was maybe the greatest man not to become a college president.

Hennessey then went on to a distinguished career as provost at the University of Vermont and for a short time acting president there.

What are the testimonies from this distinguished life in the halls of the academy? What does his forward-looking leadership and vision for higher education and society say to us today?

First, we need to be ever ahead of the curve. Hennessey did not wait for the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and '70s, affirmative action, Title IX and all the rest to animate, motivate and move him in the direction of equality and equity. It was in his gut and in his heart, and he had the courage to give voice to those principles. Our colleges and universities today need to witness this legacy and build on it. That includes issues and contentions that Hennessey would have thought  that we had conquered, yet today continue to require revisiting and conquering anew.

Second, and more critically, check your ego and your self-righteousness at the door. It is easy for those who aspire to promote change to do it with their chests out. John Hennessey was as reserved a man, as he was an intelligent and forceful leader. But leadership was not about him, and more importantly even the good that he sought to do was not a testimony to his goodness.

The Globe piece quotes him in words that stand on their own and form a coda about the life of John Hennessey. As the undergraduate wave of women of Dartmouth began to take courses at the Tuck School, Hennessey commented late in his oral history that his upper-level administrative colleagues didn’t realize the ways in which they were “being paternalistic and fatherly.” As said noted, “The idea that it can all be done with good intentions and with ‘good old boys’ simply being gooder, isn’t going to work. And you’re going to have to listen to wise women.”

John Hennessey enriched the halls of academe, the quest for the life of the mind, and for lives well-lived.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, The Shape and Shaping of the College and University in America: A Lively Experiment. Nelson served on the student affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978-1987. He is currently working on a biography of John G. Kemeny, Dartmouth math  and computer-science professor and president, 1970-81.