Winemaker Bill Fraser ’70, who with wife Bev planted the vines to start Fraser Vineyard in 2003 in Boise, Idaho, has been named the 2011 Idaho Winery of the Year by Wine Press Northwest. In particular, his 2007 cabernet sauvignon won “Best Red” and “Best in Show” awards at the 2010 Idaho Wine Competition.

Cynthia Monroe ’88 of Anchorage, Alaska, for the second year in a row has won the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association Literary Competition. This year she won with “Hiding Place,”  “After the Fall” and “Conspiracy,” which may be found at www.cpmonroe.com.

Sarah Uhl ’07, a master’s student researching the health effects of endocrine disruptors at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has been named a Switzer Environmental Fellow by the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, awarded to emerging environmental leaders. Uhl previously spent four years working for the nonprofit Clean Water Action, when she spearheaded the Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut to replace toxic chemicals in everyday products and industry with safer alternatives.

Anthony Horan ’61, chief of surgery at Delano (California) Regional Medical Center, earned the first prize in the annual history essay contest at the western section of the American Urological Association meeting in August. His essay was adapted from his book, The Big Scare: The Business of Prostate Cancer, which also won an honorable mention at the 2011 New York Book Fair.

New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg ’88 profiles six athletes as they pursue a life-defining goal—a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run—in You Are an Ironman: How Six Weekend Warriors Chased Their Dream of Finishing the World’s Toughest Triathlon (Viking).

William M. Gould ’54, M.D., chronicles a friendship among three boys, a prank that deteriorates into a crime and its impact on the three as they meet 30 years later in Three Boys Like You (iUniverse).

Denny Emerson ’63, a former member of the U.S. Equestrian Team and a trainer and coach who earned the U.S. Eventing Association’s Wofford Cup for lifetime service to eventing, reviews seven broad “areas of choice” to help riders become better in How Good Riders Get Good: Daily Choices That Lead to Success in Any Equestrian Sport (Trafalgar Square Books).

Paul R. Pillar ’69, a former CIA analyst and director of studies in the security studies program at Georgetown, confronts America’s intelligence myths and offers an approach to better informing U.S. policy in Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia University Press).

Architectural historian William Morgan ’66 showcases the long history of a small town through descriptions and visuals of its buildings in  Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire (Godine).

Julia Miner ’76 illustrated The Lighthouse Santa (Flying Dog/University Press of New England), a story by Sara Hoagland Hunter ’76 about a girl who refuses to let an approaching storm threaten her holiday.

For its August issue, Chicago magazine tracked down 15 former gang members from the tough neighborhood of North Lawndale who were admitted to Dartmouth between 1967 and 1973 through a program called Foundation Years. The late DeWitt Beall ’62 urged the College’s senior administrators to create the program after meeting many of the Vice Lords gang members while making a film. Seven of the students graduated—C. Siddha Webber ’73, Allan “Tiny” Evans ’71, Paul Cooper ’73, Michael Orr ’72, Henry Jordan ’71, Henry Crumpton ’73 and William Burks ’73—and eight dropped out. “I didn’t trust the environment,” said Webber, an ordained minister who earned a Ph.D. from McCormick Theological Seminary. “I had never been around intellectual white people before. It transformed me.” Evans, who’s retired from the Chicago public schools, added, “Nobody thought we were going to make it. But I wanted that degree.”

Producer Chris Chesser ’70 and the cast and crew of Major League were revisited by Sports Illustrated for its July 4 “Where Are They Now?” issue. In the 22 years since its release, the movie has become one of the most popular—and most quoted—sports films ever. “It touched this nerve about the perennial loser who wins,” Chesser, who got his start as a film executive on Caddyshack, told Sports Illustrated. “It’s a formula that’s hard to f*** up. Every once in a while someone will quote a line to me that I don’t remember. Just the other night I heard on SportsCenter: ‘Juuuust a bit outside.’ ”

Moira Sullivan ’07 was one of 24 finalists in the Rose of Tralee international beauty pageant for young women of Irish descent, reported the Anchorage Daily News in June. Although she didn’t win the week-long competition in Tralee in August, Sullivan, the daughter of former Alaska State Sen. Susan Sullivan, returned to Ireland in the fall to begin working toward a master’s in finance at Trinity College in Dublin.

“There now can be no argument whether video games are entitled to the same protection as books, movies, music and other expressive entertainment,” Crossan R. “Bo” Andersen ’66 told the Associated Press following a June U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld a federal appeals court decision to toss out California’s ban on selling or renting violent video games to minors. Andersen was the lead plaintiff in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association as the association’s president and CEO. Sean Devlin Bersell ’81, association vice president of public affairs, led the lobbying effort against the law when it was being considered by the California legislature.

Lisa Friel ’79 is stepping down in October after a decade as chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex crimes prosecution unit. Friel will head a new division at T&M Protection Resources, a New York-based global security and investigations firm, providing consulting and sexual assault education services to colleges and universities, according to The New York Times. “Lisa is the top expert in assessing complaints of sexual assault and harassment and an investigator known for her ability to solve complex cases,” said T&M CEO Robert Tucker. “Lisa is the ideal person to run a unit to help corporations and colleges and summer camps and fraternities.”

The Mathias brothers—Teddy ’09, Peter ’09 and Johnny ’11—have been making music with their childhood friend Casey Gibson for more than 10 years. Now that they’ve all graduated from college, their Chicago-based band Filligar has been generating buzz. They played several East Coast dates this fall, toured the United Kingdom last summer and in August played the KahBang Music and Art Festival in Maine and performed at a sold-out show at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom. The Nerve, their fourth album, came out last winter and the fifth is due in early 2012. The band’s goal? “Do this full time,” Teddy Mathias told the New York Press in August.

Elsewhere on the music scene, “the name and sound of Tall Heights is spreading throughout New England,” according to The Pulse Magazine. The duo of Paul Wright ’07 and Tim Harrington developed their folk/pop sound playing together on the streets of Boston in Faneuil Hall’s world-renowned Street Performer Program in 2010. They released their third album, Rafters, in September, and have been playing shows in Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. (Listen to a song off the album as they performed it at Dartmouth here.)

The 60th birthday bash of financier Leon Black ’73, founder of Apollo Management, was covered by several media outlets in August, including The New York Times. Among the 200 guests, who were treated to a 90-minute concert by Elton John at the festivities in Southampton, New York, were N.Y.C. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and designer Vera Wang. “Leon throws some good parties, because Leon’s worth like 20 gazillion, like 20 billion or something crazy, and for him, you know, a billion dollars is like 10 dollars to us,” guest Howard Stern said, according to the Times.

In August New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) reported on research conducted by biological sciences professor Celia Chen ’78 and a team of Dartmouth researchers on the Androscoggin River near an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site in Berlin, New Hampshire. The river was polluted for more than 70 years by chlorine and other chemicals used in paper manufacturing, and Chen and her team are capturing various river organisms to measure the levels of mercury and other toxic metals. Chen, of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program, told NHPR that mercury “biomagnifies” up the food chain. “There’s been some indication from the EPA studies that were done that there are elevated levels in some of the fish that are the size and species that humans consume, and we’re particularly concerned with how the mercury gets into those larger fish from lower in the food chain,” she said.

College football is jam-packed with great rivalries, but ESPN.com asserted last August that one of the biggest may be between Southeastern Conference (SEC) commissioner Mike Slive ’62 and his Big Ten counterpart Jim Delany. It doesn’t help that the SEC has won five consecutive national titles, two of them against Big Ten teams. “This is so much Sun Belt vs. Rust Belt, and the best players are in the Sun Belt now,” someone who knows both men told ESPN.com. Slive, who was featured in the January-February 2011 issue of DAM, said of his relationship with Delany, “I would characterize it as highly competitive. But it’s nice on occasion for us to find some common ground that relates to the long-term health of intercollegiate athletics.” Added Big East commissioner John Marinatto: “They fence, obviously, during our meetings, but there’s a competitiveness that makes them very, very good at what they do. They’re tremendous stewards of their respective conferences.”

“I’ve been tackled by a drunk guy, had a bottle thrown at me and the other day a guy just went off on me,” Paul Marino ’04 told The New York Times in August. Apparently they were not fans of the New York City subway theater act of Marino and Fred Jones, who perform as Popeye & Cloudy. Since January the pair has been performing Shakespeare, Abbott & Costello and some original scenes for about 20 hours a week on the F, G, J, L and R trains. Marino said they both got sick during the first two months of performing after being “exposed to every germ in the city.” Armed with a hand sanitizer, Marino persevered and now derives his income primarily from tips. “I’m in love with that kind of art, that organic, wild art of busking. Fred and I share this courage in terms of the places we’ll go as performers,” Marino said.

“This is the biggest project our chapter has taken on in terms of cost,” Mark Zankel ’89, deputy New Hampshire director of the Nature Conservancy, told the Associated Press in July. He was referring to the state chapter’s plan to purchase 13,000 acres of conservation land at the Mascoma River headwaters for $12.5 million. A habitat for more than 100 species of birds, as well as black bears, moose and deer, the Mascoma River is also the source of public drinking water for Lebanon, New Hampshire, residents and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “It’s such an extraordinary opportunity,” said Zankel.

Brad Ausmus ’91, who caught more than 1,900 games before retiring last year after 18 seasons as a Major League Baseball catcher, told National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program that he calculates he did 150 squats a day during a seven-month season. Ausmus played for the Houston Astros for 10 seasons, was the winner of three Gold Gloves and was a 1999 selection to the National League All-Star team. He conceded that playing that position takes a toll on your legs, especially by August and September. “Physically, it’s mainly getting in and out of a squat,” he said. “You do it not only during the course of the game—which is actually the easier part—you do it in the bullpen, you do it in spring training, you do it during the warm-ups, you do it prior to the game.” Ausmus now works for the San Diego Padres as a special assistant to the general manager.

Career: Became president of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, August 2010; inaugurated April 2011; managing director, First Union Capital Markets, 1996-99; chairman, Bear Stearns Asia, 1995-96; executive director, Goldman Sachs, 1990-94; director, government bond division, Salomon Brothers, 1976-90

Education: A.B., philosophy; M.A., intellectual history, Cambridge University, 1976; M.A., history, Yale, 2002; M.S.L., Yale Law School, 2007; Ph.D., American history, Yale, 2009

Family: Lives in Lexington with wife Jennifer; father of Tucker, 20, and Penelope, 17

“When I left the financial world, my old boss gave me a trip to an Amish farm where you go to figure out what to do with the rest of your life. The perception of the people there was that I should be a college president. Then we started talking about how to make that happen, and it was off to the races.”

“Dartmouth did everything it could to put the intellectual plate in front of me, and I didn’t eat from it as well as I should have. I became very involved in social activities that diverted my attention from my academic endeavors. I regret that quite completely.”

“I’m on a mission to encourage students to enjoy the activities college has to offer, but to not forget the purpose of college. That’s to broaden our horizons intellectually and to expose us to the things that will allow us to engage with all sorts of people and pursuits after graduation.”

“I came to Transylvania assuming the faculty would resist my presidency because of my business past, and students would be excited by it because so many are interested in that profession. The opposite happened.”

“After I announced an initiative to go paperless I thought the students would be in the streets celebrating an environmentalist in the president’s office. Turns out we’re the only college in Kentucky that gives away paper for free, and the students were furious I was taking it away.”

“Everything has to be done by consensus on a college campus, which can be maddening.”

“I’ve learned you don’t challenge people to do things just because it seems like a good idea at the time. You have to investigate what’s practical and implementable within a particular community.”

“Alumni feel like owners of their alma mater, and one has to be very careful about tinkering—and threatening memories. A non-alum president will always be seen as an interloper.”

“None of my prior experience in business or with nonprofits has informed what I do as a fundraiser as much as my experience as a Dartmouth alum. I’ve learned a great deal from the major gifts officers and from our alumni initiatives around the globe.”

“A cross-disciplinary approach to education will distinguish the liberal arts experience of the 20th century from that of the 21st century. We used to think of a liberal arts college as a destination where people go to access a myriad of subjects. In the 21st century we’re going to see people attending liberal arts colleges because of the interaction among those subjects.”

“We need not to confuse the price of education with the cost of education. More kids today are getting financial aid and more kids are getting more financial aid. The cost of an education today is not much different from what it was 10 years ago on an inflation- and aid-adjusted basis.”

“Not every college should strive to have every amenity that is available in the marketplace. Students and their parents should care about the quality of faculty and the quality of the students they’ll be rubbing shoulders with.”

“We have to teach prospective students to prioritize: This isn’t a country club, and it’s not a camp. It’s an educational institution.”

“The academy will always privilege civility over productivity, and business will always privilege productivity over civility.”

“In finance I was a mercenary working for pay. Some days I enjoyed my work, others I didn’t, but it was all about the compensation.”

“I have found a job that I can’t wait to get back to every day. I absolutely love it.”

We met on a muggy night in Washington, D.C., at the finely appointed Pennsylvania Avenue offices of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank dedicated to precisely this topic. Present were three alums whose lives were reshaped by the events of September 11. William Lynn ’76 had just announced these would be the final days of his tenure as the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon. Rand Beers ’64, who has advised five presidents on sensitive questions about terrorism and international affairs, now serves as under secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in charge of protecting the nation’s physical infrastructure and its cybergrid. Our host was Nathaniel Fick ’99, CNAS CEO, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer.

DAM: I thought we could start with you, Bill, telling us where you were and what you thought when you heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

Lynn: I was at home. I was aware of the operation. I was aware that we’d found a compound that we suspected was bin Laden or, probably better stated, for which we didn’t have another explanation. It was all circumstantial that it was bin Laden. [Our intelligence analysts] couldn’t get the right angle on the satellites to get a real shot of him. They went through everything: Could it have been Zawahiri? Could it have been a drug kingpin? And so the president made the decision to go forward. It was obviously uneasy. I was very happy they had backup helicopters.

DAM: And when you heard that it was him?

Lynn: Well, it’s a turning point on the war on terror. As it’s turned out, he had more of an operational role than we realized or expected. So it’s a huge step forward, but it’s not the end.

DAM: Do you think that one man was that important to the war on terror?

Beers: The community has always said, “Don’t overemphasize the importance of a single individual.” But if you want to pick a single individual who is the most important individual, I think people would say, if only from a symbolic perspective, it would be bin Laden. The conventional wisdom was that he was not, day-to-day, involved in operations, providing advice. The presumption [was] that he was basically in hiding and wasn’t able to communicate. But we discovered through the exploitation of material afterwards, and also by the courier process through which we found him, that in fact he was.

DAM: The library, the trove: How important has that been?

Beers: There’s a lot of information there. I think we’ve said for some time that there wasn’t any specific operational information that came out of it, but a lot of insight into how the organization worked: Who were the key actors in it? What were the themes people thought about? And what was bin Laden’s role in the overall organization after the dispersal of Al Qaeda following the Afghan invasion?

Lynn: I think it’s usually the case in intelligence—or almost always—you never find a notebook that has a list of all the operations that they’re about to do and a list of all the people and their home addresses and you just go pick them up. What you get is information that you build on and I think this gave us information about the context, about how they operate, about how they communicate. When you combine it with this whole store of other information, it incrementally gets you closer to closing more avenues they use to conduct attacks.

DAM: Nate, what is the next major threat, the successor to Al Qaeda? Or is Al Qaeda still a major threat?

Fick: I’m not quite ready to take my eye off this particular ball—or to spike the proverbial football—but it did feel pretty good that night, I have to say. I had just gotten off an airplane, so I missed the president’s speech, but I got a call from a Marine buddy I had served with in Afghanistan in 2001 and went out on the front porch and had a scotch and relished the moment. The next night I went out with a SEAL friend who ordered his bourbon “bin Laden style.” I don’t know if that term has entered the vernacular yet, but it’s two shots and a splash of water. I guess I maintain the position that there are more individuals, more non-state actors both good and bad capable of having global impact. And the barriers to entry to high-end capability are falling.

DAM: Bill, do you think the military is nimble enough to transition to these new threats? The lone-wolf threats?

Lynn: I think we’re nimble enough if we know what the threat is. I think that is the hard part. We have—as [former Defense Secretary] Bob Gates has talked about—essentially a perfect record in predicting where we’re going to see a conflict next. That is, we’ve never gotten it right. And if you look at almost any conflict we fought in the last 25 years, you look a year out; you wouldn’t have any idea that we were going to do that. Iraq may be an exception to that, because Bush kind of telegraphed it. Other than that, look at Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Desert Storm: All of them, if you were year out, even a few months out, you would [not have predicted]. We used to have a world where there was linearity in the threats. The most sophisticated nation states had the most destructive capabilities, and as you worked your way down the food chain there were people who had evil intentions, but they didn’t have the same capabilities. Now the people at the bottom end of the food chain can have enormous capabilities. In the cyberworld a couple of dozen guys in flip-flops drinking Red Bull can develop quite a suite of capabilities.

DAM: How do you like our chances against another African immigrant with a bomb in his underpants?

Beers: Well, I think that the fact that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula ended up having a global reach capability was a surprise to us. We saw them talk about it aspirationally. But December 25, 2009, was really a wake-up call that there was another important actor who was not the main Al Qaeda—and that we were going to have to pay attention to them.

DAM: What keeps you up at night, Bill? What are the threats that worry you the most?

Lynn: Well, the one that has been most focused on: the cyberthreat. As I said, I think it’s asymmetric in terms of our vulnerability. We haven’t seen a full development of this threat. Despite all the attention in the last few months that people pay to Google and NASDAQ and the other intrusions—in fact these are fairly modest. These are basically exploitations. They’re theft.

DAM: There’s been no cyber 9/11?

Lynn: There’s been no 9/11. What we haven’t yet seen—but the capabilities exist—are truly destructive attacks. Attacks that would destroy things. Attacks that would actually kill people. That is possible. The tools exist.

DAM: What would that look like?

Lynn: You could take a power grid down. You can take an air traffic control system down. Trains are automated, you could do all sorts of things. It’s hard to know exactly where it’s going to come. But the capabilities exist. And we haven’t seen anything like that yet, partly because the threat—the capabilities—largely are resident in sophisticated nation-states. But these capabilities are going to move. They’re going to move to rogue states and they’re going to move to terrorist groups. And when they do you’re going to have a merge of capability and intent that I think we have to be very fearful of. What keeps me awake at night is that merge of cyber capability and intent to truly do us harm.

DAM: Nate, is that the same threat you see?

Fick: Well, I’m not in government, so my 18-month-old keeps me up at night. But I do agree with [Rand and Bill]. What can the kinetic attack look like? Look at a pipeline explosion or look at opening a dam or closing a dam. I can remotely control the computer in your car. I can pin your accelerator to the floor. I can disable your brakes. We don’t think of it in these terms, but in addition to the Internet there are all of the network devices that talk to one another. Your refrigerator talks, perhaps, to the manufacturer with updates on how its cooling motor is functioning.

DAM: You don’t think Al Qaeda wants to get into my icebox, do you?

Fick: No. I certainly don’t want to be alarmist. You’re talking to three people who work at places that have either defense or security in their name. When we talk about these issues we need to keep in mind some propensities for error. My view is that policy makers within a government often fall prey to one or more of these. We tend to overreact in the sense that people in positions of responsibility are accountable to citizens and feel the burden, I imagine, so doing nothing and letting the situation develop is usually not the answer the bureaucracy produces. Two others are that we always tend to overemphasize whatever it is we’re talking about. At a conference talking about cybersecurity everyone agrees that the topic under discussion is never getting the right amount of attention; it tends to get not enough attention. Third, we underestimate the equilibrating effect on systems. We tend to compensate individually and collectively.

DAM: Most DAM readers probably interact with the Department of Homeland Security at the airport more than anywhere else. How would you assess how we’re doing there?

Beers: In terms of trying to find a balance between security and commerce, between security and privacy and civil liberties, I think we are moving into a better and better space. We’re trying to do a better job differentiating between passengers who basically represent no risk and whether the no-risk passengers can simply move through the system at a more rapid pace to allow time to focus on individuals who are in a higher-risk profile, so to speak. So I think you’re going to see over the course of the next year or so that what you will perceive at the airport in terms of security will be a lot less than what’s actually occurring. There are still individuals who will get screened or interrogated who will say there was an overreaction. With the Transportation Security Administration every mistake gets magnified and the press just loves it.

DAM: Looking back for a minute, would you say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made us safer or less safe as a country?

Fick: I think the war in Afghanistan has almost unequivocally made us safer. I think that using military force in Afghanistan was the right answer, but we could have done it differently. If you’d asked me in the fall of 2001, when I was first there, if we’d still be having this conversation 10 years later about large-scale conventional American forces in Afghanistan, I would have said, “Not a chance.” That said, the military and the intelligence community have been remarkably successful in dismantling Al Qaeda as a formal military structure. If you spin the globe and you look at places that are hospitable to non-state actors like Al Qaeda to train and plot large-scale attacks, there just aren’t that many. You can’t do it in Belgium. You can’t do it in Alabama. I think you can recruit and you can inspire in an Internet chat room, but you can’t rehearse large-scale operations in a chat room. You need a place. So I think the war in Afghanistan has made us, on balance, safer. I think the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake. It was the wrong decision. There are some interesting questions for historians to answer about whether the war in Iraq played any role in the Arab Spring. It’s too soon to tell. I don’t know where this goes, but 10 years on we are not as well off as I would have predicted in 2001.

Lynn: I think the initial decision to go into Afghanistan was right. It was the source of the 9/11 attacks, and addressing it militarily was the right approach.We shouldn’t be there 10 years on because we should have finished it. Saddam was largely contained with the Iraq policies we had.

Beers: I have a lot to say about that. As you know, I resigned [as White House advisor] because of the war in Iraq. First, [after 9/11] consensus existed on a global basis. We forfeited the opportunity to change the international security architecture as a result of the shift out of Afghanistan to Iraq. Second, our entry into Iraq introduced the question as to whether or not the United States invasion was intended as a stepping stone to an invasion into Iran. Would that have changed the whole nuclear equation with respect to Iran? I don’t know. But it certainly complicated the security question with respect to our relations with Iran because we introduced a military force on their border that might just turn right and keep going. The “what ifs” for me are enormous.

DAM: We’re having this conversation in the aftermath of the budget debate around the debt crisis. Bill, you’ve dealt with budgets before. How significant a threat is this environment to the ability of the Pentagon to defend the country?

Lynn: Well, you start with the problem, and the problem is we’re spending a lot more than we’re taking in. Actually, the budget disparity is so great it rises to the level of a national security problem. You never see for any length of time a nation that’s weak economically stay strong militarily. So we need to address that problem. The key is to do it smart, and doing it smart means making considered judgments about what it is you want to do and what it is you’re willing to give up in national security—what risks you’re willing to take. It also means you need to ramp changes in. You don’t want to do abrupt changes. This second half of the debt deal, which would have a sudden and abrupt sequestration, would be very destructive. You’re talking about a $100-billion-a-year cut, essentially overnight. I don’t think you can absorb that without doing true damage to national security.

DAM: For people who live far from Washington and have passing understanding of what these fights are like, what does it look like when you’re trying to make a decision about a weapons system or an aircraft or an engine? How ferocious are these battles from your vantage point?

Lynn: There’s always going to be politics involved, particularly once something’s gotten started and generated jobs, but that’s a problem as old as the Republic. The original continental Navy was supposed to have seven frigates that were going to be built in one shipyard in one state of the same design. Well, the Continental Congress got ahold of that, and instead we had seven different designs for seven different frigates built in seven different states. The problem hasn’t changed much since then.

DAM: Do you think the military is bloated?

Fick: You cast this in terms of national security. I see it as an opportunity. You should never miss the opportunity afforded by a good crisis. We’re in an inflection point now where maybe there’s the popular will, the political will to do some things that weren’t possible before. In a lot of ways the defense budget is a microcosm of the broader federal budget, and you have a growing entitlement problem. Healthcare premiums for military service members haven’t changed since, I think, 1994. That’s crazy. Military personnel, as in any large organization, is your biggest cost, yet we tend to talk about weapons systems. We have a military system that is in many ways the legacy of an agricultural or an industrial economy, where if you did 20 years you’re a broken man. So you have military personnel retiring at age 38 and the United States is paying them and paying for their healthcare for the rest of their lives, which for a lot are working lives with opportunities for 30-year careers. We need to talk about changes that may actually result in a stronger, more capable force.

DAM: What about other threats on the horizon even if distant: Space? China testing its first aircraft carrier?

Lynn: Space is definitely an important area for national security. We utilize it for navigation, for targeting, for communications. Will we have a war fought exclusively in space? That seems unlikely to me, but could a broader conflict migrate? Almost absolutely. One Chinese aircraft carrier is going to have very little effect on our security. China is going to have military capabilities. What you do not want is to have the U.S. and China military capabilities come up against each other. You want to have an economic competition where you can manage disputes when they arise. Between two powers like the United States and China they’re going to arise.

DAM: What kind of threat to national security does climate change present?

Fick: Look at the Arctic and the possibility of free navigation there for much of the year. Maybe the Northwest Passage becomes a reality. The Russians in particular have been fairly assertive in making a claim, so the Navy is certainly interested in it. There are anecdotal data points to start thinking about: Small island nations setting up sovereign wealth funds to buy land elsewhere and planning to relocate national populations; more intense weather patterns in conjunction with cities like Karachi with 12 or 15 or 18 million people on the coast. Does that present scenarios the U.S. military has to respond to? Sure, but I don’t see it as a looming Hollywood-style crisis.

Beers: I’d go a step further. If the weather patterns change significantly, we’re going to have a pattern of natural disasters that will complicate our economy in the ways that a Katrina or massive flooding have. If patterns change and that leads to larger areas that are no longer able to cultivate food to supply populations, and the world is no longer in a position to aid those people, we’re going to have migrations. I don’t have an answer to what is implied, but I think that will affect the world economy and will affect more than just the nations in which the problems occur.

DAM: Any parting shots?

Fick: I’ve got one for you. We have several million of our citizens now who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade, and these people are coming home to communities all over the country, and I think we collectively owe them something. Dartmouth, actually, is really doing more than its share in this regard. Former President Jim Wright deserves a lot of credit for bringing a whole bunch of veterans to campus and giving them a whole lot of support, both financial and social. A Marine who served under me—Michael Stinetorf, my machine gunner—just graduated from Dartmouth in June, which is a huge tribute to him and to the College. It’s an important thing for the place to do, and I think every community and institution in the country should be thinking about ways that they, too, can help us reintegrate and benefit from this whole generation of people who fought for our country.

Matthew Mosk is a reporter with the ABC News investigative team in Washington, D.C. A 2011 Emmy nominee, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

It’s a routine Calhoun has perfected. In August Calhoun marks his 26th anniversary as piano tuner for the celebrated Rhode Island jazz festival, which since 1954 has hosted such luminaries as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles. Calhoun generally has minimal interaction with the musicians, but his behind-the-scenes role is crucial to the festival’s success. When Dave Brubeck hits a note that rings just so, it’s a credit to his talent and a testament to Calhoun’s craftsmanship.

“The musician playing the piano has never played this piano before,” Calhoun says. “They’re going to walk on stage, introduce themselves to the audience and then sit down at a piano. In a sense my job is to make it so that they have total trust in what the piano can do for them and how the piano sounds.”

Newport performers take turns on the festival’s rented pianos rather than bring their own, creating the need for an on-site tuner sensitive to the instrument’s notoriously fickle nature: Humid weather, common during the annual festival, can knock the pitch out of whack. So can a pianist who pounds the keys especially hard.

“I’m insurance that the pianos will be in tune enough and in good enough repair,” explains Calhoun. Normally both he and the performers are too busy to greet each other, though sometimes they do. One time Chick Corea asked to meet Calhoun to feel him out and get a sense of the piano he’d be playing. The tuner has also met Dr. John—a pianist of a strikingly “gentle” style, Calhoun says, despite his “funny little meaty hands.”

One summer Calhoun found himself huddled beneath a piano with Herbie Hancock and his manager, investigating the source of a terrific BAM! that occurred after a structural piece at the instrument’s base fell during the Grammy winner’s performance.

“His manager looks at me and goes, ‘Are you the piano technician?’ I said ‘yes.’ He goes ‘good’ and looks at Herbie and says, ‘Herbie, get out of here!’ ” Calhoun recalls with a laugh.

As a boy, the Holbrook, Massachusetts, native was always more interested in trying to take apart his parents’ piano than in playing it, though he is a professional pianist. (He’s fond of bluesy jazz.) Coincidently, when Calhoun finally got his first piano in 1980 he had no choice but to dismantle it—he lived on the top floor of a triple-decker in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was impossible to get the instrument up the stairs in one piece. Months passed before he attempted reassembly.

Calhoun enrolled at Dartmouth to study physics and astronomy and, like other prospective students, he marveled at the beauty of the campus.

“I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s gorgeous,’ and Dartmouth seemed to be pretty impressed with me,” he says. Calhoun lived in the Wigwam dorms (known today as the River Cluster) and joined Sigma Phi Epsilon while busying himself with physics. “Something about the remoteness from the rest of the school, I think, tended to foster close associations with the rest of the kids down at the Wigs,” he recalls. Calhoun spent a semester with other physics students at the Kitts Peak National Observatory in Arizona, an experience he remembers as “wicked cool” since it gave him and his peers the chance to spend nights in a mountaintop observatory. While contemplating his future during senior year, he taught physics to students at Hanover High School.

After graduation Calhoun continued teaching high school science before finally deciding to blend his interest in music and physics. Driven in part by the enjoyment he had taking apart and putting together his first piano, in 1985 Calhoun entered the New England Conservatory to study piano technology. After completing the yearlong program, which required tuning and repair classes in the morning and hands-on practice in the afternoon, Calhoun was hired at the three-day jazz festival in 1986 after making what he calls a “ridiculously low” offer for his services. He’s been there ever since.

Calhoun shows up at 7 a.m.—hours before show time—and hangs with the sound engineers near the stage. He does full tunings and checks octaves at the start of the day, but between acts is when he really hustles—moving between performances on the festival’s three stages with a tuning wrench and pair of rubber mutes. Calhoun typically has a narrow window to test the strings that correspond to each note, check the octaves and finger the keys to make sure the sound is pitch-perfect.

“He’s very good and very fast, which you have to be,” says Bob Jones, a senior producer with New Festival Productions, the festival’s production company. “Sometimes there’s only 15 minutes between two piano players. He’s got to pipe right up on stage and make sure the piano’s in tune.”

“Calhoun is one of the festival’s many unsung contributors who return each year and are vital to behind-the-scene operations,” says festival manager Tim Tobin. “They feel as if it is a privilege to work for us because it is in fact the granddaddy of all jazz festivals.” In addition to the prestige, the festival’s intimate atmosphere is a magnet for the workforce. “When you’re working with your family, you tend to stick around,” says Tobin.

Calhoun echoes that sentiment. He’s been part of the festival family for so long that “they never call me anymore. They just assume I’m coming and wait for me to contact them.”

Even so, working a prestigious festival alone doesn’t pay the bills. Calhoun, a resident of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, juggles several jobs. His main gig is tuning and repairing pianos for performance halls and individuals. He also teaches high school physics part-time, runs workshops on the physics of music and tunes the pianos at the weekend-long Newport Folk Festival in July.

Calhoun says he’s tuned the piano of virtually every Newport performer in the last quarter-century, though one notable exception stands out. One summer Bruce Hornsby swung by Newport while on tour but enlisted his own keyboard player to tune his 9-foot Baldwin piano. It was, Calhoun politely suggests, perhaps not the best decision.

“Let’s just say had I tuned the piano it would have sounded better, but you know, Bruce Hornsby didn’t seem to care one bit what it sounded like.”

Eric Tucker is a reporter for the Associated Press in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Studying the brain is both horribly and wonderfully complicated. It’s so frustrating it takes such a long time to figure out even a few of the thousands of circuits, but every discovery is a fantastic high.”

“Perseverance is built into the trait of curiosity, a scientist’s motivation. If you’re sufficiently curious, you’re willing to continue despite failures, despite obstacles. It’s so easy to give up. There may be no more than half a dozen discoveries in a researcher’s lifetime.”

“I left high school before graduation in 1944 to become a naval aviator through the B5 program at Middlebury. When, after a year, the Navy determined it had enough aviators, I was sent to Dartmouth to become a supply corps officer.”

“My entire college training in psychology consisted of two courses at Tuck: mental hygiene and international relations. Only because of letters my professors wrote on my behalf did I get into graduate school.”

“I went to McGill intending to study social psychology, because I had decided the world needed help solving social problems.”

“Once at McGill, I met with the department chair who opened my file and wondered what the hell I was doing there. He made me take a qualifying year and directed me to Donald Hebb to learn about experimental psychology. Hebb let me take his class, and I was hooked.”

“Hebb’s class drew on drafts of his book, Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. It transformed the psychology of the era from black-box psychologists [who studied input and output] to what gives rise to perception, memory, thought process, emotion, motivation—to being able to think about psychology in terms of neuronal function.”

“The marriage between psychology and neurobiology is not complete, but each arm recognizes how desperately it needs the other. Neuroscience at an integrative level can’t be pursued unless we know something about the organization of the mind and the organization of behavior. Psychology can’t get very far without trying to understand how the nervous system gives rise to such organization.”

“A big moment for me was learning there was an area in the brain important for visual discrimination that was far removed from the part of the brain we knew was the primary visual area. This was work I did at Yale, studying monkeys with Karl Pribram. That’s when the whole idea of circuitry became real.”

“The activists who have protested the use of animals in research have been very helpful in one way. There isn’t a laboratory in the country that doesn’t have its scientists’ proposals evaluated for the ethical treatment of animals. This has improved animal research throughout the world.”

“Scientists can be more effective in making clear how absolutely vital research and science in general are for improving health, living conditions, the atmosphere, nature—everything.”

“I was somewhat prepared for the call telling me I’d won the National Science Medal. Otherwise I would have fallen through the floor.”

“The best part of the ceremony was having the chance to shake Barack Obama’s hand. I did it three times that afternoon. He’s trying his best to expand, not just protect, the scientific endeavor and education.”

“The number of cells, synapses and molecules in the brain is mind boggling. We can’t study them properly until we get better techniques. How do we examine the human brain properly when we can’t get inside it the way we can in animals?”

“Looking at my own behavior through a scientific lens is a habit, not that it leads to anything.”

“I don’t know how a scientist could think of retiring early. For the sheer enjoyment of the process, we stick to it for as long as we possibly can.”

Behind him was a General Motors V8 engine with 523 cubic inches of displacement, a monster capable of churning out 1,700 horsepower when stoked by bursts of nitrous oxide. To his side was a steel roll cage, not that it would help much if he cracked up at top speed. Underneath him were four thin tires that looked more suited to a golf cart.

It was September 21, 2010, and Nearburg was gunning for one of motorsports’ most enduring records: The Summers Brothers’ 45-year-old land speed mark of 409.3 miles per hour, the holy grail of its sport. At least 20 teams had tried to break it over the years. All had failed.

Now here was Nearburg—a jovial-but-intense, easygoing-but-borderline-obsessive-compulsive 60-year-old who goes by Charlie—with his lean, 6-foot-3 body fastened into his custom-built streamliner, taking his best shot.

For Nearburg and his crew it was a moment four years in the making. Or maybe four decades. In some ways everything Nearburg had done since his days at Dartmouth—the engineering he learned at Thayer, the fortune he made in the oil business to pay for all this, the hours spent driving race cars of all different stripe—had been a prelude to this. And as he sat in stillness and watched for the sun, his thoughts went to one place.

“I know it sounds hokey,” he says, “but that’s when I really feel Rett’s presence.”

Rett Nearburg came into this world in a hurry, almost as if he knew he wasn’t going to get much time here. It was all his mother could do to stop him from drawing his first breath in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen on the North Central Expressway in Dallas.

Off-the-charts smart, a bit of a hell-raiser, a total gearhead and yet also a gifted artist—just like his old man in most respects—Rett was 10 when he found a lump the size of a quarter attached to one of his ribs. “Then,” Nearburg says, “a doctor you’ve never seen before walks in and tells you in a cold, clinical voice, ‘Your son has cancer and your life is never going to be the same.’ ”

The diagnosis was Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare and nasty bone cancer. Rett had surgery to remove three ribs, then gritted through intense chemotherapy, uncomplaining and undeterred. At one point during treatment he took six Continental Math League tests, becoming one of just 12 students across the nation to achieve a perfect score.

Eighteen months later he was declared in remission. For the next two and a half years Rett and his family—Charlie, Dana and Anna Nearburg ’10—enjoyed a nearly normal existence. Rett caught the winning touchdown in a middle school championship football game. He cheered as his dad drove for NFL legend Walter Payton’s Indy car team and raced at the legendary Le Mans.

And, sure, Rett continued to have scans every six months. Ewing’s survival rates are low upon initial diagnosis, practically nonexistent if the cancer recurs. But the checkups kept coming back clean—until a day in January 1998. Rett immediately went in for surgery.

“Halfway through the doctor came out and said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s back,’ ” Nearburg says with his eyes down, doodling on a scrap of paper as he speaks. “It was my job to go into the recovery room and tell Rett. He was still on anesthesia, but he looked up at me with these big eyes and said, ‘Well?’ And I had to say, ‘Rett, it’s cancer.’ He was 14. He knew what that meant. He just closed his eyes and laid his head back. That was just….”

And there his voice trails off.

To understand what kind of father Nearburg wanted to be, you have to understand what kind of father he had. Gene Nearburg was a classic Texas oilman, hard-drinking and hard-living, so busy making fortunes—and losing them—he didn’t have much time for family.

“You can read into this whatever you want to,” Nearburg says, “but I know a big part of the reason I worked hard to succeed was because I wanted my dad’s approval so badly.”

They bonded over a few things—cars being one of them—and when it came time for college, Gene told Charlie to go to an Ivy League school. Nearburg fell in love with Dartmouth, a place where an engineer could study things beyond engineering. He froze his tail off that first winter, a Texas kid in a polyester parka, but eventually settled in, joining the crew team and Bones Gate, modifying his engineering major with studio art.

After Hanover Charlie tried to distance himself from his father’s path, going into commercial development, then sales, then advertising. But the lure of the family business was ultimately too strong.

He took some geology classes, then told his father he planned to start his own oil and gas exploration operation. In 1978 his father staked him two years’ start-up money—office space and a salary for Charlie and a secretary—in exchange for a half interest in Nearburg Producing Co. Then he told him all the ways not to screw up.

By 1982, after a series of small successes, Nearburg had a hunch about the geology under a claim south of Roswell, New Mexico, sunk everything he had into it—and a lot he didn’t—and hit it big. Huber Federal No. 1, which Nearburg operated himself, became one of the most productive wells in New Mexico history.

Although he was living in a tiny 1908 Craftsman house, sans central air, Nearburg rolled all the profits back into his business. It soon became one of America’s top-50 independent exploration and production companies. He had some misses. But not many.

“He’s very calculating in everything he does,” says Duane Davis, the chief operating officer of Nearburg Producing Co. “This is a high-risk business, but if you do your homework you reduce the risk quite a bit. And Charles always does extra homework.”

It is perhaps an odd mix: A seat-of-the-pants, thrill-seeking race car driver and a meticulous, detail-oriented engineer. But that’s Nearburg.

“He sets land speed records in everything he does,” says Arnie Holtberg, the headmaster at St. Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas, where Nearburg has been a trustee for 20 years. “Charlie is one of the most determined, goal-oriented people I’ve ever met.”

And yet when it came time to face his most significant challenge—the illness of the son he loved and doted on the way his own father never did—Nearburg was about to learn that despite all his resources and determination, he was utterly powerless.

For seven years Rett spent half his life in hospitals around the country, participating in phase 1 drug trials and early forms of gene therapy, at times making himself a guinea pig for researchers. The pattern became achingly familiar: Find a tumor, shrink it, remove it. All told, he had 13 major operations.

“After the sixth or seventh surgery, when they had literally sliced Rett from sternum to backbone, Charlie told Rett, ‘You know, if you want to knock this off and just live a little, that would be fine,’ ” says Mark Nearburg, Charlie’s brother and best friend. “And Rett said, ‘If there’s any way what I’m doing can help someone else someday, I’m keeping going.’ ”

During one of the lulls between hospital stays, in 2003, Rett enrolled at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). For one of his projects he used homemade parts to rig a respirator to an out-of-focus computer camera that was aimed at the word “NOW.” He invited classmates to wear the respirator, and when they breathed in, the camera went into sharp focus and the word “NOW” grew crisp and bold. The students knew Rett had cancer. The significance—the breath of life, the immediacy of living, the importance of staying in the now—was lost on no one.

Rett lasted only one semester at MICA before cancer forced him to withdraw. He did an experimental treatment in San Antonio, Texas, that seemed to work for a time. But by the end of 2004 he was struggling, so exhausted he spent most of a New Year’s trip to New Orleans in the hotel. His parents thought maybe he had a lung infection, a constant fear—Rett’s right lung had been destroyed by radiation and surgery, leaving him solely reliant on his left one.

On the morning of January 14, 2005, he had a bronchoscopy and another scan. As Rett was moved into the recovery room, doctors showed the Nearburgs the results. “As soon as they flashed the scan up, Dana and I broke down,” Nearburg says. “By that point we could read the scans as well as the doctors. His left lung was just full of tumors.”

The Nearburgs began calling friends and family to Rett’s hospital room. For the next several hours streams of visitors came in to hold hands and say prayers. Rett died that evening. He was 21.

How do you move on from the worst thing that ever happened to you? How do you construct a new reality that doesn’t involve the constant intensity of life-or-death decision-making? How do you overcome the guilt of living while your son is dead?

For the next year and more Nearburg agonized over those questions. He and Dana found themselves unable to configure a post-Rett existence and went through an amicable divorce. He distracted himself with his business and numerous hobbies: fly fishing, motorcycle riding, cancer research fundraising (including an international symposium for Ewing’s researchers in Rett’s name), flying (a licensed pilot, he frequently commutes between homes in Dallas and Lebanon, New Hampshire), woodworking, car collecting, staying active with Dartmouth as a Thayer overseer and a crew team steward. There’s a reason Barry MacLean ’60, Th’61, also a longtime Thayer overseer, calls him “a Renaissance man in every sense of that phrase.”

Through it all Nearburg’s thoughts kept going to Bonneville. He had never been there but was long fascinated by the pursuit of pure speed on the densely packed salt pan in northwestern Utah. And watching Rett had taught him not to leave things undone.

“You learn life is really a day-to-day experience,” Nearburg says. “You’ve got to have a forward vision and you’ve got to delay gratification if you want to accomplish anything meaningful. But you’ve also got to wake up every day, make the most out of it and never let the sun set on regret. That’s how Rett lived his life and that’s how I try to live mine.”

At the end of 2006 Nearburg purchased a used streamliner and named it The Spirit of Rett. He discovered trying to break land speed records was not only a great way to honor his son, it was also pretty good therapy. He got busy hiring a crew to rebuild the car from stem to stern, sweating the details in true Nearburg fashion.

There are no corporate sponsors at Bonneville, no prize money. Just trophies. The costs, which easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, are high: Nearburg won’t say what he spends per year, only that it’s less than his annual contribution to Dartmouth. The stakes are higher.

“If things go wrong at 400 miles an hour, they go wrong in a hurry,” says Lee Ryan, Nearburg’s crew chief. “You’re talking about a car that is 33-feet long but only 3 feet wide, so it has a tendency to get a little bit of a yaw. If it rolls, there’s virtually nothing to stop it rolling.”

Or there was the time in 2007 when the car’s parachute failed to deploy. Calling on all his driving experience, Nearburg worked the brakes judiciously until they literally melted from friction. With 100 yards to go before hitting Interstate 40, he was still traveling 120 miles an hour, flames shooting from the back tires. By carving a series of wide turns he stopped just short of the highway.

Less than an hour later he was back in the car, with the parachute repacked but no brakes, ready for another run. How? Simple, says Ryan: “He’s got balls of cast iron.”

By 2010 The Spirit of Rett had broken a number of land speed records, including the fastest gasoline-powered car and the fastest two-wheel-drive car. But the Summers Brothers’ record for fastest non-aspirated car—viewed as Bonneville’s heavyweight championship—was still out there.

Heading into the September meet the team was still fretting over certain particulars, including the gear ratios. Chuck Horrell ’00, Th’01, who met Nearburg through Thayer’s Formula racing team—Nearburg is a team mentor, driving coach and sponsor—had joined the crew for Bonneville. He and Ryan debated gear ratios for two days. If they chose too low a number, the car might not go fast enough. If they went too high, the engine wouldn’t have enough power to turn.

“Charlie just pulled a number out of the air,” Horrell says. “Charlie’s whole life seems to be about making very important decisions based on incomplete data sets. And yet he always makes the right one. Is that magic or some form of intuition? I don’t know.”

Nearburg calls it a SWAG—a scientific wild-ass guess.

Then again, it’s not all guesswork. Knowing his engine works best at lower temperatures (cold air is oxygen rich) but higher humidity (water also contains oxygen), Nearburg consulted aviation forecasts, waiting through the entire first day of the September meet. Other teams went out, burned up their engines and went home.

Nearburg didn’t roll until the second day, when he knew conditions would be ideal. At first light his crew pushed him off. The first run went perfectly—the gear ratio was right on—and Nearburg blazed through the timed mile at an average of 417.6 miles an hour.

But there was still the matter of the second run. Official records factor the average of two passes, done in opposite directions within one hour, and only count if the average improves the existing mark by 1 percent. As salt conditions degraded in the heat of day Nearburg had problems getting traction with those skinny tires. He went through the timed mile with the engine 250 rpms below maximum.

It wasn’t until the safety crew arrived, horns honking, that Nearburg learned the second run had been timed at 411.7. With an average speed of 414.3, The Spirit of Rett had broken the record by 1.2 percent. Nearburg’s crew members came next, not that he could fully see them. He was already crying.

“At that point I just closed my eyes,” he says, “and said another prayer to Rett.”

Brad Parks is an author, most recently of Eyes of the Innocent (St. Martin’s Press), and a frequent DAM contributor.

Although she blends into the crowd of stretchy outfits, Stevens, 27, is hardly a run-of-the-mill cyclist. In fact, she ranks among the fastest in the world.

She would much rather focus on how lucky she is to ride a bicycle for a living. “It’s just an incredibly liberating feeling,” she says, picking up speed on a downward slope, a breeze flattening some stray curls sticking out from beneath her helmet.

After working long hours for four years on Wall Street, when it was difficult to schedule even a daily run, Stevens decided in the late spring of 2009 to escape from the “win-win” corporate culture and pursue some victories of her own— on two wheels.

In what might seem an act of youthful folly Stevens abandoned her furniture on a Manhattan street corner, reduced her material possessions to what could fit in a couple of duffel bags and traded her cubicle for some cleats. With hardly any racing experience—Stevens had only a year’s worth of races under her belt—she was also forgoing a mezzanine fund associate’s six-figure salary to make in cycling what she might make as an administrative assistant. “I thought I would just sort of explore it, try it out for a year,” Stevens says, in a characteristic moment of self-effacement. “I’m still just learning the sport.”

She seems to be getting up to speed quickly. After a re-cent string of wins and lightning-quick times, the 5-foot-6-inch Acton, Massachusetts, native is poised to represent the United States at the 2012 Summer Olympics. “Sometimes I get very, very lucky in life. I don’t know why,” she says. “Things just align very nicely.”

Athletes do not achieve what Stevens has by sheer serendiptiy, however. Since June 2008—when she entered her first hard-surface race, a three-looper in Central Park—she has posted 20 first-place finishes in 70 USA Cycling-sanctioned events. All told, she has crossed the finish line in one of the top-three spots in more than half of her races.

Although some of those contests may have been small-potatoes events, most, such as last March’s Redlands Bicycle Classic in California, attracted a nerve-racking level of competition. Stevens earned a blue ribbon in the long-form road-race portion of the event, doing the 67 miles in 3 hours and 10 minutes. She also took the top prize in the 35-kilometer (21.7-mile) sprint-like time trial at June’s national championships in Oregon, clocking a blistering 47 minutes and 38 seconds.

In Europe, too, where cycling is generally considered a much fiercer sport, Stevens holds up. In July 2010 she experienced perhaps her brightest moment, in the middle of the 10-day Giro d’Italia, one of the world’s most prestigious races. During that stage, against more than 100 women, Stevens broke away from the pack to win by a comfortable 42 seconds for her HTC-Columbia team, which is among the best in the world. She finished 15th overall.

As a result Stevens is ranked 21st out of 360 women by the Union Cycliste International, the global governing group, and might well be even higher had she competed in more European races. Even so, her meteoric rise on the world stage compares to making baseball’s all-star team just three years after picking up a bat for the first time.

One can’t help but wonder where Stevens might rate had she fared better in the September world championships in Australia. She crashed during warm-ups when her bike skidded out on a wet patch of pavement while cruising along at the speed of a slow car. The wipeout scraped her hands so badly that two pink scars, on a left knuckle and between right-hand fingers, were clearly visible almost two weeks after the accident. “It was quite stupid,” Stevens says, “but it happened. And I learned my lesson.”

Stevens is not the first cyclist to take the sport by surprise. Every few years a runner or skier or even volleyball player in his or her mid-20s buys a bike and becomes a “second sporter,” according to Jim Miller, a vice president of USA Cycling, the sport’s governing body in the United States. “And when you find them, it’s fantastic and makes your day.”

An aura of mystery has surrounded Stevens from the start, says Patrick Littlefield, who in 2007 recruited her to her first team, the amateur New York squad Century Road Club Association/Avenue A Razorfish. “I kept hearing about this girl who was so strong and so good and how I had to put her on the team,” says Littlefield, 43, who like many Manhattan cyclists works in finance for a regular paycheck rather than racing full time as Stevens does.

Heightening the curiosity were claims that Stevens had cruised up a well-known, super-steep road along New Jersey’s Palisades cliffs in under six minutes, which is rare for anybody but especially for women, Littlefield says. (His best time is 6 minutes and 20 seconds.) “If a woman who has never raced before can do River Road that fast, there’s something going on,” Littlefield says. A meet and greet with the team in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park followed Stevens’ impressive Palisades sprint, and her career was launched.

Yet fans of the sport were mystified a novice could accomplish so much so fast. On September 1, 2008, at Vermont’s Green Mountain Stage Race, in a stage that coaches, organizers and fans can recall with great detail, Stevens started out with the slower Category 3 and 4 riders but somehow managed to catch the swifter Category 1 and 2 riders, despite the faster group getting a usually insurmountable five-minute head start. And, as the story goes, the hare caught the tortoise using laughably amateurish equipment.

“It became like a folk legend, about how she won her own race and passed the other race briefly, too,” says Michael Green, president of the Century Road Club Association, a New York race organizer. That Vermont mind-blower seemed to single-handedly elevate Stevens’ rank from Category 3 to 1 in just a few months. “Most racers never get to Category 1,” Green explains, “or it takes them at least a few years.”

Apparently, not everyone was aware of her rapid rise. Last year when Stevens rocketed across the finish line at the Valley of the Sun in Phoenix, Arizona, on the second day of a three-stage race, the official cameramen missed her entirely because “she was so unknown,” Green says. “They were getting ready to film somebody a minute behind her.”

Surprise can cut both ways, and there was initial scuttlebutt, motivated by jealous rivals perhaps, that performance-enhancing drugs might be behind Stevens’ strong debut. Fueling that speculation, no doubt, are continuing revelations about pro-cycling doping scandals in general. Stevens and all those who know her find those suggestions absurd. “I can’t think of anyone less likely to dope,” says close friend Ann Scott ’06. “Her body is like a temple, and she is so cautious about what she puts in it.”

Indeed, during sophomore summer, Stevens, a Kappa Kappa Gamma, was disqualified from an inter-sorority pong tournament because she wouldn’t drink her beer. “It was never really my thing,” she explains.

Though her success can seem accidental, Stevens, one of five siblings who played sports of one kind or another, was notably dexterous from a young age, according to oldest sister Angela, 42, a physical therapist in San Francisco. In fact, when her next-to-youngest sibling was 5, Angela says, Evie’s version of jump rope involved her bouncing atop a ball through a swinging hula hoop. “She was definitely coordinated and picked up things easily,” adds Angela.

It also emerged early on that Stevens needed to feel outgunned to kick into gear. As a freshman at Acton Boxborough Regional High School Stevens earned a spot on the varsity tennis team despite having almost no prior experience, says coach Mike Gardner. “She could barely get the ball back, but she got it back,” Gardner says. “She was not the fastest kid or strongest kid, but she just had this tremendous desire.”

A blunt college counselor would later use a line graph to convince Stevens that she had no shot at Dartmouth, but she was recruited for tennis and gained early admission. Though Stevens rode the bench most of the time, she stayed with the team until senior year, she says, “because I don’t like quitting.”

A government major with a minor in women’s and gender studies, Stevens stumbled during phone interviews for management consulting positions, she says, making her worry about finding a good job after graduation. One self-taught crash course in finance later, however, Stevens had scored a lucrative offer from Lehman Brothers, even if other analysts hired boasted considerably more accounting know-how. “I was a little in over my head to say the least,” says Stevens, although she seemed to catch on quickly. She landed a job at what was then the Gleacher Mezzanine Fund before Lehman imploded in 2008.

Even her first real attempt at a thigh-burning bike ride, on a California vacation to visit Angela, could be seen as an attempt to prove naysayers wrong. Zigzagging up and down Mount Tam, outside San Francisco, on Thanksgiving Day in 2007 Evie was feeling pretty good about keeping pace with her sister, a sometime racer, until they stopped. Angela “looked at me and said, ‘Normally, I go a lot harder than that,’ ” Evie recalls, laughing.

Female cyclists live fairly modest existences. Stevens declines to state her current income, but race organizers estimate that a sponsored racer of her caliber makes around $30,000 a year—a fraction of what Wall Street was paying. Although professional cyclists draw salaries from their corporate-sponsored teams and then share prize money awarded by events among team members, even the top male riders fall far short of earnings in the more publicized team sports.

Since quitting New York for cycling, Stevens has led a nomadic life. When she’s on the road, which is much of the time between March and October, she’s often bunking with other racers (which has made noise-canceling headphones critical). An apartment in Girona, Spain, provides a temporary base during swings through Europe (where her time is limited by lack of a visa), but stateside home is a rotation of beds, couches and inflatable mattresses in the apartments of fellow bikers or friends. She also takes extended pit stops at her parents’ new home in Dennis, Massachusetts.

If she has any regrets about trading New York’s riches for a more frugal existence, Stevens doesn’t show it. “She is really just having the time of her life,” says Scott. When pressed, Stevens cops to having socked away some money from her Wall Street days, lest her career take an unexpected turn. B-school is not out of the question in the future, she hints.

Her life isn’t all about gears and chains, either. On a recent return to New York after the racing season ended Stevens got to check out some Rothko paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Another afternoon involved nothing more complicated than a park bench and some people-watching. The peripatetic quality of her new life means there’s little time for relationships, she says, though her friends seem to get it. “They have a great understanding of my off-the-grid nature,” Stevens says.

As a private person in this age of YouTube, Facebook and “over sharing” in general, Stevens has mixed feelings about her new celebrity, but she does want to draw attention to her sport. Aside from competition, Stevens wants to get more people biking in general—for exercise and as “a way to explore the outdoors.” If recreational bikers turn serious, that works, too: “No matter what level, in my opinion cycling is always fun,” she says. She’s also promoting the message of Transportation Alternatives, a New York group working to add more bike lanes to the street grid. Celebrities such as David Byrne and Matthew Modine have lent support; Stevens is one of the first athletes to join them. That adds an “important gender dimension” to getting more people pedaling, says executive director Paul Steely White. “People often think of [New York City] cyclists as 22-year-old male bike messengers, and we want to change that.”

Some cycling observers hope the hoopla surrounding her achievements doesn’t distract Stevens too much from her training. “The biggest danger would be for her to sense she’s already arrived,” says John Eustice, a former pro rider who’s now a race organizer and commentator with ESPN. “I don’t care how much talent you have, it takes a lot of time to become a champion.”

Coach Matthew Koschara, a former pro cyclist who’s been advising Stevens since meeting her in September 2008, agrees that focus is critical, but he sees greater risk in overtraining than slacking off. That’s why he’s careful to remind his dedicated tutee, in daily phone calls or e-mails during the season, to log no more than 30 hours a week on a bike of some type—just the thought of which might be enough to make most people clutch their chests in pain. He’s also sort of a diet counselor, regularly advising Stevens on meal plans that call for bananas before her pre-breakfast workout and maybe plain yogurt with honey afterward.

Koschara believes that Stevens’ newcomer status is an asset. “When you have the experience that Evelyn has in big business, you can deal with setbacks,” he says. “It’s also made her good at critical thinking.”

For someone in a sport that requires back-breaking amounts of exertion, Stevens can seem incredibly relaxed. On that recent ride on the Cape, without the pressures of a stopwatch, Stevens barely flinches as a silver-haired man politely announces he is about to pass. It is hard to imagine her that passive in race mode or in the peloton. Despite the tranquility of the scene, or perhaps because it allows her a flash of perspective on a lifestyle that seems planets apart from many of her fellow graduates, Stevens says she knows now that cycling is a perfect match for her personality.

“I don’t do things very casually,” she says. “I wish I could be a more balanced person, but usually if I get into something, I get really into it.”

C.J. Hughes is a freelance journalist. He lives in New York City.

The safe money was on a longtime associate commissioner, who was said to have the backing of the league’s athletic directors. But there were also sexier names being floated: high-powered SEC alums with splashy resumes, former coaches who had led teams of yore, ex-athletes with instant name recognition.

When the conference’s choice was revealed—in the form of a short, cigar-chomping, Dartmouth-educated Jew from upstate New York named Mike Slive—the reaction was, to say the least, tepid. Slive, a former lawyer, had made his reputation in sports representing institutions accused of NCAA violations. He helped found Conference USA, one of those lesser leagues SEC schools visit only when padding their schedules.

His selection was viewed as a house-cleaning effort by the SEC, which then had six of its 12 schools either on probation or under investigation for serious NCAA infractions. Compared to some of the names being mentioned for the job, Slive was considered about as sexy as a mock turtleneck. The day after Slive’s introductory press conference the SEC’s sportswriters—who are sort of like the league’s Greek Chorus, only with more stains on their shirts—let him have it.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel called him “Judge Judy” and asked whether someone with such a “legalistic mind” was a good “fit” for the good ol’ boy SEC.

The Louisville Courier-Journal howled, “The man is as Southern as snow tires. He comes to Gridiron Central from a league that sits at the college football kids’ table.”

The Tennessean taunted, “Welcome to the SEC, Michael L. Slive…hope you brought your life jacket.”

The Birmingham News jeered, “Raise your hand if you believe one man has the power to clean up a league where the obscene monetary ends too often justify any means necessary. Now raise your hand if you believe Aubie and Big Al are real. (Aubie and Big Al are the mascots of Auburn and Alabama.)

“I was completely baffled,” says Paul Finebaum, a syndicated sports columnist for the Mobile Register. “An Ivy League intellectual from the Northeast coming into the heart of Dixie to be the commissioner of the SEC? I thought it was going to be a disaster.

“Boy,” Finebaum adds now, eight years later, “has he proven me wrong.”

The man who is today widely hailed as the most powerful administrator in college sports—a man who commands the leading conference in the land and has also served as the chairman of the Bowl Championship Series and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee—is the son of a butcher from Utica, New York. He practiced the old man’s trade himself as a part-time job in high school and college. And though today the white-haired 70-year-old runs a 25-person organization with a national profile—and more than $200 million in annual revenue—back then a good day ended with all his fingers intact.

A good-not-great quarterback at Utica Free Academy, he was recruited to play football at Dartmouth, though his career proved brief. As best Slive can remember, there were 23 quarterbacks but only 22 centers at the first practice. “When I lined up without a center,” Slive says, “I knew my days in football were numbered.” His time as a premed didn’t last much longer: a mere one semester of chemistry with professor John Wolfenden, who was legendary for ending medical careers before they began.

Yet even as a talent for quarterbacking and chemistry eluded Slive, he found his niche in other areas. He picked up lacrosse, a sport he had never played, and turned himself into a stalwart defensive-minded midfielder for coach Whitey Burnham, who later became a close friend. Slive also served as president of Alpha Theta, the Interfraternity Council and Palaeopitus.

“Mike was an incredible plugger who always found a way to make himself better at everything he did,” says John Walters ’62, a lacrosse teammate. “He was pretty quiet and unassuming about it, but he made an impression on everyone around him.”

After Dartmouth Slive went straight to law school at the University of Virginia. But he discovered during a yearlong fellowship at Georgetown that the law didn’t feel like a calling. Thus began a peripatetic existence during which he and his wife, Liz—later joined by daughter Anna—crossed the country following a career that, even in retrospect, seems like anything but a straight line to where he sits today.

The first stop was back in Hanover, where Slive worked in Dartmouth’s financial aid office. A year later, in 1968, athletic director Seaver Peters ’54 had an opening for an assistant, and Slive—who had become a regular at all the sporting events—jumped at it.

“In those days we didn’t have a facilities manager, compliance people, scheduling people,” says Peters. “It was really a two-person operation. So we worked very closely together. It was obvious from the start he was a real talent.”

After two years of stuffing ticket envelopes Slive felt he was wasting his legal training and became an associate at Stebbins & Bradley in Hanover. That started two decades of yo-yoing between sports and law. Because while Slive began rising in the legal community—he became judge of the Hanover District Court and then judicial master of Grafton County Superior Court—sports kept grabbing at him. And Dartmouth kept playing a part.

The first time was when football coach Jake Crouthamel ’60 arranged for Slive to act as an agent to Reggie Williams ’76. An All-America linebacker, Williams was torn between the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts, who were offering him a $100,000 signing bonus, and the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals, who were offering a $35,000 rookie contract.

“Mike is the first one to tell you: When you have an emotional decision, use logic,” says Williams, who played 14 seasons with the Bengals. “He knew my passion was in proving I could make it in the NFL, and he didn’t let me lose sight of that.”

The second time came a decade later. After stints as assistant commissioner of the Pac-10 Conference in California, where he was in charge of NCAA compliance issues, and at Cornell, where he was athletic director, Slive returned to Hanover and hung out his own shingle as a lawyer. In 1986 he was retained by Joe Yukica, who felt he had been unfairly terminated as Dartmouth’s football coach.

“It wasn’t easy for him, being an alum and a former college employee, to go against his school,” Yukica says. “But he took it because he thought it was the right thing to do.”

Slive, along with seasoned trial lawyer David Nixon, successfully argued that firing Yukica with one year left on his contract would irreparably harm his career. Dartmouth was forced to reinstate Yukica. But the victory was not without cost to Slive. “I got some hate mail,” he says. “I also remember a headline in the Valley News that said something like, ‘Mike Slive: His friends swear by him, his enemies swear at him.’ ”

Still, the precedent-setting case gave Slive a national reputation in sports law. And when a pair of Midwest universities were accused of NCAA violations, they hired Slive, who soon realized there could be a practice in helping wayward schools go straight. He relocated to Chicago and, along with partner Mike Glazier, soon had all the work he could handle. He loved it.

“Mike’s idea of a great Saturday morning was to meet early for breakfast at a place called Lou Mitchell’s in Chicago—and I’m talking 6 o’clock in the morning,” recalls Glazier. “He’d be wearing his cowboy boots and his jeans, because he didn’t have to wear a suit. And then he’d spend most of the rest of the day dictating.”

A close relationship with several institutions led to Slive’s role in creating the Great Midwest Conference and its predecessor, Conference USA, of which Slive was the first commissioner. And that’s what he was doing when, unexpectedly, the SEC came calling in 2002.

Slive says that when he was installed in the SEC’s Birmingham, Alabama, offices, he wasn’t given any kind of directive to become the new sheriff in town. But it soon became clear, with a style that was both personable and relentlessly direct, that’s what he was going to be.

“I felt that no matter how successful the league was we would not be viewed as successful if we had compliance issues,” says Slive. “We’re talking about athletics here, but you always have to keep in mind this is higher education. If you lose that, you’ve lost your soul.”

Slive formed a task force to address the systemic rule-breaking and in 2003 announced the goal of having every SEC school infraction-free in five years. His statement was met with howls of incredulous laughter from around the American South, including the SEC’s ever-skeptical sportswriters. And yet the task force, whose recommendations were unanimously ratified in 2004, slowly began to change the league in culture and practice.

“When he took over we had these bitter feuds going on between some of the schools that were ratting each other out to the NCAA every chance they got. It was pure Hatfield-and-McCoy stuff,” says Gene Marsh, a University of Alabama Law School professor who wrote the task force’s report. “There was a strong feeling before Mike came in that if you brought a complaint to the SEC office, it would go there and die. Mike established that if you brought a complaint, it would be seriously addressed. So everyone doesn’t just run off to the NCAA the first time they hear a rumor.”

By 2008 the only SEC program on NCAA probation was Arkansas track and field. As of October of this year there was only one SEC school serving time: Alabama, for a relatively minor scandal involving student athletes receiving free textbooks.

“Mike has really influenced the SEC to aspire to its better angels,” says Princeton athletic director Gary Walters, who was Dartmouth’s freshman basketball coach in 1968 when he first met Slive. “I think the [SEC] presidents recognized some of the shenanigans that were going on were really tarnishing the educational reputations of their schools. And they couldn’t have hired a better person to help correct that.”

What’s more, the SEC is more financially successful than ever. Thanks to contracts Slive negotiated with ESPN and CBS, SEC schools received on average $17.4 million from the conference last year. The league has also won four straight national championships in football.

“He has just been a phenomenal commissioner in every respect,” says University of Kentucky president Lee Todd. “He’s got the presidents totally unified behind him.”

There have also been other victories, such as Mississippi State making Sylvester Croom the first African-American head football coach in SEC history in 2003. John Walters remembers visiting his old classmate at a hotel suite in Atlanta when the news broke and finding Slive with newspapers spread across a bed.

“He was reading those newspaper articles with tears in his eyes,” said Walters, one of a number of Dartmouth connections Slive has kept strong through the years. “He had really pushed for that, and he was so proud.”

Slive’s current contract, which pays him a little more than $2 million a year in base salary and bonuses, runs through 2012, and he talks like a man who wouldn’t mind signing on for one more go. He’s so eager to get to work each morning, he sets his alarm clock for 4:45 a.m. He does not golf or garden. If he has a hobby, it’s wandering out on the back porch of his Birmingham home with a book on a Sunday afternoon, lighting a cigar and looking at the view.

“Sometimes I sit back and I don’t believe it,” says Slive. “I came from Utica, New York. My folks didn’t go to college. And somehow, here I am. There isn’t another job I’d rather have. And there’s no place where I’d rather be.”

Brad Parks is a frequent contributor to DAM. His most recent story, which appeared in the March/April 2010 issue, was about the 1958-59 hockey team. His next book, Eyes of the Innocent, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in February.

Dianna, who died March 18, 2010, a month before her 48th birthday, was a wholly remarkable and at the same time pretty typical Dartmouth alumna, a working mother who strived to accomplish all the good she could in her corner of the world and often well beyond. A physician specializing in infectious diseases and HIV, Dianna exemplified the very best of Dartmouth. She was brilliant, penetratingly curious, self-made, friendly, funny, community-service oriented, athletic, fearless—someone who made real change in the world.

In the great D-Plan that is life, I hadn’t seen very much of Dianna in the last too-many years, though we were relatively current on each other’s major life events. Weddings, jobs, kids. Then cancer. Boy, did that come out of the blue. She was one of my closest college friends, but we were rarely in the same city or even on the same coast. She was in terrific shape—a marathon runner, rock climber and avid hiker—a practicing physician, mother of two little girls and stepmom to three older children. She handled the diagnosis, as she did so much else in her life, bravely and defiantly, with great humor and thoughtfully expressed sentiments, surrounded by people who loved and admired her.

Dianna was easy to admire. She was a leader, but in such a humble way. Because she was doing so much so well and so enthusiastically, others naturally wanted to follow her. This was quite literally true when she was doing a medical rotation in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s. Outside the hospital a mountain peak on the horizon beckoned her to climb it (the granite of New Hampshire in her muscles and her veins). She asked doctors, nurses, anyone in earshot, if they wanted to hike that mountain with her when they were off shift. She was met again and again by the same response: “If there were a reason we needed to walk up the mountain we would,” she recounted them saying. “But why on earth, with life being difficult enough, would we walk up that mountain for no reason?”

The reason turned out to be Dianna herself. Swept up in her unrelenting enthusiasm, African after African signed on for a no-reason-at-all hike up the local mountain. Knowing Dianna, I’m sure it was an unforgettable adventure for everyone, full of laughter, great discovery, maybe even a wrong turn or two—all at a breath-quickening pace.

Dianna was the first person in her family to go to college. Without family guidance during the application process, she sat down and wrote her first-choice school, Dartmouth, a long letter enumerating her strengths and interests. Only when she asked a friend to take a look at the letter did she learn there was such a thing as an application process.

She felt she started a step behind, I think, although you would never know it to meet her. She navigated so many waters so skillfully at Dartmouth, academically, athletically, socially. She was elected to Casque & Gauntlet her senior year. Although it seemed a natural fit—she was clearly a leader, popular, committed, smart and all those other C&G qualities—she wrote in our 25th reunion book that she felt unqualified. They must have, she wrote, “needed one smart Polish female who drank, and I fit the bill perfectly.”

After college she went to NYU medical school, paying for her education through a scholarship that required her to do her residency with the Air Force. Or so the Air Force thought. Dianna was hell-bent on getting the best training in the country. Her future patients deserved no less. She phoned and wrote and phoned again anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone. She finally reached a sympathetic staffer for then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and mounted an argument that won her a call from the senator himself. He would approve a deferment, he said, on the condition that she never call his office again.

She did indeed get the best training in the country—at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (overlapping with Dartmouth President Jim Kim)—and fulfilled her Air Force requirement later in her career. Never, I feel safe to say, has there been a less military soul in the military. I remember a story she told about being taken to task in a Veterans Administration hospital hallway by a superior who noticed her without her regulation hat. Consequences be damned, she barely stopped to hear the reprimand for being out of uniform. “I had a patient who was coding!” she said (using the term for medical emergency).

Always her patients came first. Tributes at her memorial service detailed the lengths to which she would go to advocate for them—a passion that dated back to her very first “patient,” her medical school cadaver. Cary Hastings Plamondon ’84 has a “Dianna story,” as we call them, of a dinner plan morphing into a visit to Dianna’s anatomy classroom after hours so Di could introduce Cary to her cadaver—with pride and by name. From the start Dianna was the most humanistic of doctors.

During this past year a number of us Dartmouth ’84s, Dianna’s devoted friends, have talked a lot about life and death and what light each sheds on the other. We have hugged our children a little tighter, called distant friends a little more often and tried to shunt trivial difficulties to their rightful place in the hierarchy of life’s troubles. Still, we are left shell-shocked to have one of us—an unusually strong, accomplished and active one—stolen away in the prime of her life, struck swiftly by a cancer that went undetected in such a vital person until it had metastasized to a fatal stage.

But we are also enlightened and inspired, as always, by Dianna. Her final year—it was 15 months from diagnosis to death—was a remarkable crucible of life’s priorities and a powerful example of a life well lived. One of her recent accomplishments, she wrote in our reunion book, was finishing a 5K race after her sixth round of chemotherapy. She was exquisitely conscious of creating memories for her family—her husband, Jim, and their 8- and 6-year-old daughters—so while her body battled raging cancer and debilitating chemotherapy and surgeries, she and her family took a cruise to Mexico, swam with dolphins, biked miles of California coastline, traveled to Spokane, Washington, to meet the girls’ 95-year-old great-grandmother, and simply nested with books and crafts and homework on the bed when she was too exhausted to move. Through it all, she said, the girls learned one of life’s most important skills: empathy. In dying as in living, Dianna was the most empathetic person I’ve ever known.

“It’s no secret,” Dianna wrote in the midst of her struggle, “that I am loving my life right now.”

Deborah Schupack is a writer whose latest book, Sylvan Street (Plume), was published in May. She lives in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

There have been many reasons for the long-term decline of the humanities. Not least among them has been a collective failure of nerve among those of us who teach the humanities. We have taken our own scholarship too much to heart and have become unable to offer our students anything beyond doubt, cynicism and despair. Our students have, as a result, deserted us in ever increasing numbers. If we want the humanities to thrive, we need to change the way we operate. We need to speak clearly and boldly about the importance of studying them, and we need to teach in a way that realizes the humanities’ vast potential to transform peoples’ lives for the better. We need, by our teaching and our conduct in the classroom, to help our students understand the importance of eschewing a self-interested, self-centered atomized individualism and of committing themselves instead to becoming active members of communities.

Since my undergraduate days I have been repeatedly struck by what I can only describe as the humanities’ self-esteem problem. Too many of us who teach the humanities are too often complicit in our marginalization because we do not at our core believe in the overriding importance of what we do or, if we do believe in it, we are unable or unwilling to articulate that belief clearly and strongly. When a biologist stands up and makes a case for privileged access to limited resources, we should stand up and say, I hear and understand you, but what I do is equally important. Clarity about why what we do matters is essential.

So, why do the humanities matter? First, we teach essential skills that students are unlikely to learn anywhere else. On the top of that list I would put the ability to write concisely and persuasively, but I would also include critical thinking, the ability to do basic research and the ability to speak competently in front of a group. Our colleagues who teach the hard sciences and to a lesser extent those who teach social sciences have a tendency to focus on transmitting information to their students at the expense of working on their students’ skill sets. In our teaching we should emphasize skills rather than information.

The humanities matter because they are by far the best place for students to learn epistemological humility. Human beings in general seem to have a propensity to misapprehend the true complexity of the world around them. Nonetheless, education is absolutely critical here, both in a negative and a positive sense. The lesson that many of our students take away from their classes in the hard sciences and social sciences, a lesson that is taught implicitly rather than explicitly, is that the universe is an orderly place that obeys laws that we can learn through careful study and then consistently and successfully apply. The implication is that human behavior also obeys laws that can be divined and applied.

This is where the humanities faculty has a critical role to play. The material we teach and the way we teach drive home the point that human beings—and any institution or system that involves human beings—defy simple analysis. This is perhaps most evident in the case of literature. Why does Achilles refuse to return to battle in Book 9 of the Iliad? Did Aeneas really love Dido? To read Homer and Virgil is to confront the problem of grasping the thoughts and motivations of another person. But it goes far beyond that, in no small part because we also regularly impart hard-earned insights into why a clear and complete understanding of the world always eludes us. To take but one example, post-modernism has taught the invaluable lesson that language is never a transparent medium and that words are inevitably partial. A humanities student who has been properly taught has a finely honed appreciation for uncertainty and nuance and hence is much less prone to the kind of intellectual hubris that so easily leads to disaster.

In teaching the humanities we lay the basis for a tolerant and pluralistic society by helping our students come to understand the overriding importance of culture in shaping identity and worldview. It is all too convenient for the members of any given society to conflate nomos and physis, to take their own social conventions as biological destiny and to view other cultures as deviating from that biological destiny. Here again our colleagues in the sciences frequently do our students no favors by concentrating their attention on the limited subset of human behaviors that is to a large extent biologically determined. The humanities do exactly the opposite by inviting, even compelling, students to confront head-on the extent of human diversity and to encourage them to ponder the origins and meaning of that diversity.

I regularly teach the basic introductory course for Dartmouth’s classics department. One of the stated goals of this course is: “To help you learn about the extraordinary importance of culture in shaping human beings, individually and collectively.” And I spend a considerable amount of time on this issue over the course of the semester. For instance, I take the students through the Greek and Roman systems of categorizing and evaluating sexual behavior and comparing them to our own. I have the privilege of teaching some of the brightest college students in the world, most of whom received a much-better-than-average high school education. And yet the ideas that culture is determinative of behavior and that no one culture is better than any other always come as a revelation to a significant number of my students.

I make no claims to being a better-than-average teacher. The power to transform the way people see and understand themselves and others is vested in the material itself—all we need to do is to present it properly and let it do its work. I tell my students that culture is like oxygen—invisible and rarely a matter of overt concern but absolutely vital to our existence.

A few years ago we had some incidents at Dartmouth that spoke to a lack of tolerance on the part of many members of the student body. Our response was to form a panel to design a few hours of what I can only call indoctrination in the importance of tolerance that was to be administered to all incoming first-year students during orientation. The chair of the panel asked me if I wanted to share my thoughts on how best to proceed. I responded that it would be better for everyone involved if I didn’t because I thought the whole thing was fundamentally misguided. Tolerance cannot be enforced by dictate from above. It can, however, be fostered by the simple expedient of helping people come to understand culture and its effects and for that reason to expect and respect differences. That project is something that the humanities are uniquely equipped to undertake, and the importance of that project—and hence the study of the humanities—cannot be easily exaggerated. If we want to live in a pluralistic and tolerant society, we have to teach our children about culture and its effects.

The most important reason studying the humanities matters is based on a simple assumption that the ultimate motivation for doing what we do is to be happy. The humanities help people learn how to be happy.

This is a subject about which I speak to my students all the time, and they regularly retort that it is not possible to learn how to be happy or to seek happiness. Many of my students see happiness as roughly the same as the weather—it comes and goes without any ability on our part to influence it.

I am aware of the research that shows there is a strong genetic component in individuals’ temperaments and hence their likelihood of being happy. Genetics is no more than a single relevant factor. It does not determine our fate. I am perhaps a naïve humanist, but it seems to me that when it comes to happiness our decisions and actions are profoundly important.

Even if you agree with that, you may wonder what any of this has to do with the humanities. The connection is to be found in cultures, each of which is built around a limited number of what philosopher Charles Taylor has called “hypergoods.” Taylor defines these as goods “which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.”

There is always an implicit assumption that successful pursuit of the hypergoods of the society in which an individual lives will make her or him happy. This is most easily seen in Americans’ attitude toward money. There is a line in David Mamet’s movie Heist in which a character played by Danny DeVito says, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” I suspect that Mamet’s point was that money is so fundamentally important that its pursuit requires no explanation. A few years ago I had a conversation with a student who was about to graduate and had a Wall Street job waiting for him. I asked him why he had taken the job, and he said without hesitation that he had taken the job because it paid very well. I then asked him if he could explain why the money was important to him. He looked completely baffled. It was Mamet all over again. I asked him if he thought that making a great deal of money would make him happy, and he said, of course, as if I had asked him if the sky is blue or if water is wet.

It’s a reasonable assumption that that student is now indeed making a great deal of money, but it is not a reasonable assumption that making a great deal of money has made him happy. I say that in part because a great deal of recent research, carried out by people such as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton, has shown that incomes beyond about $75,000 have virtually no measurable effect on peoples’ happiness. Put another way, based purely on their incomes, a Dartmouth professor is about as likely to be happy as a Wall Street banker who makes $4 million a year.

I have delved into the subject of money because it illustrates a simple but important fact: People tend to unreflectively pursue the hypergoods of the society into which they were born. The problem is that there is no guarantee that acquiring large amounts of a society’s hypergoods will make any given individual happy. The humanities can help lead our students to some critical realizations about what may not make them happy, and help students harvest the rich fruits of thousands of years of people thinking about what actually does make human beings happy. We can benefit from the insights of some of the smartest people who ever lived simply by opening a book. What this means in practice is that we can indeed learn how to be happy, or at least greatly increase our chances of being happy. This in fact is the conclusion Aristotle reaches in The Nicomachean Ethics. He argues that we can consciously pursue happiness and that “to entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.”

Another topic about which the humanities have a lot to say, as exemplified by Artistotle in Politics, is that human beings are by nature meant to live in a community. I dwell on this point because I have become more and more convinced during the past few years that one of the single biggest problems with which Americans are currently wrestling is a commitment to individualism that has been taken to an almost pathological extreme.

Even as individualism helps ensure that people have the freedom to make lives that suit them and strong incentives for achievement, there has also from the outset been the potential for Americans to push individualism so far as to become completely alienated from the communities and society in which they live. By the end of the 19th century there was a widespread feeling that American society was literally disintegrating because individuals were pursuing their own interests without any regard for the well-being of others. That feeling gave rise to the Progressive movement, which was based on the belief that individualism needed to be balanced by a concern for others.  This concern was expressed not just in words but also in action and produced nearly 75 years of highly effective social reform.

There is a general consensus that Progressivist impulses collapsed during the Vietnam War, which was followed by a shift back toward a more individualistic society, a shift that gathered force with time. That shift is evident in the contrast between the visions of America articulated by Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. One could make a good case that Reaganite individualism represented a necessary corrective to a collectivism that had lost its bearings, but it seems clear to me that the correction went too far and that we ended up with an America in which individuals were taught implicitly and explicitly that the only rational and intelligent course of action in any given situation was pursuing one’s self interest.

The rampant, unchecked individualism that came into being in late 20th- and early 21st-century America proved in fact to be detrimental both to individuals and to society. Our most recent financial crisis in part resulted from the fact that individuals on Wall Street had every incentive to make potentially catastrophic bets because it was in their self-interest to do so. The humanities have much to contribute on this front. The simple act of encountering other societies both past and present that have very different visions of the relationship between individual and community can be crucial for students accustomed to hearing only the gospel of individualism.

For students who have been taught that self-interest is the be all and end all, encountering the Greeks and Romans, with their deep-seated interest in ethics and belief in the necessity of community, can be transformative. The humanities are a great place for students to learn about the importance of being active and responsible members of communities—a lesson that carries immense significance both for individual students, because it significantly increases their chances of living happy and productive lives, and for the communities and society in which we all live.

Paul Christesen has taught in the classics department since 1998. This essay was adapted from the first Edward Bradley lecture, which Christesen delivered in honor of Dartmouth’s longtime classics professor at the 2010 Classical Association of New England summer institute held on campus last July. The entire lecture can be read here.

Although the conventional surgical method applied to ACL reconstruction is still favored by many surgeons, Dr. Freddie Fu ’74, DMS’75, has pioneered an approach that might not only be better, but also has his profession talking.

Fu, a professor and chair of the orthopedic surgery department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and School of Medicine, where he completed his degree, commands attention for his results and because he is president of the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopedic Sports Medicine as well as immediate past president of the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine. He typically lectures 10 days a month, often traveling internationally. “It can be anywhere,” says the native of Hong Kong. His patients include elite and recreational athletes from a variety of sports.

Fu’s fame is not limited to professional circles. In Pittsburgh he has received numerous civic awards. A local eatery, Lulu’s Noodles, even features a “Dr. Fu’s Special” on its menu.

ACL reconstruction typically entails the insertion of a single-tendon graft into a tunnel made in the tibia and femur. Arthroscopic reconstruction, first performed in 1980, can sometimes be done today in as little as half an hour, depending on the patient.

“In the last 30 years, as the technology for ACL reconstruction has improved,” explains Fu, “surgeons have focused on doing the procedure faster and more efficiently, and they’ve drifted away from doing it anatomically correctly.” As Fu talks he whips through halls of the UPMC Sports Performance Complex, which are studded with signed photographs of NBA players, Tour de France cyclists and other star athletes.

He says he is concerned that traditional ACL reconstruction has failed to adequately replace the ACL to its native anatomy. Because ACL replacement leads to the development of osteoarthritis, Fu theorizes that anatomically correct surgery will reduce the risk. “We can do better,” he says. The more native anatomy that’s restored during ACL surgery, Fu believes, the better the odds that patients can continue to be highly active, because long-term knee health is promoted.  His research is examining this premise.

The nonanatomic quick fix has its appeal, Fu acknowledges. Surgeons aren’t incentivized to slow down, and a longer procedure may sound daunting to some patients. The anatomic approach can take up to 90 minutes and requires more attention to detail, he says.

For the last 10 years Fu has avidly focused his research on ACL native anatomy, among other things performing cadaver, embryonic, animal and fossil investigations to understand the anatomic details of this ligament.

Today he heads research teams at 15 laboratories in Pittsburgh, conducting clinical outcome, musculoskeletal imaging and laboratory research to study the relationships between joint function, disease, injury and treatment.

The most important detail of the reconstruction surgeries he performs, he stresses, is the location of the native ACL insertion site—that is, where the ligament connects to the bones. Other anatomic details he strives to match include the size of the insertion site openings and the tensioning patterns of the two ligament bundles.

Fu is focused on the fact that the human ACL is composed of a double, not single, bundle of fibers. He and his colleagues will embark soon on a $3.2 million clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to compare outcomes of anatomic single- vs. double-bundle ACL reconstruction. They’ll use highly sophisticated and sensitive high-speed, biplane radiography and MRI and CT imaging to assess knee kinematics, cartilage characteristics and clinical outcomes in 160 patients monitored for two years after reconstruction. The trial will be the most in-depth study ever to compare single- and double-bundle approaches.

Since 2003 Fu has performed exclusively anatomic ACL reconstructions, using either a single or double graft, depending on patients’ preference, the anatomic characteristics of the ACL and any other present knee pathology.

Fu’s most vivid memories of Dartmouth center on the classroom. “All the students were in awe because they had the chance to be taught by the president,” he says of a John Kemeny lecture to his calculus class.

An even greater inspiration was bio professor Roy Forster, whom Fu considers “a mentor who guided me in the right direction.” Forster’s influence was such that Fu took 10 biology courses and became “more creative and questioning.” Fu claims those traits were in play on a 2000 trip to Japan, where he first observed double-bundle ACL reconstruction being attempted. This sparked his interest in the anatomical concept of reconstruction. Having researched knees since his medical school days at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Albert Ferguson ’41, Fu had already replaced a few thousand ACLs by then—sometimes performing the surgery as often as 12 times a day.

“I came back thinking, simply, this is a new technique to try,” he says. “But as I thought more about it, the concept of anatomic correctness became a whole new world.”

Although many ACL surgeons are on board with the anatomic approach, just as many see it as complicating a procedure that seems to work just fine.

“Changing to an anatomic technique for ACL reconstruction can be difficult for many surgeons,” says Dr. Carola van Eck, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s orthopedic research laboratories. “They’re very good at the fast and efficient ACL reconstruction they’ve been doing for years.” Changing to an anatomic approach requires more learning and is technically demanding, she adds.

“Dr. Fu and his research group have heightened surgeons’ awareness of the need for anatomic tunnel placement in ACL reconstruction,” says Dr. Jo A. Hannafin, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College who is also director of orthopedic research at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City and author of Say Goodbye to Knee Pain. “The issue remains that there is variability from patient to patient in the exact anatomic footprint,” she says. “What’s especially exciting is his research designed to determine the clinical importance of anatomic reconstruction and the need, or lack thereof, for a double-bundle reconstruction.”

Dr. John Richmond, chair of the orthopedics department at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston and a professor of orthopedic surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine, performs more than 100 anatomic ACL reconstructions a year. “Much of what’s changed in our field in the last five years can be attributed to Dr. Fu,” he says. Richmond lauds Fu “as a classic clinician-scientist, looking at the anatomic procedure critically, researching it in the lab, proving in the lab that it would be better and adopting it. ”

Fu says it just makes sense to approach ACL reconstruction with the same anatomic awareness that’s shown in other surgeries.

“We as surgeons often want to take a shortcut to surgery and ignore anatomy,” says Fu. “To be fair to our patients we need to think less like technicians and more conceptually, more open-mindedly. The hard fact is anatomy never changes. It’s been the same for millions of years.”

Deborah Klenotic is a freelance writer and assistant director of web communications in Dartmouth’s alumni relations office.

Arriving less than eight weeks before President George W. Bush launched the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the two blunt reports represented a last-ditch attempt by senior intelligence officers to warn of dire consequences should the nation plunge into war. One of the papers was titled “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq.” The other was “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq.” Both provided a startlingly accurate, bleak portrait of what was about to unfold.

Instantly the papers flung their low-key, bookish author, Paul Pillar, into an uncharacteristic, central role in the dramatic controversy taking place out of public view during the run-up to war. Political opposition to the Iraq invasion would blossom years later. At the time Pillar circulated the papers, the career analyst who was then serving as the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia was sending a signal to key officials about something that was not yet widely apparent: A fervent anti-Iraq War tide was swelling within the intelligence community. To Pillar’s supporters, the papers would eventually be presented as evidence of a courageous effort to speak truth to power. To his critics, they would be viewed far less kindly—more like proof that an overly politicized intelligence community had veered way out of its lane.

Pillar says he expected the reports would be ignored. And they were. For months he had been hearing what sounded like a hard sell for an invasion. The president, he believed, had effectively charted a course for war very soon after the September 11 attacks, and that plan was cemented by the following summer.

“The decision was signed, sealed and delivered before those estimates were even written,” he told me recently as we sat in his secluded office at Georgetown University. There, as director of graduate studies at the center for peace and security studies, he lectures on terrorism, counterterrorism and security issues in the Middle East.

Pillar has spent a lot of time ruminating over all that went wrong in the months that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nearly eight years later, retired from intelligence work, he is working on a book that looks at the origins of major foreign policy blunders. He’s calling it The Mythology of Intelligence: Iraq, 9/11, and America’s Misguided Quest to Understand the World, due out next year from Columbia University Press.

The Dartmouth graduate and Vietnam veteran has at the same time embarked on a new crusade, this one playing out in public. It bears a striking resemblance to his last one. Pillar has become one of the leading voices of dissent against President Barack Obama’s decision to scale up the war in Afghanistan. He has traveled to seminars from Florida to Maine and done guest spots on talk radio to voice his objections, saying this mission could be as costly, bloody and ill advised as the one in Iraq.

At a foreign policy conference in Washington in June, Pillar sat alongside some of the senior analysts involved in mapping out America’s war effort in Afghanistan, and he did nothing to hide his dismay. By announcing both a massive buildup and declaring a 2011 date for the start of a withdrawal, President Obama had devised an incongruous, if understandable, political compromise, Pillar told the think-tank audience at the Center for a New American Security. The president’s new plan, he said glumly, risked prolonging the American war effort while not achieving much of anything.

“Our continued presence in Afghanistan does not make the difference between Al Qaeda establishing or not establishing a new safe haven there. The worst thing for us would be to enhance the perception that we are there to stay,” he said. “That will only strengthen the narrative out there that the United States is out to occupy Muslim lands.”

Pillar was even more blunt in a series of e-mail exchanges with me as I sought to understand his objections to the war. I asked him what he thought would happen if the president’s promise of a drawdown proved to be more rhetoric than reality.

“If we do not get out,” he responded, “we will continue to hemorrhage blood and treasure at a rate that the nation cannot afford and that is well out of proportion to any possible gain in our security. Our presence will continue to be a force more for instability than for stability, particularly because of Afghan resentment against what is seen as foreign occupation.”

For those who knew Pillar at Dartmouth, the notion that the dour and serious foreign affairs scholar has become a modern day anti-war crusader is both startling and steeped in irony.

More than 40 years ago Pillar traveled from Detroit to Hanover at a time of tremendous political upheaval. The son of a chemical engineer and an elementary school teacher, Pillar landed at Dartmouth and promptly joined ROTC. He saw his friends and neighbors being shipped off to Vietnam and decided if he was going to be summoned to war, he’d rather go as an officer. Then he burrowed into his books and ignored the anti-war mayhem that was rising around him. The man who shared a Fayerweather dorm room with Pillar was exactly the opposite—a self-described radical named Paul Mirengoff ’71. Mirengoff says that on the day in 1969 he joined about 100 other students to occupy Parkhurst in the crescendo of an anti-war protest, he’s fairly certain his roommate remained oblivious to the unfolding drama, head down in a pile of history texts at a study carrel in the stacks. “When they finally hauled us out at 2:30 a.m., I’d be surprised if Paul was even awake,” Mirengoff says.

Pillar does not dispute the account. He says he tried to avoid getting drawn into political debates in the spirit of dorm-room harmony. “We sort of kept a moratorium on the things that divided us, and kept it more to talk about sports and things like that,” he says.

In some respects, though, Pillar’s path seemed preordained from the day he took a chair in professor David Baldwin’s introductory international politics class the first semester of freshman year. The term paper he wrote on peacekeeping in the Congo won the Chase Peace Prize, which goes to the best Dartmouth senior thesis or undergraduate paper in which the student has reflected “on the causes of war and the prospects for peace in the world.”

International affairs became Pillar’s focus at a time when the nation was consumed with conflict overseas. But as his college years progressed and the war wound down Pillar thought there was little chance his Army service would take him across the Pacific. Within a month of arriving at Fort Gordon, Georgia, shortly after completing a politics degree at Oxford in 1971, however, the young lieutenant received orders for Vietnam. Four months later he was boarding a troop transport. Pillar was on his way to Camp Alpha at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon, the processing point for almost all U.S. military personnel entering or leaving Vietnam.

His was a logistical unit. He greeted newcomers as they stepped groggily off an airplane, briefing them on how to take malaria pills, handing out ration cards for the PX, issuing clothing and equipment and giving them their specific in-country assignments. At the same time he met with soldiers fresh off the battlefield. He would get them tested for drugs, Army standard procedure, and find them seats on airplanes to take them home. It was an unusual vantage point, where he could see the dramatic effects of warfare on the young Americans who passed through.

“I sometimes would hear, ‘You’re still here, lieutenant?’ from soldiers on the way out whom I had officially welcomed to Vietnam when they were on the way in,” Pillar wrote for the preface to his forthcoming book.

His tour didn’t involve combat—though the camp was the target of two rocket barrages during his stay. Instead it offered an up-close view of the ravages of war on the faces of those passing by him each day. Those faces left an impression.

In March 1973 Pillar boarded a C-141 transport plane with 50 others for the last military flight out of the conflict. A red carpet awaited the plane at Travis Air Force Base in California, and three generals escorted the weary passengers to an arrival celebration. Later that evening those gathered toasted the deactivation of Pillar’s unit, the 90th Replacement Battalion, which had been created to serve expeditionary forces back in World War I and which had rotated soldiers into and out of the long slog in Vietnam. A reporter asked Pillar for his reaction, and the military man pondered his response, he recalls. “I hope,” he said, “that the battalion was furling its colors for the last time and would never need to be activated again.”

Vietnam, he later wrote, was the first of the “two tragically ill-conceived military expeditions” that served as bookends to his 30 years of public service.

“The perches from which I observed the end of one misguided war and the beginning of another were quite different—a junior Army officer in the field in one, a senior intelligence officer in Washington in the other—although I hardly had any more influence on events in one job than in the other,” he wrote.

That other bookend was Iraq.

After his Army discharge Pillar prepared for a career in academia, earning a 1975 master’s and 1978 Ph.D. in politics at Princeton. But the job market was dismal, so he began considering an intriguing alternative. As someone with an already well-established interest in national security affairs, he thought it might be smart to spend time “on the inside looking out and not just on the outside looking in,” he says.

There are limits to what Pillar can say about the 28 years he spent in the CIA, which he joined in 1977. He spent a good portion of his tenure there studying the complicated political dynamics in regions of the world that faced the most intractable problems, including the Near East and South Asia. In 1993 he began to focus on the growing threat of international terrorists, taking a post as chief of analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and rising to become the center’s deputy director in 1997. In 1999 the more cerebral Pillar began to clash with the new table-thumping director, Cofer Black. Pillar left for a fellowship and wrote what would come to be seen as a prescient book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, about the burgeoning terrorist threat facing the nation. It was published later that year, after which Pillar returned to active CIA duty.

It was during his years as an analyst that Pillar met his wife, Cynthia Drabek, on a backpacking trip. Drabek, who served as a government attorney with the Department of Justice, joined the CIA after the two were married.

By 2001 Pillar had shifted his focus to South Asia. It was from that perch that Pillar gained an unusually close look at the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks. He watched the administration turn increasing attention to Saddam Hussein, and he began feeling like an academic trapped behind the desk of a bureaucrat. Inside Langley there were rumblings of a possible war with Iraq, and he realized he could do little to sound alarms.

“I was still a government employee in the intelligence community so it was not my place, nor did I have the freedom to express my opinions on the policy openly,” Pillar says. “But the particular work that my part of the intelligence community was focused on was very much in line with my private view—that this was a blunder.”

The response to the final two reports that his section produced was subdued when they first circulated in January 2003. Years later, when Democrats in Congress began to reassess the decision to wage war with Iraq, the papers became political dynamite. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee called them “chilling and prescient.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in a 2007 report on prewar intelligence that one of the most “troubling” aspects of Pillar’s reports “was the extent to which they were ignored by policymakers.”

The key senators who constitute the Democratic Policy Committee had summoned Pillar to testify before them in June 2006 as they sought to determine how the United States had gone to war in search of weapons of mass destruction and who had attempted to draw lines between  Al Qaeda and Iraq when none existed.

In an exchange with U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) Pillar explained that even as he prepared the assessments of what lay ahead in Iraq, he was under “no delusion that we were going to turn aside this train that was already far down the track.”

“So your view was that the assessments you were doing as late as January of 2003 were really to inform policymakers about the problems they were going to encounter once the invasion occurred?” Bingaman asked him.

Pillar: “If I could have produced those assessments a year earlier, that would have been great, but given the timeline of the decision-making, the best we could do was help inform the decision-maker and the military about the problems they would be dealing with once the occupation began.”

Republicans, meanwhile, said Pillar’s work was being exploited for political gain—that the work he oversaw represented only a fraction of the material being circulated in the months before the war, and in 2007 its significance was being exaggerated. The Weekly Standard referred to him as a “rogue bureaucrat,” and Guillermo Christensen, a 15-year veteran of the CIA, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Pillar had discarded his “neutral role” as an intelligence analyst and “inject[ed] himself in the political realm.”

Pillar had officially become a political lightning rod.

When Pillar retired from government service in October 2005 it was as if a gag was removed.

After taking his teaching position at Georgetown Pillar began looking for an outlet for the strong views he held close during his years at the CIA. He didn’t want that outlet to be the classroom, saying he is “happy not to teach any courses on intelligence because I am simply too close to it. I think with intelligence there would be too many times in which I would feel compelled to say that X is the truth and Y is baloney.”

Pillar found that venue in speaking engagements and with his writing. He has become an increasingly vocal critic of American war policy—an unlikely new course for the man who once worked hard to avoid debating international politics with his anti-war activist college roommate.

Conservative critics who derided his take on the Bush policy in Iraq must have done a double take when, last fall, he began to challenge the wisdom of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.

Last February Pillar began what would become a series of debates with John Nagl, a disciple of Gen. David Petraeus, who strongly advocated that the Obama administration ramp up its forces in Afghanistan to bolster a counterinsurgency there. The two experts clashed in point-counterpoint fashion in the journal National Interest, offering opposing answers to the question: “Is Afghanistan the Right War?”

Pillar argued that the required expenditure of blood and treasure was not worth it. “I see little if any increment in our safety,” he says, “because Al Qaeda isn’t in Afghanistan, and if they need a safe haven, they’ve got one in Pakistan. And they don’t need one anyway. Look at how they prepared for 9/11. They prepared in Florida, Germany, Spain. And in flight schools in the United States.”

Nagl rebutted that losing in Afghanistan would strengthen Al Qaeda, prolong the war on terror and ultimately cost many more American lives. “This fact may be unpalatable, but it is also inescapable,” Nagl wrote.

It was Nagl who invited Pillar to appear at a conference sponsored by his Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security (which is headed by Marine veteran Nathaniel Fick ’99, who declined to comment on Pillar’s views).

Seated alongside Lt. Gen. David Barno and the former ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Pillar argued at that conference that the continued American military presence in Afghanistan was becoming a rallying cry against the United States, not only for radical Islamic militants, but also for more mainstream Muslims.

“Our continued presence in Afghanistan has been increasingly seen as a foreign occupation,” he said. “As far as extremism and terrorism are concerned, the most important thing for the president to keep in mind is to not make the withdrawal that is to occur in July 2011 a sham, but to make it clear that we are, indeed, on our way out.”

I asked Pillar how he envisions the United States making an orderly withdrawal, and what to expect to happen to Afghanistan if the United States is no longer present. It is a question that surfaced repeatedly when Obama and his war cabinet spent weeks trying to settle on a policy for what was once known as “the good war.” That process concluded with what many, including Nagl and Pillar, considered to be an uneasy compromise in which the United States built up its forces and agreed to begin its withdrawal in the summer of 2011.

Though the president set the pull-out date during his speech to the cadets at West Point in December 2009, he pointedly chose not to say what it meant—whether the withdrawal would involve thousands of soldiers or just a few dozen.

“Some are arguing that the withdrawal should be little more than cosmetic,” Pillar told me. “I believe it needs to be meaningful and substantial.” To accomplish this, he says, there will need to be “a lot of messy deal-making among the Afghans, not all of which will be to our liking.” But as ugly and counterproductive as it may be, he says, it’s a lot better than the further expenditure of American lives.

Pillar has not convinced Nagl of this. But the counterinsurgency expert does concede that, more than once, Pillar’s cogent arguments have got him to reexamine the basis for his own position—forcing him to remind himself why he came to favor America’s deep investment in a far-flung, undeveloped central Asian nation.

“He’s so articulate with his position that he forces the other side to go back to first principles,” Nagl says. “He’s playing a very important role, and that’s frankly good for the nation, and he’s one of the only people doing that in the public sphere.”

A series of recent events has raised new questions about the American war effort and helped fuel some uptick of anti-war sentiment. There was the release this summer of thousands of pages of internal cables by the online whistle-blower clearinghouse Wiki-Leaks. Pillar says the episode provided illustration and texture to what was already well known about such things as civilian casualties and Pakistan’s dealings with the Afghan Taliban.

Also this summer came Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s abrupt departure from the military after a Rolling Stone writer quoted impolitic exchanges between the commanding general and his top aides, including one in which the general is jokingly advised to tell Vice President Joseph Biden to “bite me.” Pillar had taken an almost identical position to the one attributed to Biden during the president’s lengthy assessment of Afghan war strategy. Biden was said to argue that the terror threat had moved away from Afghanistan and could be managed with far fewer resources than were being proposed. At the time McChrystal dismissed the approach as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan.”

Still, Pillar says he took no delight in the general’s downfall, saying the quotes in Rolling Stone would “surprise few people who have ever been exposed to bull sessions, including in the military, involving senior people and their staffs who are trying to do difficult and frustrating jobs.”

Right now Pillar’s opposition to continued warfare in Afghanistan is more pronounced than that of most Americans. But whatever the reason—perhaps the fact that coalition forces were seeing their highest death tolls this summer—a growing number of Americans appear to be edging closer to Pillar’s position that the cost of this war is too high. A monthly national survey of opinion about the war, taken by Quinnipiac University, has asked if Americans think the president “is doing the right thing by fighting the war in Afghanistan now, or should the United States not be involved in Afghanistan now?” It found that those who answered the war was the “right thing” had slipped from 59 percent in January to 48 percent in July.

Pillar believes a majority of the country will catch up to him, much as they did as the Iraq War unfolded. “I think as costs pile up, particularly the blood side of the blood and treasure, the public’s view will change,” he says. “The trend line is in that direction.”

Though he hasn’t been in touch with Pillar in the many years since college, Mirengoff says he finds some humor in once again being at political odds with Pillar. For while his ROTC roommate is now an anti-war crusader, Mirengoff, once jailed for protesting the Vietnam War, is now a conservative blogger in Washington. He says many of his prominent friends consider Pillar a political enemy.

“We’ve both flipped,” he chuckles. “It is very ironic.”

And yet Mirengoff is quick to add that he continues to have a deep respect for Pillar, much as he did when the two lived through college on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Mirengoff recalls that a day or two after he landed in the Grafton County jail for having occupied Parkhurst a letter vouching for him arrived at the courthouse. For reasons now long forgotten it was ignored and returned to the author: Pillar.

“It was probably the only time I ever heard him criticize the establishment,” Mirengoff says.

The establishment is hearing regularly from Pillar these days. Only time will determine whether his message will again be ignored.

Matthew Mosk is an investigative reporter for ABC News in Washington, D.C., and a regular contributor to DAM.

At the urging of her journalist husband, Markos, who reported on the political transitions in Eastern Europe in 1989-90, Tsakopoulos Kounalakis indicated her preference for Hungary, where she has been serving since January.

Although a case could be made that she, like many ambassadors before her, was tapped only because of her political activism—and the more than $1 million she helped raise as head of Greek-Americans for Hillary Clinton—Tsakopoulos Kounalakis brings to her post professional and personal experience well suited to navigating the challenges her new job presents.

As Ambassador Ken Yalowitz, director of Dartmouth’s Dickey Center and a 36-year State Department veteran, points out, “Although ambassadors will always have their respect, foreign service professionals have a general concern when a political appointee is named. But political appointees can be exceptional diplomats—well qualified, highly motivated. Often they can accomplish things because of their access to people a career foreign service officer might not be able to reach.”

Indeed, in addition to other political activism such as serving four times as delegate to the Democratic National Convention from California, Tsakopoulos Kounalakis has meditated with the Dalai Lama and been honored by the Greek Orthodox Church for her interfaith work mediating forums with the World Council of Religions for Peace. She has also served on the California State World Trade Commission.

As president of Sacramento-based AKT Development, however, she was not immune to controversy. Shortly before her confirmation hearings she was engaged in a contentious dispute over the value AKT placed on land sold to a school district. Sacramento’s Natomas Unified School District brought suit against AKT, and the case is still in litigation. Previously AKT had appealed a federal ruling against it involving violation of the Clean Water Act all the way to the Supreme Court. There a 4-4 tie resulted (the lower court’s ruling against AKT was upheld) after family friend Justice Anthony Kennedy recused himself.

Tsakopoulos Kounalakis deems land development the world’s oldest profession, she says, because “people have fought over land since the beginning of time. My life as a businesswoman had a lot to do with negotiation.”

That’s a skill much needed in her current job. A nation of 10 million people where memories of territorial disputes can still lead to international brouhahas, Hungary borders seven countries, from Austria to Ukraine. The nation’s boundaries convulsed in the turmoil of 20th-century Europe. “You cannot look at any system here, any way of thinking, and find an absolute equivalent anywhere else in the world,” Tsakopoulos Kounalakis says, citing the uniqueness of the Hungarian language and complicated recent history.

Imagine a capital city of 2 million people, the home of Europe’s largest synagogue, in a country that lost nearly half a million Jewish citizens only a few generations ago. To a culture that has the shadow of the Holocaust stretching over the Danube, the State Department has dispatched a person who believes the role of religion and faith in people’s lives is still underestimated.

“An interfaith forum,” Tsakopoulos Kounalakis says when describing her work with the World Council of Religions for Peace, “is an incredibly powerful venue for understanding how people think—a close-up opportunity to talk to people who believe completely different things from one another and have more than a bilateral conversation.” She’s fascinated that religious leaders are “raised to positions of power based on their unwillingness to give an inch.” When Tsakopoulos Kounalakis describes her interfaith work, she could easily be explaining politics, weaving seamless connections between the strands of her life.

The political connections that resulted in her appointment as ambassador have their roots in the many times her politically active father, Angelo, involved her in events he organized after Tsakopoulos Kounalakis returned home from Dartmouth via Greece, where she spent some time after graduation. Once back on the West Coast she earned a 1992 M.B.A. from Berkeley and then joined the family business.

Tsakopoulos Kounalakis’ arrival in Hungary overlapped the run-up to national elections in April—a backdrop every bit as tumultuous as the American political landscape. They resulted in the return of former prime minister Viktor Orban. His face is a familiar one—not only because he was prime minister from 1998 to 2002, but because in the pivotal summer of 1989, as Tsakopoulos Kounalakis was graduating from college, Orban took center stage in Budapest by delivering a speech in Heroes Square demanding that the USSR withdraw its troops and allow free elections.

The recent elections were Hungary’s sixth since the collapse of the USSR, and their outcome demonstrated the same desire for change reflected in pre-election polling. A survey conducted in the fall of 2009 by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project found more than two-thirds of Hungarians were dissatisfied with the functioning of their democracy, and an even higher number indicated the country was on the wrong track.

In a defeat of the Socialists, who had been governing for eight years, the conservative Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats) party captured enough seats to have a supermajority in the next parliament and put Orban back in power, but the nationalist Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary) party more than doubled its returns of the previous election cycle, as did the liberal, green Lehet Mas A Politica (Politics Can Be Different) party.

Tsakopoulos Kounalakis knows what it is to experience political upheaval. She marvels that she is representing the United States under its first African-American president. “Just when you think the United States has taken a turn for the worse, the voters do something bold and different,” she says.

In many ways Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, an immigrant’s daughter, embodies the American dream. High school in Sacramento, however, did not prepare her for the intensity of an Ivy League classroom. She found herself in archaeology classes with peers who had “studied ancient Greek and Latin at Groton for years,” and she found it “mind-blowing.” Professor Jeremy Rutter “gave me the wake-up call of my life—and it didn’t feel good,” she recalls. “It wasn’t that I was inspired in an uplifting way by his words. I was made to feel that I was tremendously privileged to be there and to ask myself if I was going to make something of it.”

She looks back at her time in college as “a very quiet, focused academic life,” distinct from her youth in California and all that has followed. “For the first time I felt different,” she says. “I felt that I was, that my family was, new to the United States.” That sense of being something of an outsider on an historic campus was underscored when 20 members of her extended family, including her octogenarian grandfather, arrived in Hanover from California for her graduation. Unprepared for New Hampshire’s cold New England June, they embarrassed Tsakopoulos Kounalakis by wearing hastily purchased Dartmouth sweatshirts to the ceremony.

As a student Tsakopoulos Kounalakis spent nights watching TV in Robinson Hall. Her social life, she confesses, was terrible. She focused on studying and working on The Dartmouth. Her father sent her a dozen roses when she became the arts and leisure editor, a job nobody else wanted. For Tsakopoulos Kounalakis being named to the position was more than a thrill—it was the proudest moment of her life. Two decades later she recalls the satisfaction of overhearing students in the Hop chat about how much the arts section had improved. The engraved glass mug every editor receives is among the items she carried to Budapest. She decided not to pursue journalism, she says, for fear she’d “end up in South Carolina doing the police beat.”

Tsakopoulos Kounalakis makes no secret of relationships she’s cultivated since with many of Washington’s most powerful Democratic women including Secretary Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, fellow Greek-American Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), whose campaign Tsakopoulos Kounalakis supported from the West Coast. She’s spent hours on Pelosi’s living room sofa, she says, listening to the speaker’s stories and sharing her own. The last thing Tsakopoulos Kounalakis did before leaving California was have dinner with Feinstein.

The ambassador considers herself lucky to have these female role models. The concept of women helping women is her explanation of why so many of them showed up for her confirmation hearing—even after she protested that too many people would speak on her behalf and she didn’t want to take up everyone’s time.

At the swearing-in following her confirmation, Tsakopoulos Kounalakis’ father held the Bible on which she took her oath from Clinton, while Pelosi and Justice Kennedy stood by.

In her Szabadsag Ter (Freedom Square) office before hosting a reading for embassy women of a memoir about motherhood, Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, mother of sons Neo, 9, and Eon, 8, reflects on balancing career and family. “I can do this job, and I can still be there for my kids at night,” she says. “I don’t have to go to every single function if it’s going to harm my ability to parent,” she says. But she can’t do it all. This year their father was the first to meet their teachers, she says.

As a newcomer to Budapest Tsakopoulos Kounalakis is excited about the opportunities her diplomacy will provide her to make a difference. “I can honestly tell you there is a general lack of true understanding of what the U.S. State Department does,” she says. “What you learn very quickly is that we really are the good guys.” Careful to explain she does not refer to Hungary, but to the Eastern Europe region and the networks of U.S. missions around the world, she highlights the work of preventing human trafficking, cracking down on corruption and “stopping the unlawful flow of money that supports terrorist activities or unlawful business activities.” Diplomacy is also about affirmation, she says. Last winter the ambassador presented a Hungarian judge with the International Women of Courage Award to honor her advocacy for victims of domestic violence.

The English major is lyrical about America’s “remarkable capacity to change and renew and grow.” But if a journey from West Coast to East and back, and from West Coast to Eastern Europe is any indicator, the description also fits an individual who fuses business savvy with a zest for intercultural dialogue. Perhaps there is a kernel of the once-shy outsider left in her. She hasn’t returned her annual Green Card update to the College in years, she says, wondering what she would have to say.

Cynthia Marie O’Brien, a former DAM intern, teaches writing at Manchester (Connecticut) Community College.

Time magazine referred to Sandy Alderson ’69 as Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Dominican Republic “czar” in a July 26 piece. The former CEO of the San Diego Padres and executive vice president of baseball operations for MLB was tapped in March by commissioner Bud Selig to reform the league’s Dominican Republic operations—“baseball’s puppy mill,” according to Time—where young prospects are often exploited by local buscones (agents) who encourage steroid use and help perpetrate age and identity fraud. “We need to provide educational opportunities for players who have signed contracts,” said Alderson, who has instituted drug testing and fingerprinting for the top-40 unsigned prospects.

The violent deaths this past summer of two James P. Timilty Middle School students made former students such as Marzuq Muhammad ’05 question whether they could be doing more to help youngsters in their old Roxbury, Massachusetts, neighborhood, The Boston Globe reported. Muhammad used Timilty as a springboard to the private Noble and Greenough School and then Dartmouth, where he took part in the College’s Marshall Islands teaching program. Now when he’s not working as a senior research analyst for a commercial real estate firm in Boston, he teaches real estate design to Roxbury middle-school students and pitches in at an architectural workshop for local high school students. “This is an internal struggle I have. Have I turned my back on my community, especially when I heard about people like Steve Odom [one of the murder victims]?” said Muhammad, who wants to create a network of young professionals from his former neighborhood to mentor teens.

As a director of commercials Dan Rush ’92 once shot an ad in Toronto for Dell Computers. In September he returned to premiere his first feature film, Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rush adapted the film from Raymond Carver’s 1,500-word story “Why Don’t You Dance?” which he read as an undergrad. Rush told the Los Angeles Times he was intrigued by the question, “What do you do if everything in your life is stripped away? You’re at this crossroads when all you’re left with is who you are.”

High school chemistry teacher Karen Lewis ’74, the daughter of two Chicago public schools teachers, was elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union last June. “Our plans are to defend public education—that’s what it’s always been from the very beginning,” Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times following her victory by a 3-2 margin over leadership that had been in place nearly 40 years. “She will lead the union through the worst financial crisis since Mayor [Richard M.] Daley won control of the city’s public schools 15 years ago,” the Sun-Times noted. Lewis, who has called mayoral control of schools “an abomination” and a “failed experiment,” will soon work with a new mayor; Daley announced in September that he won’t seek a seventh term.

“I can’t remember a summer when I didn’t work on the [Parks Pond] campground,” Harearl “Buzzer” Moore ’88 told the Bangor Daily News in July. When he returned home in the early 1990s to help run the business his family opened in 1968 in Clifton, Maine, the golf enthusiast dreamed of building a golf course on its more than 450 acres. He began clearing the land around 1994 and built a nine-hole track with ­­­assistance from a small contractor, financing the project with the salary he made as an assistant headmaster at nearby Lee Academy. After opening Sawmill Woods Golf Course in 2004, Moore and his mother sold the campground to focus on running the golf facility. “It’s a fun course to play,” said Moore.

Following the death in 2007 of Betty Koop, his wife of 70 years, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop ’37 traveled to Philadelphia for the dedication of a church organ in her memory. While at the Tenth Presbyterian Church, Koop shook hands with Cora Hogue, the church’s longtime director of adult education. “We’ve known each other for years, but we passed as ships in the night,” Koop told the Valley News in June. After a long distance courtship Koop and the 69-year-old Hogue were married last April at the Philadelphia church and now live in Hanover.

Oh, Light, the latest album by Eric Lindley ’05, who records under the name Careful, was selected as a “Critic’s Choice” by The New York Times in July. The release comes from Sounds Super Recordings, a label owned by Rizwan Mahmud ’04.

Joe Mendes ’42 is on a mission, noted Wall Street Journal columnist Ralph Gardner last summer in an “Urban Gardner” column. For the past 30 years the former investment banker and Marine colonel has been helping to clean the Central Park drinking fountains as a volunteer with the Central Park Conservancy. Mendes, who served in the Pacific in World War II and trained and flew missions in the Korean War with baseball legend Ted Williams and astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, originally cleaned two dozen concrete drinking fountains on his route. All but two have crumbled and been replaced by metal fountains. But Mendes still can be spotted about once every three weeks at the reservoir’s south entrance, cleaning those two fountains with a can of Comet and three scrub brushes, including “a metal one that will get into the grooves,” he said. “People drinking out of the other fountain will look up and thank you for it.”

Career: Division chief, child abuse pediatrics, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas, 2006 to present; professor, University of Texas Health, San Antonio, 1998-present; founding medical director, Christus Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital Center for Miracles, San Antonio, 2006; opened San Antonio’s first child abuse center, 1988

Education: A.B., English (magna cum laude); M.D., University of Texas Health Science Center, 1985

Family: Lives in San Antonio with husband Dean Kellogg ’77, M.D.; mother of Dean, 21, Bernard, 18, and John, 16

“It’s nice to have a job where you can affect the safety and happiness of a child. When you find children who have been abused, there’s a lot of opportunity to make their
lives safer and their families more functional.”

“Child abuse is a problem that continues to be difficult to look at because of the emotional trauma and turmoil it brings.”

“I stumbled into my specialty because I wanted a 9-to-5 job—and a challenge.”

“My first job was working for some ophthalmologists in Houston. When I began to wonder if I could move into medicine, my husband encouraged me to dream big. Then we both got into medical school.”

“It takes an average of two years for a child to tell someone they’ve been abused. They have had some very convincing reasons not to tell. They’re afraid they’ll break up their family, be blamed, not be believed.”

“Abusers work very hard to make sure that kids blame themselves, because they know if they can get them to do that, they won’t tell. Kids who blame themselves don’t recover as well as those who understand eventually that it’s the other person’s fault.”

“Many children would rather continue to be abused and keep their families intact than stop the abuse and lose their families. It’s horrendous when a mom sides with the abuser and a child recants. Children lose everything when that happens.”

“I see myself as a myth buster. When I testify in court I try to teach jurors and judges, for example, not to expect to see physical evidence. The history from the child is most important, but people watch shows like CSI and think DNA is ubiquitous. They’re skeptical when real life is not what’s on TV.”

“I expect to be attacked personally in court. But the worst kind of experience I could have is getting off the stand and feeling I didn’t tell the jury all the information that’s important because the right questions weren’t asked.”

“Many young children have sexual behaviors that cause their parents to think they are being abused. Many times it’s reflective of what the children are seeing on TV or on their computers.”

“Teenagers seem to be less prepared than they used to be about how to make healthy choices. Everything they know about sex they learned from the Internet.”

“My sense is that there is better awareness of what to look for with child abuse. Pediatricians are asking questions during routine visits that weren’t asked 20 years ago. People are more willing to report what they see.”

“If children are a priority in your state, then you pay child protective service (CPS) workers what they deserve, and you lower their caseloads. That’s how you protect children—not by coming down on CPS for the mistakes they’ve made.”

“Sexual abusers are experts at deceiving people. They deceive children into sexual relationships, and they can just as well deceive adults into thinking they are innocent.”

“You hope you break the cycle. You also realize that intervention doesn’t always make a difference.”

“The kids I see are heroes. They are survivors. Their capacity for forgiving is unbelievable. They just want their lives back.”

“If I start to open my mouth about what I saw at work today, my husband rapidly changes the subject, so I leave it at work.”

“Seeing what I do has made me more grateful for being able to parent my own kids. Being able to go home and fix dinner and have normal conversations with them is something I will never take for granted.”

“I didn’t realize I had a severe hearing disability until Dick’s House sent me to an audiologist. Now I wear hearing aids. I apologize to all those people who thought I was a snob in college because I didn’t turn around when they called to me.”

If there’s one person who might change that, it’s likely to be David Spindler.

Spindler has been studying the Great Wall for more than a decade and is now one of the world’s preeminent scholars on the subject. “He knows more things about the wall than anybody else working in the English language,” says Pamela Crossley, a Dartmouth history professor who specializes in Chinese history. “Even in Chinese, there are only a couple of lifelong scholars who might know as much about the wall.”

Although Spindler has a master’s on top of his A.B. in Asian studies—and a law degree from Harvard—he does not have a Ph.D. and has never had an academic post. His expertise has been acquired from independent research funded by speaking engagements.

He’s more athletic and sinewy than many of his contemporaries, having spent a lot of time exploring the wall on foot, often hiking alone for days at a time and bushwhacking far from popular access points to visit sections of interest.

Through his work Spindler has challenged much of what is considered established knowledge about the wall. “Pretty much everything that is popularly known about it,” is a misconception, he says. For example, the wall is not actually a single structure but a series of walls and towers that are not continuous.

Then there’s the notion that we know the total length of the wall. “We don’t,” says Spindler.

The Chinese government last year released an estimate that the portion of the wall built by the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644) is 5,500 miles. That number is arguable, Spindler says, and does not take into account portions of the wall built by other dynasties.

The myth Spindler most adamantly challenges is that the wall was ineffective. “There’s the idea that the wall simply didn’t work,” he says. “I point to many mid-16th century raids by thousands of Mongols each. The Chinese were able to fend off the raids partly because they had the wall there.”

In asserting the effectiveness of the Great Wall Spindler is in conflict with most theory on the subject. “Historians have developed consensus that it was important as a symbol but did not have a lot of strategic significance,” says Crossley. “David is working against this.”

That he has garnered the respect of historians and was recently published in an academic journal is a testament to the depth of Spindler’s research. He has studied in 20 different libraries in various countries and estimates he’s read about 95 percent of what was written about the wall during the Ming Dynasty. “I set out to read everything there is that relates to the Ming Great Wall,” he says. “I think I’ve made a pretty good go of it.”

During more than 400 trips to the wall he has canvassed nearly every part of the structure in and around Beijing. He attributes his ability to sustain himself through these trips partially to his College days, when he skied cross-country and rowed crew. “There’s definitely a connection between the endurance sports and my interest in what I’m doing now,” he says. “My research trips are in many ways an endurance test.” Hiking the wall is not for the faint of heart. Spindler often treks off established trails, wearing a carefully crafted uniform of mountaineering boots, thick leather gloves and a safari hat. When he took a writer for The New Yorker magazine on a hike several years ago, the reporter broke his kneecap. It took the pair three hours to walk out to help.

Spindler describes characteristics of the wall in a matter-of-fact manner. His passion for his work is evident in his patience for teasing out the details. He can discuss, for example, how warriors along the wall used signals to send an alert of incoming raiders. He found this fact described in a single line in a text from 1460 and thinks he may be the first modern researcher to come across the information.

Spindler’s interest in the Great Wall began almost by chance. As an undergraduate looking to complete his language requirement, he wanted to take a non-Romance language, which left him with the choice of Russian or Chinese. “I somewhat randomly picked Chinese,” he says. He first visited Beijing, where he now lives with his wife and baby daughter, on the foreign study program during his sophomore summer.

His interest in China grew after graduation, when he went to Taiwan to study the language intensely. Several years later, completing his master’s in Chinese history at Peking University, he first went to the Great Wall.

A friend suggested they hike the wall to get out of Beijing. It was “for strictly recreational purposes,” Spindler says. “It was just a hike.”

He continued hiking for recreation until just before leaving China for Harvard in 1997, when he began to consider something more. “I thought that these experiences along the wall were worth writing about,” he says, so he started conducting research and learned that “very few people had written about the Great Wall.”

Today he spends most of his time working on a book and a photography project. Spindler collaborated with friend and law school classmate Jonathan Ball to put together a historically rigorous set of photos of the Great Wall. They shot pictures at important battle sites along the wall on the anniversaries, down to the hour if known, of those battles. It’s “as close to being there as possible in terms of light and vegetation,” says Spindler.

The project is on display in Palo Alto, California. For more information, go to www.jon-ball.com.

Spindler’s book will focus on the portion of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty. He wants to explain how the wall was used throughout history and hopes people will come to understand the wall not just as a symbol but also as a key part of Chinese defensive strategy.

That, others say, is Spindler’s key contribution to the field. “I think most people have taken the wall for granted,” Crossley says. “It’s one of the really charming aspects of David’s work. His approach is ‘what if we didn’t take this for granted?’ That is really kind of
astounding.”

Wall of Myths

Spindler says that despite common assumptions, none of the following statements about the Great Wall is true:

1. The wall can be seen from the moon with the naked eye.

2. The length of the wall is known.

3. The wall is the world’s longest graveyard because bodies of workers who died while constructing it were thrown into the construction site and buried.

4. The wall was an elevated highway used for moving men and materials

5. The wall is a single, continuous structure.

Betsy Q. Cliff is a journalist in Bend, Oregon.

Cheryl: “It’s funny being a Dartmouth mom because it is a lot different from an experience standpoint, but there’s so much that’s the same. It’s an easy campus to navigate, the feeling is familiar and the culture and values are still the same. It’s still Dartmouth.”

Rosa: “Oh, Mommy, I’m doing rush at KKG tonight.”

Cheryl: “That’s great! I was a Kappa as a junior when I was there. I heard you liked Tri-Delt too?”

Rosa: “Yeah, it was fun.”

Cheryl: “It’s so nice that there’s this immediate flow of information now from students to their parents. She can talk to me by cell or on Facebook and post pictures for me. I couldn’t do that with my mother. The benefits are that I’m not completely out of touch. She always feels she has a connection to home. And as an alum I can connect even more with what she tells me.”

Rosa: “I talked to her last night after a party and I was like, ‘Heorot has really nice bathrooms!’ And she was like, ‘Are we talking about the same Heorot?’ ”

Cheryl: “I was floored. I didn’t even know Heorot had bathrooms. Socially, things have changed a lot at Dartmouth. There were obviously fewer women and there were definitely fewer black women. One of the things I’ve seen as a parent is that there are a lot more black women visible in more activities. I think there was just one other black woman playing on the rugby team with me when I was there. Now no one thinks twice. There’s more of a variety of activities that they’re involved in. Cutter Hall was also a big hangout when I was there.”

Rosa: “I’ve never actually been, but some of my friends from Gospel Choir go. I get blitzes from there all the time. I know a lot of African Americans say, ‘There aren’t many of us on campus, it’s so difficult,’ but I think there’s a ton of people. In Gospel Choir and even on the rugby team there are a significant number of African Americans. I don’t really see any racial issues, and being half black and half white I’m very prone to look for them.”

Cheryl: “Yes, things have improved greatly in regard to race relations. Ro, you really should check out Cutter, though.”

Rosa: “I don’t have any time, Mom.”

Cheryl: “Sorry, I forgot. That’s another thing. Though we were busy, I don’t think we had quite so little time as the students now.”

Rosa: “I don’t know how I do it either. I work at Novak Café, I play rugby. I’m taking three courses and one has a lab, so that takes extra time. I’ll go out on Saturdays. Then I do Gospel Choir two nights and I’m on the Winter Carnival committee. I’ll usually do my homework in the morning or quite late at night.”

Cheryl: “My goodness. We just had classes and practices.”

Rosa: “I have to go, Mom. I need to iron my hair and then get to practice and then I have rush.”

Cheryl: “Good Lord, girl.”

Rosa: “Love you, Mommy!”

Martha and Margi
Born and raised in Alaska, Margi Dashevsky ’10 came a long way from home. But knowing that her mother, Martha Raynolds ’78, skied the same trails she did and studied in the same classrooms made Hanover a place as close to her heart as Fairbanks. “When my mom came to visit it was nice that it was a special place for her, too,” Margi says. They also share a love of the outdoors and a passion for the environment. Martha is an Arctic botanist who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks last year and Margi was an environmental studies major.

Margi: “I like to think of myself as an independent person. Then I realized after I came here that I’m pretty much following in my mom’s footsteps.”

Martha: “It’s great having a daughter with the same interests. She tells me what books to read and what the latest issues are. But Dartmouth isn’t the same place it was when I was there.”

Margi: “The Outing Club has changed a lot. I was a leader in Cabin & Trail. That’s a very gender-balanced group compared to some of the others. I think it was pretty gradual for the club as a whole to be more inclusive of women. My mom found a nicer community in the ski team.”

Martha: “There wasn’t a lot of interaction between the women’s and men’s teams. Ours was definitely second rate in terms of the equipment we had, but that was to be expected. I still found it more welcoming than the DOC.”

Margi: “I love skiing, but the ski team was too much of a commitment for me! It’s intense.”

Martha: “I could tell when I dropped Margi off for her freshman trip that the DOC is now a much more welcoming group. It does a great job of saying ‘We’re so glad you’re here and we’re happy to have you as a new friend,’ as opposed to, ‘This is the way it is—learn from us.’ Margi sent me a paper she wrote on the DOC that had some insights about it being more accepting of women, but there’s still a link between masculinity and doing things in the outdoors in regards to strength and endurance.”

Margi: “Yeah, there’s a mentality that if you’re not pushing yourself really hard, you’re not really climbing. And there’s little value in finesse and agility as opposed to brute strength. The climbing culture can be hyper-masculine at times.”

Martha: “The campus has also changed a lot in terms of dining and housing options. There are so many alternative places to eat now, and the students have more space and privacy in the dorms. I lived in the co-op house freshman year and then in a few apartments in town.”

Margi: “I lived off-campus, too, on the organic farm about a 15-minute bike ride north on Route 10. If you live there, you work on the farm. I also started the Sustainable Living Center with some friends freshman spring by knocking on a lot of administrators’ doors. It’s a dorm for 19 students that opened in 2008. In the first year residents reduced their electricity consumption by 58 percent. I hope it becomes more of a resource center, as well, because there’s so much to learn about all the inputs and outputs of a house and how to reduce our ecological footprint.”

Martha: “Even though we share a lot of the same interests, she’s faced with a lot of different issues. Margi is looking at a much different world than I did.”

Sheila and Sally
When Sheila (Kay) Cooper ’82 decided she wanted to go to her father’s alma mater, he was not exactly encouraging. “Dartmouth isn’t a place for women,” he told her. “It’s a manly place.” In fact, it still was in many ways, but Cooper was determined. Two decades later, when her own daughter was accepted, Sheila, now a project manager for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in Austin, and her dad, Gordon Kay ’52, were ecstatic. “My grandfather took me to dinner and said it would make him so proud and happy if I chose Dartmouth,” says Sally Cooper ’10, who lived in Panarchy, just down the hall from where Grandpa once slept. “I loved being in Hanover and walking across the Green, knowing that my mom and dad and grandfather walked the same paths. It’s made Dartmouth more of a spiritual place for me.”

Shelia: “When I went to Dartmouth there was a different feeling in regard to women on campus. My husband, Kent [Cooper ’82], says, ‘You girls wouldn’t even look at us!’ There were just too many men. It was overwhelming. And we were so busy just trying to be one of the guys. Someone joked that the only cleavage he ever saw at Dartmouth was when fat John would bend over to pick something up off the floor. It’s true. I remember my ‘going out’ outfit was a turtleneck with strawberries on it, a red sweatshirt, terrible jeans and red L.L.Bean duck shoes. Sally went to the frat basements in flip-flops. I was saying, ‘Oh, no!’ ”

Sally: “I know. I’m from Austin, though, and I just can’t wear normal shoes. But I did start wearing Uggs to the frats.”

Sheila: “In my senior year we established the first sorority house [Sigma Kappa, now Sigma Delta]. The national ladies bought us really fancy furniture—velvet settees and French Colonial pieces. Our reaction was, ‘This is sooo not going to work here.’ We put plastic all over everything. It was not a good thing. The ladies were disgusted by us. Sigma Kappa girls at other colleges wore pantyhose to football games, and we Dartmouth girls didn’t even own skirts. I had one dress for formals, just one.”

Sally: “I had a dress for every night of the week. People wear things out to frat basements now that you’d see at the nicest club in New York. They wear elaborate outfits with a lot of jewelry and the right shoes. Even the boys wear button-down shirts. Dartmouth has become really fashionable.”

Sheila: “I hated those big weekends when girls would come up from the girls’ schools and sleep in our common areas. And all the fraternities would road trip to their schools. A lot of the guys married girls from Colby Sawyer and Wellesley. There just weren’t enough of us to go around. Another thing that’s changed is that when I went to Dartmouth I didn’t even know what a gay person was, and now Sally’s best friends are gay.”

Sally: “About half of my male friends are openly gay. And I was in a gender studies class called ‘Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes and Will & Grace.’ ”

Sheila: “The he-men of Dartmouth are turning over.”

Sally: “Being gay now at Dartmouth is not a stigma at all. One of my friends came out at Theta and all the guys were so supportive. Even in my queer marriage class we had a lot of straight guys. It’s awesome that the campus has become so accepting.”

Sheila: “It was so different when I was there. We still had the Indian mascot. It was very conservative.”

Sally: “I like that my mom knows Dartmouth so well. She even knew about the fog cutter parties at Bones Gate. She was like, ‘Stay away!’ And I was like, ‘That’s my favorite.’ ”

Sheila: “Or that nasty punch at Phi Delt.”

Sally: “Phi Delt rocks!”

Sheila: “I do wish I had taken more advantage of the cultural things to do up there. Sally, you did a better job of keeping up with that than I did.”

Sally: “Yeah, I even bought a Film Society pass.”

Sheila: “I just wanted her to be able to experience everything that’s there.”

Ellen, Paula and Karen
Twins Paula and Karen Sen ’10 had no desire to go to Dartmouth, and they especially didn’t want to go to college together. They did apply to humor their mother, however, and Dimensions Weekend (for accepted students) convinced them otherwise. They decided to follow in the footsteps of mom Ellen (Sullivan) Sen ’77 after all. An engineer with General Electric who lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, Ellen recalls a very different Dartmouth than her daughters experienced. “We felt the hostility so we had to be somewhat courageous, ” she says, “but most of the guys in my class wanted us there—and more of us.”

Ellen: “I was in the second freshman class of women at Dartmouth, and we were very aware that we were the outsiders. I had a rock thrown through my second-floor window at Mid Mass. We dressed like lumberjacks to fit in. We even kept ‘Men of Dartmouth’ because we wanted to be very respectful of the traditions.”

Karen: “My mom is a different breed. She’s a real saint. She can really get along with anyone and doesn’t let too much bother her. She was also very busy, majoring in engineering, so she was studying a lot and didn’t get caught up in the social scene.”

Paula: “Our mom also has four brothers, so she was really comfortable hanging with the guys and not as shocked by their antics as much as some other girls might have been.”

Ellen: “There was a 9-to-1 ratio. And, boy, you knew it when you went to the dining hall. But I found it to be a challenge and kind of fun. You could get a lot of attention if you wanted it.”

Karen: “Who wouldn’t like that ratio?”

Paula: “It’s even now, but I think it’s still a male-dominated campus in the sense that most of the social events are at fraternities. I really like the guys here. I think some guys are still sexist and it’s unfortunate, but….”

Karen: “…It’s certain individuals, not the guys as a whole.”

Paula: “Right. And it’s also a product of the campus being so small that anything you see or say or hear comes back over and over. It’s like high school in that sense.”

Ellen: “It was like high school then, too, with some of the stupid jokes the guys would play on the girls. I remember one time the guys from Theta Delt sang about us for a competition on the steps of Thayer. One line was something like, ‘Our co-hogs go to bed alone…,’ and the dean of the college gave them first prize. You just had to laugh.”

Karen: “The campus now goes a long way to bring men and women together to talk about gender issues. This isn’t my mom’s Dartmouth. It’s far, far different. She came up for the ‘35 years of coeducation’ weekend in 2007 and one panel talked about it still being a sexist place. But listening to the women who were here 35 years ago, it’s clear we have come a long way.”

Paula: “Are we getting better? Yes, we are. And at the end of the day we’re all good people who mean well.”

Ellen: “The spirit of Dartmouth has never changed. I remember when I got married to my husband all my friends from Dartmouth were at one table and his friends from Harvard were at another. Inevitably, they started singing college songs. At the Dartmouth tables everyone knew all the words and they were really into it. The Harvard people just couldn’t compete.”

Paula: “Since my mom loved it here so much we actually didn’t want to go. It was ‘her’ school. We didn’t want to follow in her footsteps. We came to visit kicking and screaming. Then we both ended up loving it. I think everyone would agree that Dartmouth does a really good job of selling Dartmouth.”

Ellen: “It was a nice surprise. They were really sold on the spirit.”

Karen: “I actually have an entry in my diary from second grade when Mom brought us up in 1997 for a reunion, which we hated. Everything is spelled wrong. I wrote, ‘Right now I’m sitting on a bed at Dartmath. The beds are uncomforble and the food is yucky. I don’t want to go to collage here.’ ”

Ellen: “She has it framed on her wall now. It’s so cute.”

Paula: “Now we love everything about Dartmouth, and the prospect of not being here next year is completely depressing.”

Lillian and Adelaide
Choosing to spend her winter quarter on a foreign study trip to New Zealand demonstrates that Adelaide Giornelli ’12 “is a very smart girl from the South,” says her mother Lillian (Cousins) Giornelli ’82, the director of a charitable foundation in Atlanta. “She figured out a way to get two summers in one year.” Indeed, adjusting to the frigid temperatures of Hanover wasn’t easy for the Georgia native, but she’s quickly adapted—just as easily as her mother did 30 years ago.

Adelaide: “I knew Dartmouth was a good school, but at first I didn’t want to follow my mom because we’d gone to the same high school and grew up in the same town. I also didn’t want to go because she brought me to Homecoming when I was in fourth grade and I just remember being terrified of this enormous fire and all these insane people running around. Then I came up for the Dimensions program and changed my mind. It’s pretty cool being here now. We have a nice shared experience to talk about.”

Lillian: “Even in my day there was a diverse community, so being from the South didn’t make me feel too much like a fish out of water. But whenever I’d walk down the hall of my dorm and say I was ‘fixin’ to go to dinner’ I got a lot of strange looks.”

Adelaide: “Yeah, people freak out when I say ‘y’all.’ They don’t really understand. People aren’t really sure what to do with that. But I don’t really have much of an accent, do I?”

Lillian: “You do run into people who have preconceived misconceptions about people who come from the South. I got asked a lot of questions about whether I had electricity or plumbing. I’m not sure how much that’s changed.”

Adelaide: “People know I have plumbing, Ma!”

Lillian: “Adelaide has an even broader group of friends—more coed than my friends were. I lived in an all-female hall. Adelaide’s dorms have been completely coed. I didn’t join a sorority. I was on the rugby team. There are so many more options now with women’s groups and varsity teams and club teams. And more social activities. I’m glad that’s available for her now.”

Adelaide: “I’m definitely not strong enough to play rugby. I play Ultimate Frisbee and I pledged Sigma Delt last fall and I’m in the Rockapellas. Am I much busier than you were, Mom?”

Lillian: “From the outside looking in it seems like there is so much more to do. In particular the opportunity for volunteerism has dramatically expanded. The Tucker Foundation didn’t have a huge presence when I was there. There’s a lot more opportunity to do more service in the community. And these kids now grow up being overscheduled, so they’re used to a lot of activities. Everything was much less complicated when I was young. I didn’t start thinking about college or going on a visit until my senior fall in high school. And I think all my friends would say, because of the quality of the kids applying, we wouldn’t get into Dartmouth today.”

Adelaide: “I would have waited too if I could have, but my mom was freaking out. I tried not to pay attention to the pressure. My high school was pretty competitive, and there was a point when everyone was talking about the SATs and ACTs. No one could shut up about it. And when one person would get into college, everyone would find out and talk about it. I didn’t even know where I wanted to go, though. I think I gave my mother a couple of gray hairs.”

Lillian: “The students now are more wildly enthusiastic about being there, too. The thing that’s so funny to me about Dartmouth today is this concept of flair. I’ve never been up there and not seen two-thirds of the students in some form of costume.”

Adelaide: “Mom, that was Homecoming. It’s just on big weekends where people go a little crazy. Mom came up with two of her best friends and they told me stories about her that she’d never told me before. It was a lot of fun. I hope I stay as close to my friends from here as my mom has with hers.”

Lillian: “You know we can all talk about what a great education you get at Dartmouth and agree on that, but it’s the bonds that get made in those four years in Hanover that mean the most to me. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Adelaide is there and building those same strong relationships with a core group of friends who will stay in her life beyond college. There’s that Dartmouth tie that binds, and it is a wonderful thing.”

Jennifer Wulff is a freelance writer who lives in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her daughter, Bailey, is a potential candidate for the class of 2029.

]]> http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/%e2%80%9cthis-isn%e2%80%99t-my-mother%e2%80%99s-dartmouth%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/after-the-crash/ http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/after-the-crash/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:10:05 +0000 suejenks http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/?p=10797 It’s what passes for good news in the modern era: In December the Obama administration announced that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout known as TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) would cost $200 billion less than expected. That afternoon Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ’83 told me, “You’re going to see there are substantial risk of losses still ahead although a fraction of what we initially estimated.” Hooray?

Earlier that day I had spent some time with Geithner’s predecessor, Henry M. “Hank” Paulson ’68, who led the charge for TARP, going so far as to comically get on his knees before congressional leaders to beg them to get a deal done. The bald, bespectacled Paulson is lean and energetic, with the pinky finger on his left hand mangled from a Dartmouth football injury. (As a senior he received the New England Football Coaches Award as Offensive Lineman of the Year; in 2000 he endowed the football coaching position in honor of his coach, Bob Blackman.) Geithner and Paulson follow in the footsteps of legendary Treasury Secretary and member of the Dartmouth class of 1826 Salmon P. Chase, who eventually became chief justice of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that either Geithner or Paulson will follow that path.

Having joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, where he amassed a fortune, Paulson left the financial organization where he was chairman and CEO in 2006 to become the 74th secretary of the Treasury. His was a stormy tenure—not because President George W. Bush lacked confidence in him, as had been the case with Paulson’s two predecessors Paul O’Neill and John Snow—but because of the financial meltdown that occurred on his watch.

We met on a chilly and bright December morning in his new office at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., where Paulson is a distinguished visiting fellow, and where he was putting the finishing touches on his book, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, and working on what he calls his “passion,” environmental conservation.

Do you feel responsible for not having seen more indicators that a major economic collapse was coming?
When I came to Washington I thought there was a high likelihood there would be turmoil in the capital markets and I communicated that to the president and to [Federal Reserve Chair Ben] Bernanke and others. And although we worked to get prepared, I did not see the housing bubble as precipitating it, and then for a good while as it unfolded I underestimated the severity of the problem that was coming. But I also look at it and say that if I’d been omniscient we still couldn’t have got the powers we got any quicker. In other words, I started working on Fannie and Freddie reform from the day I arrived in Washington, and it took the impending failure of those two institutions to get the authorities [we needed at Treasury]. And with TARP, even in the height of the crisis it was difficult getting the powers that we needed.

Who’s to blame for the crisis?
There’s a lot to go around. One of the basic root causes that led to the excesses are the big global economic imbalances that have come with structural differences in the economy. Governments have been looking at these for a long time. The United States saves not nearly enough; it borrows too much. Other parts of the world save too much and don’t consume, so we have big, structural imbalances. [Others to blame include] obviously the financial institutions and their huge excesses; investors, in terms of not being disciplined and having enough diligence; the rating agencies; the government itself that came up with structures like we had for Fannie and Freddie; regulators who could have been more vigilant. It’s very difficult, if you want to be fair, to point the finger at any one group.

So you feel proud of the steps that you, as Treasury secretary, took to deal with the financial crisis?
I am very grateful that I was there, that during this collision of politics and markets—there couldn’t have been a worse time in terms of an election—we were able to navigate the minefields and do what needed to be done. There are a good number of things around the edges that I wish we’d done differently, but I think in terms of the major steps that were taken I’m proud of what was done. I think we avoided a major collapse of the system, which would have been really catastrophic.

When White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asked you to be Treasury secretary you pushed back. For a long time you didn’t want to do it. You even suggested somebody else’s name. Looking back today do you regret taking the job?
No, I don’t. It was an extraordinary time. It was very difficult. I am really pleased I had the opportunity because I think it made a difference. So I was glad I was Treasury secretary. And I’m really glad I’m not Treasury secretary anymore.

It was a position that President Bush had trouble filling to his satisfaction.
Right.

Your predecessors were not well regarded within the Bush administration. Do you now feel any sympathy for the O’Neills and Snows of the world?
It is very important to build strong relationships when you come to Washington. Starting with the president I had an understanding, but I knew that understanding would not be worth much if I didn’t build a relationship of trust with him. And I knew that was on me, not on the president. I had a career where even when I was running Goldman Sachs I was advising clients and principals, so I knew how to work with a principal, and I had an opportunity to build relationships with the president, with Ben Bernanke, with other Cabinet secretaries, with the leadership of the House and the Senate, people on both sides of the aisle. And I went right to work on that, and I think that paid big dividends when the crisis came.

Whom did you recommend for Treasury to Bolten?
I’m not going to say—and it’s not in my book.

You and the current Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, have an excellent relationship?
Absolutely.

And you wanted him to be your deputy when you were at Treasury?
Right. But he had a very important job [at the New York Federal Reserve Board] and thought he could be more useful there. Still, we worked closely together.

You’re a Republican and he is a Democrat. Was that a difficult dynamic?
That was not an issue. That president had told me when I came to Washington that I’d be able to choose people for the key jobs at Treasury and that politics wasn’t going to be part of it. I actually didn’t know what Tim’s political party was.

Is the Treasury in good hands with him there?
I think it’s in excellent hands. Would I maybe have done some things differently? Of course, but I think what’s been done are logical extensions of what we did earlier, and my book On the Brink is—although it spends a lot of time on my thinking and the team at Treasury—more than anything else a story of teamwork and of three men—Ben, Tim and me—who complemented each other in terms of our skills and absolutely trusted each other and really worked very closely together on a crisis.

When you and Geitner first met and bonded was Dartmouth a part of that at all?
It was a very small part of it. I got to know him when he was president of the New York Fed, and we were working on issues and problems surrounding credit default swaps. And I just was very impressed with his intellect and his judgment and the way he tackled problems.

Do you think that there’s some reason the current and previous Treasury secretaries are Dartmouth graduates?
[Laughter] I think it’s interesting. You know, I love Dartmouth, and more broadly I love liberal arts colleges and universities in the United States. As someone who hired from all over the world when I ran a financial institution and, again, I know that we have problems in our secondary education, big problems in this country, but liberal arts education—where people are trained to question, to think, to express themselves orally, to express themselves in writing—is a great background. And I found that there’s just nothing like the students who come out of these colleges for a whole range of things.

Do you think there’s anything special, particularly, about Dartmouth?
Of course I do. I think Dartmouth is the largest and one of the very best institutions that’s focused primarily on undergraduate education. I had great faculty, got to know them personally, and it was just a very special school.

You ended up having a very good working relationship with Democrats in Congress, but my understanding is that the White House told you not to compromise on Fannie-Freddie legislation.
One of the first major tests that I had in my relationship with the president was in November of 2006, when I wanted to compromise with the Democratic side of the aisle…

…who had just won Congress.
Who’d just won, and there was a division of opinion. I took it to the president and he said, “This is why you’re here, Hank. You go work with them.” And our team worked out some agreements with Barney [Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee], and I believe those early agreements really set the stage for the success we ultimately had.

Is there anything that could have been done differently with Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy in September 2008?
We tried very hard, but we didn’t have the authority to put capital into Lehman Brothers until we got TARP. Even if the Fed could have found a legal way to make a loan, it would have been foolhardy because it would have been lending into a run—Lehman Brothers had a big capital hole and a liquidity problem, and we didn’t have a buyer for them as we did with Bear Stearns.

So there’s nothing that could have been done?
Yeah. We couldn’t find anything.

TARP certainly isn’t the most popular legislation in the United States. Do you think in retrospect there were not enough strings attached?
I could maybe phrase the question the other way around. When I went to Congress and sought those extraordinary powers that we needed, we ended up with various oversight bodies. We had the Governmental Accountability Office there permanently. We had the inspector general at Treasury. We had a new [U.S.] inspector general. We had a congressional oversight body. We had the financial stability oversight body. The number of strings attached was extraordinary.

I remember up at the Hill negotiating it and sitting around the table with a bunch of congressmen and senators and saying, “Who believes that we should have five different oversight bodies?” No one believed it, but everybody wanted their own. I think we got plenty of oversight and we got the flexibility we needed. Thank God we had the flexibility to put capital into the banks.

But when those AIG bonuses came out in early 2009 the American people were shocked that the same people who helped cause this horrible crisis were able to get these multi-million-dollar payoffs, some of which were coming from the taxpayer.
Right. You know, compensation was something we talked about very directly and negotiated with Congress. And I understood how politically sensitive it was, but the biggest concern we had was to have something that would work and would prevent the collapse of the system. And the balance we needed to strike was to say—and remember, we were looking at illiquid asset purchase programs—how do we come up with a set of restrictions and guidelines that allowed for broad participation by healthy institutions so they wouldn’t be stigmatized?

It was the same with the banks, because the way it tends to work in a crisis is every institution will say, “We don’t have a problem,” until they do, and then it comes very suddenly. In some ways it’s the tallest midget syndrome, you know, and they will shrink their balance sheets and hoard their capital. And so we needed a program that would let a maximum number of institutions participate. So I see the tradeoff.

The other side of the coin is with the banks. I believed there would have been up to 3,000 banks participating. But when that got stigmatized, we ended up with almost 700 banks participating, and we had banks withdraw. There were many banks that could have used this capital, and the country would be in better shape today if they had, but they pulled back. You see my point that there’s a tradeoff when you say, “Okay, here’s the program, and if you really need capital you’re going to come, but here are the restrictions that go with it.”

And executives make $200,000 a year, not $2 million.
Yeah, and then what you’ll do is you’ll have a program like some of the Europeans had that when a bank gets ready to fail, you can nationalize it or you can put in a lot of capital. We were trying to do something different. We were trying to design a program where you would get maximum participation. Now I understand the other side of that, I really do. With a couple of major institutions that have serious problems there’s a huge concern and a huge public concern, rightfully so, about compensation. But the sad facts are that if we stigmatize these institutions the people who will be hurt are the same people who are angry, because if you have an institution that can’t pay what it takes to keep the best people, the odds of paying the government back also decline.

As a Republican, how weird was it to see House Republicans sink that first TARP bill—and watch the market crash?
You know, we in this country don’t like bailouts, and thank God we don’t. I’ve looked at polls where 93 percent of the people opposed TARP and something over 60 percent were afraid of having something worse than a serious recession. So they never made the connection, and I never was successful in convincing people that this wasn’t being done for Wall Street and that there was really a connection between the banks collapsing and having serious problems on Main Street. So that just wasn’t done.

Was it your job to convince the nation?
Well, there are a lot of people who have tried. We have a president today who’s a pretty good communicator, yet I’m not sure the nation’s convinced on that topic. But we didn’t make that sale. I felt that what we were doing was putting aside policy principles in order to maintain the market system.

You are not a big “government intervention” guy.
No, but we needed to do it, because I so clearly saw the nature of the crisis. But it was otherworldly for me to be on the phone with congressman after congressman and have them lecture me about free market principles and then say to them, “But don’t you understand?” A lot of them did understand or they’d say to me, “Well, I’ll pray for you,” but they were going to vote the way they were going to vote. It’s a funny thing—the farther I get removed from this the more I look back positively; that it got done and Congress did act in an election year before the system collapsed. It was pretty extraordinary. At the time I wasn’t nearly as charitable in my own thinking. I just thought, “Can’t people see what’s happening?”

In Vanity Fair, you were quoted as saying you thought some of the questions asked at hearings were “idiotic.”
That’s right. It’s a good thing I didn’t say it there. There wasn’t much levity.

Is it true you got on your knees to beg Nancy Pelosi to get a deal done?
Yeah, that’s right. That was actually me trying to break a moment of tension because—well, one of the most bizarre events I ever participated in was the Cabinet meeting when the two presidential candidates came back [to Washington, D.C., at the end of September 2008, during the thick of the campaign].

It would have been easy for one of them to demagogue you.
One of the critically necessary ingredients was having both presidential candidates back TARP. One of the more interesting things my book shows is that I had regular communication with both of them. But based upon some of the things that were said on the campaign trail, I didn’t take it as a given that either presidential candidate was going be supporting it. And I didn’t take it as a given that when [GOP candidate Sen.] John McCain came back he was going to be supporting TARP.

Did you vote for McCain?
I tell a lot in my book, but that’s one thing I don’t disclose. I’ll say this: I was very grateful and I continue to be to both candidates for not attacking TARP, for being supportive, particularly near the end as McCain was falling behind. That was a gnawing worry on my mind the whole time. When I watched the presidential debates I did so with my heart in my throat.

There have been some nasty and personal attacks against you. It’s easy to say, “Well, it comes with the job,” but doesn’t it hurt sometimes?
Of course it hurts sometimes, and if this had taken place during any sort of a normal tenure at Treasury I would have been much more sensitive to it. But these were extraordinary times. And the attacks really didn’t come until I went to the Hill and said, “If we don’t get TARP, we’re going to be in a serious problem.”

What would have happened?
It would have been much worse. I understood why the American people were angry, and I viewed the attacks as a reflection of that anger. I’m also very mindful and very understanding of why people are angry, because there’s been tremendous destruction of wealth and economic pain and hardship. If we’d had one more institution go down there would have been a domino effect. To see double-digit unemployment today, with just Lehman going down and the financial system freezing, and for me to understand what would have happened if we’d had $3.5 trillion of money market funds blow up or some of the things that could have happened if we didn’t act—I am convinced we staved off absolute disaster.

If TARP hadn’t passed, would unemployment be even worse?
Just look at how difficult it is to repair the economy right now. When you’re in a period like this, I don’t care if it’s a small company or a big company, you have a CFO saying to the chief executive officer, “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to fund our working capital,” and, you know, working capital—there’s your payroll, your accounts receivable, your inventory. And so they all immediately start cutting inventory and then jobs and it is a very vicious cycle.

If AIG had gone down it would have been a multiple of the impact you saw with Lehman, and it would have taken down a good part of the rest of the financial system with it. The degree of concentration we have in our financial system, in my judgment, is a real problem. We have today 10 institutions that hold approximately 60 percent of the financial assets. In 1990 there were 10 that held about 10 percent. So you get a couple of these institutions going down and it’s a real problem.

Should there not be any organizations that are too big to fail?
Well they are as big as they are, so the key question is how do you regulate them and how do you have the proper authorities and tools in place so you can let them fail without taking down the rest of the system? This is something that Ben and I had talked with Congress about before Lehman went down. We saw we needed these powers. There’s no way we could get them, and the president and current Treasury secretary still haven’t gotten them. But I believe that with the right tools no institution needs to be too big to fail. You just need the power to unwind them outside of bankruptcy.

So you support the Obama administration’s push for new authorities?
We recommended it. It is, you know, our blueprint. I was recommending this in June of 2008.

What would you like to have done differently in your tenure?
Not send a three-page outline of the TARP legislation to Congress at midnight. You know, we should have done that at a press conference and explained what it was: a three-page outline. It wasn’t supposed to represent the complete request or something that was not to be changed. Congress had said, “Don’t give us a fait accompli,” but by sending it that way we made the legislative process more difficult.

Because it looked like a big power grab?
Yeah. I also wish I had been able to communicate more effectively and clearly why we needed to do what we needed to do and why this was not for the big banks but for the American people, and what the connection was between the need to rescue the banking system and how important that was for jobs and in people’s lives. At the time I was feeling very bad about it. But as I look back now I think the things we got wrong are primarily around the edges, and that the major things we got right.

Washington was a weird world for you to enter after a lifetime spent in the world of finance. There is a lot of posturing in this town. Did this surprise you?
No. I came to Washington in June of 1970. Right out of Dartmouth I worked for John Ehrlichman [counsel and assistant to the president for domestic affairs under President Richard Nixon]. I went to Harvard Business School, then I worked at the Pentagon and on the Lockheed Loan Guarantee. I went to the White House in April of 1972 and I left in December of 1973. So I was there during Watergate. Despite that, if I hadn’t been in Washington earlier, if I hadn’t walked over from the White House to meet with George Shultz when he was Treasury secretary, I would not have made the decision to come down and serve the country in July of 2006. My mom told me, and I don’t remember this, that when I left Washington I said to her, “I’m going to come back some day as Treasury secretary.”

Because George Shultz was somebody you respected?
Well yes, obviously, but I had worked on a lot of the economic and tax issues and I thought I’d gained a lot from my country and I didn’t want to look back when I was 70 and say I was asked to serve and had refused.

You were an offensive lineman at Dartmouth. What can you say about offensive linemen?
They have to eat dirt, you know. They labor in the trenches. And they’re good team players. I like to hire and work with people who’ve played on teams and competed, whether you were a good player or whatever. My Dartmouth football experience was a great one, and not just because we did well and won a lot of games. Many of the players who played with me have gone on to become doctors or lawyers. They’re outstanding professionals.

The pinky finger on your left hand looks mangled—is that a football injury from your Dartmouth days?
Yeah. I’ve forgotten which game, but on one play this finger went out this way. This other one, that way. The team doctor pulled them out, put some tape around them and sent me right back out there. When the swelling went down we could tell they were dislocated.

Do you keep up with the football team and Coach Teevens?
I don’t as much as I should. You know, I enjoyed my football experience at Dartmouth and I really, really appreciate it. I’d rather see Dartmouth win, but I’m not one of these guys that gets all obsessed with it.

You didn’t major in economics.
No. I was an English major and I was, as a matter of fact, going to go to Oxford and study English if it hadn’t been for the Vietnam War. I loved English. I planned to major in English and math, but after about my seventh or eighth math course I realized I wasn’t going to be a math major. I took several economics courses. They did not resonate with me. As a matter of fact, I didn’t particularly like them. I liked almost all my other courses and the professors.

Was there any class or professor at Dartmouth that you’ve carried with you and served as a source of comfort or inspiration during the crisis?
I had some really good experiences with professors. But there wasn’t one class that stands out. I wish I could say to you, “Boy, I thought back on microeconomics [during the financial crisis] and that was the answer.” Basically I found economists were pretty much worthless during this thing. Now, that’s an overstatement—Bernanke’s skill as an economist and practical skill and knowledge of economic history was incredibly valuable. But the economic models were worthless. The economist’s ability to predict what was going to happen when we were in the middle of a crisis was just…

Very few of them saw it coming.
Yeah.

Have you been following at all any of the College governance wars or lawsuits?
I don’t want to talk about it. I was very supportive of the Wright administration, and I support the new president. I’ve talked to him a couple of times on the phone and I’m very encouraged. I believe it’s a college that was very good when I got there and it’s continued to get better and better. So I’m not part of this group of people that is finding fault with the College. I just look at the product.

Were you in a fraternity?
Yes, SAE. But I didn’t spend a lot of time there, and I never lived there. It was more like a social club, and it was a positive experience, but my nickname was “The Phantom” because they didn’t see me a lot.

Why did you go to Dartmouth?
I thought I wanted to go east. I was recruited by Bob Blackman and I went up and visited. There was the Dartmouth Skiway—and I loved skiing. I like hiking and canoeing, and there was the Outing Club and fishing and all of those good things. I was very interested in having an undergraduate experience where I would have a close relationship with the faculty.

How did your daughter Amanda ’97 like Dartmouth?
She chose it because she likes the winter mountain climbing and all the Outing Club things and so on. Her friends were people that my son called “granolas,” you know, and she loved it and it was just a great experience for her.

Your faith is important to you. You’re a Christian Scientist.
Yes, you know, prayer has been consistently effective for physical healing and I’ve relied on it. That really didn’t enter into [the financial crisis]. It was much more praying for humility, to take ego out of it, praying for insight and judgment and wisdom—that’s where the faith and the religion was important.

You spoke to Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum while you had a stomach virus…
Well, it wasn’t. He thought it was a stomach virus. I’ll say something: I didn’t miss a single day or an hour because of illness, and I worked around the clock for two and a half years.

What was it—nerves?
All my life, if I’m really exhausted—it doesn’t happen much—I will have dry heaves. When I was seeing Purdum I had been in Asia [for a quick trip]. I was working. I got off the plane at 2 in the morning. I was in the office a few hours later working and I just had a bout of the dry heaves.

When is our economy going to be back to where it was?
I’m not an economist. I just don’t know. I know the financial system is stable.

But the lending is not happening.
Yeah, for two reasons. There’s a demand side, okay. Then there are the financial institutions. You cannot go through what we’ve gone through with the amount of wealth destruction that has taken place with a reset that we’ve had on valuation with real estate, and when you look at the number of homes where the mortgages are worth more than the homes, it’s just going to take a good while to work through that. I think the trajectory is going to be positive. My view is very similar to what you’ve heard many economists state, that you’ll get GDP growth well ahead of employment growth. When you start to get employment growth, getting real wage growth is going to be tricky.

Do you think President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package has been effective?
I haven’t really studied it to know. But, you know, I believe it has clearly had some impact.

You were at Goldman for quite some time. Do you look back at the behavior of some of your colleagues, competitors, other Wall Street titans with anger?
I’ve got to say that some of the things I witnessed and some of the problems I saw made me angry. The lack of controls, some of the risks that were taken; very, very sloppy behavior. I look back much more with sadness because, you know, I’m someone who believes in capital markets. They are responsible, to a large extent, for the fall of the Iron Curtain, for hundreds of millions of people coming out of poverty, for great advances in this country.

I look at it and I say, “How were we all part of this thing?” and I’m using a “we” broadly. First of all, we had a regulatory structure that hadn’t been changed dramatically since the Great Depression. Now that may be a bit of an overstatement, but I’ve got to tell you, it was a patchwork quilt, duplicative, unproductive—look at this growth of these complicated instruments, which led to excessive complexity. Like I said before, there’s a lot of blame to go around.

Your party is going through some sort of process right now—a rejiggering ?
Yeah, I would say that.

Tea partiers—not big fans of yours, those guys.
Yeah, to put it mildly. Appealing to populism, fear and hatred on either side of the aisle is something that disturbs me. I’m not that partisan and I very much respect people who are reasonable, who are moderate. When you have politicians who are not going to compromise on their principles it’s alarming, and you get divisiveness, not solutions.

Let’s touch on China. You feel strongly we need to be partners with the Chinese.
One of the things that I appreciate the most about my opportunity at Treasury was the opportunity to create the strategic economic dialogue. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not timid, and I think the Chinese appreciate strength. There’s not much that’s really difficult or important to get done in the world today that isn’t going to be much, much easier to get done if we can work with and reach common ground with China. And I believe the way to do that is through aggressive, robust engagement.

How do you want history to judge you?
I’ve always been proud of my character and the fact that I don’t leave anything in the tank. I give 100 percent. And I’ve also had a multifaceted career and I’ve done a fair amount in the conservation area, which is how I’m going to spend the next 10 years.

What might be the headline of your obituary?
“Was Treasury Secretary During the Biggest Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression and Worked with Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner to Successfully Prevent a Collapse of the Financial System. Worked with Limited Tools to Prevent It.” Since I believe those are the facts I don’t see that as disputable by reasonable people who understood what was going on.

Jake Tapper is the senior White House correspondent for ABC News. He is a regular contributor to DAM.

Chapin opened the Canoe Club in late 2003 and has since filled its walls with Dartmouth ephemera: a 1952 Winter Carnival Poster, turn-of-the-century copper plate class prints and an original graduation invitation, with envelope, for the class of 1884, among others. He’s also become close with local alums, including Chuck Sherman ’66, with whom he plays poker. And he’s joined a local committee of citizens dedicated to raising money for the Hopkins Center.

In spite of Chapin’s increasing involvement with the College community, he had no idea what the four class of 1966ers were talking about.

The punch line to this four-men-walk-into-a-bar joke is that it was the first Chapin had even heard of Dartmouth’s adoption practice. The alums didn’t ask in advance if he was interested in joining their class. They just announced to him that he was in.

“I’m not sure of the mechanics of it—maybe they’d all had an extra glass of wine—but they decided it’d be a great idea to have me as an honorary class member,” Chapin says. “I have to admit—it was around 5 o’clock, and I was preparing for the dinner rush—it wasn’t until about an hour after they left that I even thought about what they said. It was so out of context.”

In joining the class of 1966 Chapin became one of the 156 living Dartmouth alumni who did not actually matriculate at the College. He and his fellow adopted alums receive no real Dartmouth diplomas, nor do they walk with their respective classes at graduation. The majority never took even a single course at Dartmouth, n0n-recording option or otherwise. Yet they attend reunions and receive class mailings and DAM. Sixty-seven percent of living adopted alums have contributed at least once to the Dartmouth College Fund, and many pay class dues. Within a month of his initiation, for example, Chapin had already been solicited for, and paid, his dues. “I’ll pay of course, now that I’m a member of the class and live in the Upper Valley. I just made it clear to them—no free meals, guys!” he says.

Chapin admits to feeling surprised at the decision to adopt, of all people, him. “You’d think that an honorary class member would need a Nobel or Pulitzer for consideration,” he says. Although that may be the case for most honorary degree recipients, adopted alumni are a different story altogether.

Upon graduation most classes draft a constitution to obtain nonprofit tax status. Each constitution includes a membership clause. Patricia Fisher ’81, director of class activities for alumni affairs, offers a succinct explanation: “If a class feels strong ties to a particular person or wants to make sure that a new faculty member or administrator feels welcome, it can choose to extend an invitation.” With 13, the class of 1971 claims the most adopted members, followed by the class of 1969 with 12. The College’s only rule: No one can be officially adopted by more than one class.

As simple as the process sounds, there is no uniformity—not because the procedure varies from class to class, but rather because it varies according to personal relationships, motivations, affiliations and connections within each class.

Example 1: Dale Benoit A’68, who worked as legal secretary to Ronald Weiss ’68 during Weiss’s 20-year stint as class treasurer (today Weiss is class president). “I believe Ron let the class officers know that I was the one who took care of many of the treasurer’s tasks,” Benoit says.

Example 2: Nicholas Hagoort Jr. A’53, who became involved with Dartmouth through a labyrinth of fraternization. Try to keep up: He first met Jeff O’Connell ’51 at Harvard Law School. O’Connell introduced Hagoort to David Krivitsky ’51 (whom O’Connell knew through Casque & Gauntlet); Krivitsky introduced Bryan Menides ’53 to Hagoort—his first connection to his future adoptive class. It was through Menides that Hagoort met his close friends, Bob Callendar ’53 and Paul Paganucci ’53, with whom he lived for several years in New York City in the 1960s. Bob and “Pags,” as Hagoort fondly remembers them, were ultimately responsible for his official adoption into the class at his 40th birthday party.

Several adoptees are former and current College administrators, including former Dean of the College Tom Crady A’76 and his predecessors Lee Pelton A’58 and Thaddeus Seymour A’49. Former president Jim Wright belongs to the class of ’64, the late James Freedman was an A’57. When Jim Kim was announced as the new president last year, three classes immediately contacted Fisher about his membership. From the classes of 1999, 1981 and 1982 he chose 1982—his graduation year from Brown.

The class of 1966 also inquired about adopting Kim, but not until his acceptance of the 1982 offer was already final. “I was told he chose a class closer in age to his own,” says Sherman.

Other adoptees are widows—April Foley A’69, until last April the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, was asked to join the class of 1969 several years after her husband, Giff Foley ’69, died in a plane crash at 45. “I attended the 25th reunion and had a wonderful time hearing ‘old Giff stories’ and seeing some of my late husband’s fabulous friends,” she says.

Some adoptees are fundraisers, such as Cornelia Purcell A’80, who worked for months to help the class of 1980 raise money for its 20th reunion.

Some are coaches (baseball coach Bob Whalen A’79), some are professors (John Rassias A’76 and A’49, who somehow managed to thwart the one-class-only rule), some are former exchange students (Nanalee Raphael A’69 and Masachika Onodera A’58).

It could be said that being adopted is all about whom you know—or sometimes being completely unaware of the process. One of the women from the early 1970s exchange programs, who declined to be quoted for this story, didn’t even realize she’d been adopted until asked how her adoption has affected her. She wished she known sooner, she joked, because maybe then her daughter would have been accepted by the College.

It’s surely about being on the radar of one of those special alums who bleeds Dartmouth green, possesses greater-than-average knowledge about Dartmouth alumni adoption practices, and thinks of classmates as family, Hanover as home base and class membership as a true privilege.

“Adoption is a way for a class to bestow special recognition upon someone who’s deserving of honor for meeting the standards that your class sets,” explains Bill Mitchell ’79, current class vice president and the man who spearheaded the recent adoption of Coach Whalen. (A bit about the process: “I came up with the idea to adopt Bob and talked about it with a number of class officers and a number of folks who were influential in our class,” Mitchell says. “We all thought Bob would be a perfect person to adopt. Now he’s included in all our class mailings, and he’s a regular at class activities.”)

“Adoption is a great way to express appreciation to people who have done a lot for your class,” says Rex Morey ’99. As his class president since 2008 he has urged the adoption of three class deans: Carolynne Krusi A’99, Sylvia Langford A’99 and Katherine Burke A’99. “It’s an honor,” he explains.

The claim is easy to understand coming from someone so invested in his class. But adoptees also echo the sentiment, regardless of their level of exposure to the College and how much time they’ve actually spent in Hanover.

Chapin jokes that if they’d asked his permission, he might have requested membership with the class of 1976 instead—the difference of decades would make him sound younger. But in spite of his covert adoption, he, too, says he appreciates the gesture.

“I already live in the heart of Dartmouth and work across the street from the College, so I enjoy feeling like a slightly more authentic part of the Dartmouth fabric,” he says.

One final heart-warming example: Matthew Marshall A’45, manager of the Hanover Inn for 23 years, says that his adoption makes him feel especially connected. “Being adopted by the greatest generation is very special,” he says. “These guys have seen it all and done it all, but if you attended one of their lunches you would know they aren’t done yet!”

Just how unique is this Dartmouth tradition? Though it isn’t the only college to offer honorary class memberships (Seymour A’49 is also an honorary member of the class of 1978 at Wabash and the class of 1982 at Rollins, for example), Dartmouth is one of the few that refers to the process as an adoption. The title fits. Whether a class wants to extend membership out of gratitude, friendship or simply as a means of helping a newcomer feel more included, the underlying message is consistent: We are family, and so are you.

Carolyn Kylstra, a former DAM intern, is a columnist for Men’s Health magazine.

Career: IHT since 1994, senior editor since 2004; freelance journalist, London, Brussels and Paris, 1988-94; management consultant, London, 1988-89; executive speechwriter, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, 1985-88; Forbes reporter and writer, Houston, New York and San Francisco, 1980-85; reporter, The Post Standard, Syracuse, 1979, The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, Virginia, 1978

Education: A.B., Romance languages and literatures (French and Italian)

Family: Lives with retired journalist Bob Marino; daughter Caitlin Hoffman, 18, is at University of London

“When I was considering colleges, girls’ schools were preparing girls for a certain kind of life, and that wasn’t the life I wanted. I wanted something rough and tumble, focused on really making a difference in the world, really being a success.”

“At Dartmouth I found exactly what I was looking for—terrific language programs and the chance to be a pioneer. I also wanted an opportunity to work on a good college newspaper.”

“When I was about 14 my English teacher said, ‘You ought to think about writing fiction.’ And I said, ‘I don’t like making things up.’ She then suggested journalism.”

“The D was one of the least sexist experiences I had at Dartmouth. If you were willing to work hard, you could advance.”

“There were people in the administration who thought  because there was a woman at the head of the paper that we would pay more attention to women’s issues or take a different tack covering them. That’s something that never appealed to me.”

“Journalism schools aren’t the only places where you make great connections. The Dartmouth alumni network was unparalleled. Not so much in getting a job, but in getting good advice.”

“Being one of very few women at Dartmouth made me absolutely fearless about walking into a room full of powerful men and doing what I had to do, which was sometimes to ask questions they didn’t want to answer.”

“I wound up as a business reporter by accident. When I applied for an internship at Time Inc., I looked at my resume and thought, ‘This is pathetic.’ So I said I was a Romance languages major with a strong interest in economics. I had taken two economics courses. I was not a brilliant economics student. But I wasn’t lying. I had an interest. They put me at Fortune.”

“I found that business journalism is morality tales with numbers in them.”

“The Internet is not ruining the business of journalism. It’s ruining the business model of print. That’s a challenge for the people who sell the advertising, who sell the subscriptions. That is not a problem journalists can solve. We make sure whatever we put on pixels or paper is worth paying for.”

“I’m not concerned about the future of newspapers. If people don’t want to pay for a ink-on-paper product, maybe they’ll pay for something else, something on an e-reader.”

“I resent my hard work being given away for free. I’m glad that’s about to change. Journalists are being made to feel that our reporting isn’t selling when the truth is that people are reading what we write.”

“I’m grateful to work for an organization that still abides by the rules of the road, which keep business and editorial separate. It’s the basis of how we’re able to do what we do.”

“People who respect journalists from the days when they were bringing down presidents still respect journalists. People who never respected them still don’t.”

“People do seek out quality, so I’m not too concerned about the TMZ.coms of the world eating our lunch.”

“When people meet me and find out I work for a daily newspaper, their next question is, ‘Are you all right?’ Like you just told them you have a fatal disease.”

“You gain so much by living abroad. Your goggles are so open to everything. You’re constantly learning about other people’s ways of doing things, and although I still feel very American, I no longer react instinctively the way an American does.”

“I still read The D.”

—Interview by Lisa Furlong

One deeply religious man talked about his prison guards sodomizing him with a broom handle for being “unruly”—a devout Muslim, he broke the prison rules and insisted on praying five times a day. Another man said he was kept in a 6-by-2-by-2-foot box for 16 days straight, allowed out only once a day, and the guards took pleasure in drumming on his box at half-hour intervals. One detainee’s account was of being arrested minutes after a bomb killed his two sons, ages 8 and 11: He had been holding one dead son in the air, crying unintelligibly, when the Americans arrived to arrest every adult male in the area on suspicion of setting off the explosion. He was being handcuffed on the ground when he saw that his other son had been decapitated. He was held for 148 days at Abu Ghraib before being released without being charged.

There is a lesson to be learned here, says Heyman.

Since 2006 he has traveled to the Middle East seven times, visiting first Amman, Jordan, and more recently Istanbul, where he has sat in on interviews with former Iraqi detainees. He accompanies human rights lawyer Susan Burke, who is working on behalf of the former detainees in a class-action lawsuit against various interrogators. All detainees involved in the lawsuit were held at Abu Ghraib and ultimately released without charges. Semantics of torture aside, their time at the prison was traumatic and violent, and in spite of formal military apologies, the wounds are still raw. Burke’s role is to help the victims receive legal recompense; Heyman’s objective is to provide some level of emotional justice. He sits in on the interviews and paints or etches each subject’s portrait. In the background he transcribes the detainee’s stories in a swirl of words that shock and awe. He receives no compensation from Burke for creating the artwork. It is his own project, for his own reasons.

“My aim is to bring their voices back, to give these people their humanity, to allow them to say, ‘This is what happened to me,’ ” says Heyman, who lives in Philadelphia and supplements his artistic career with teaching gigs at Swarthmore and the Rhode Island School of Design. “We have so many reports from the military one way or the other, telling us what happened. The people it happened to should be allowed to speak for themselves.”

Heyman’s interest in the effects of war began in 1986, when Dartmouth granted the visual arts major a Reynolds scholarship to travel to France and interview people about their experiences during World War II. He found that even though the people he interviewed were in their 60s and 70s, it was clear the war had had a profound effect on their lives. “What happens in a war or a violent episode in someone’s life remains in that life,” Heyman says.

His goal is to portray this understanding in his art. He believes art should not be made for the purpose of making people happy, but rather to make people think. His work appears at a variety of museums across the country and can be viewed at www.
danielheyman.com. Eight of his portraits from Amman, including the one shown on the preceding page, have been acquired by the Hood Museum.

“Artists have very little power in the world, and I can’t thank my lucky stars enough to have this opportunity,” Heyman says. “These people want some kind of justice, and part of that justice is just having their stories told.”

Carolyn Kylstra is a former DAM intern. She works at Men’s Health.

Although creating signage in the basement isn’t among her primary duties now, Blackburn, 43, still weathers plenty of challenges in her job as executive vice president of one of the few remaining family-owned NFL franchises. She oversees all aspects of the business, from marketing to ticket and suite sales, IT and finance and, of course, negotiating contracts and staying on top of the salary cap. “I majored in math and economics at Dartmouth, and I think salary cap issues are exactly what the degree was for, right?” she says. “It actually isn’t that hard. There are a lot of rules about what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do, but the best rule I have is that if it gets too complicated I just start over and make it more simple. The money’s the money.”

This year financials matter even more to the front office. Game tickets for the upcoming season normally sell out by late spring, but “this is the first time in several years that we still have tickets available,” says Blackburn. Suite sales to local businesses have also suffered a slump and future ad revenue is another worry. “Ultimately it will affect player salaries,” she adds, remarking on the fact that while everyone else in the country is happy just having a job in this troubled economy, NFL players are still looking for increases. “It may take longer because so many contracts were already in place, but there’s no question.”

Hoping to get some good exposure for the team, which suffered an eight-game losing streak at the start of last season and finished with a 4-11-1 record, Blackburn and her family signed a deal with HBO’s Hard Knocks. The series, which has featured the Dallas Cowboys, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens in the past, premiered August 12 and provides viewers an inside look at coach Marvin Lewis and his team at training camp. “We thought it would be a good opportunity,” says Blackburn. “We have a lot of guys at a level that people nationally might have some interest in, and good PR is of course a part of it.”

The team, which has become better known for players’ off-field antics than for winning on Sundays, could use some positive coverage. Seventeen Bengals on the roster have had run-ins with the law, with charges ranging from spousal battery (Frostee Rucker) to DUI, possession of firearms, possession of marijuana and supplying alcohol to minors (all those are on wide receiver Chris Henry’s rap sheet). Blackburn herself agrees it’s not ideal to employ players whose personal behavior is less than stellar, but it’s their performance on game day that really matters. “It boils down to a guy being reliable on the field,” she says. “Certainly you never want to hire someone who’s going to cause issues, but you also want to give these guys a chance.”

Times have changed since former Cleveland Browns coach and GM Paul Brown, who died in 1991, started the team in 1967. He was known for prizing brains above brawn, and he recruited accordingly. But, says Blackburn, “the playing field probably is a little different now than it was back then. I can’t say for sure how he’d feel now.” Certain, however, is that they share a common goal: “He wanted to get the best out of the group of players he had and so do we.”

As a tribute to her grandfather the family didn’t sell the naming rights when a new stadium for the Bengals was built in 2000. Instead they named it Paul Brown Stadium—and received plenty of praise from local fans as a result. “I’m not against naming rights, but we wanted to properly honor him,” says Blackburn. “He did so much for the NFL and represents so many positive ideals and what football should be about.” Keeping the business in the Brown family also remains a priority. Joining Blackburn and her father (team owner) in the front office are her husband, Troy Blackburn (vice president), her uncle Pete Brown (senior vice president of player personnel) and her younger brother Paul Brown (vice president of player personnel). “Do we sometimes bicker in a way that isn’t how you’d talk to a coworker? Yes, I have to be honest along those lines, but I consider myself extremely fortunate to work with my family,” she says.

This summer her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, 16, became the first fourth-generation Brown to work for the Bengals, serving as an assistant to her mother. Still, Blackburn doesn’t want to put any pressure on either Elizabeth or her sister Caroline, 14, to join the family business, even though she admits that “nothing would be more fun.” Her father encouraged Katie to pursue a career outside the team before he asked her to come aboard. So after Dartmouth she earned her law degree at the University of Cincinnati and practiced with a local firm for two years. “It was a good experience for her to do something different, but I could tell her heart was here,” says Mike Brown, who was a Harvard-schooled lawyer himself before choosing his own dad’s path. “And we’ve been at it together ever since.”

He calls his daughter a natural athlete. “I’d take her to watch me run at the track when she was about 3, and lo and behold she started running behind me one day and ran and ran for a whole mile,” he says. “She just saw what was supposed to be done and did it.” At Dartmouth Blackburn proved to be just as determined. Despite barely knowing how to skate she tried out for the hockey team and became the team’s goalie. These days she keeps fit by playing tennis and golf. She’s also gotten into playing Wii sports against her girls. As for other technological fads? “I haven’t done Facebook, but I did start a Twitter account,” she says. “I got on because the Bengals players are twittering people and I
wanted to get their tweets. But I’m not really sure about the whole thing.”

With the addition of draft picks such as Alabama tackle Andre Smith and USC linebacker Rey Maualuga, the team is hoping for a better season this fall than last. There’s also the addition of free agent Tank Johnson (another player with jail time in his past—but a lot of tackles, too) and the return of starting quarterback Carson Palmer, who was out for most of 2008 with an elbow injury. While the Bengals haven’t made it to the playoffs since 2005, Blackburn is not writing off her team’s chances of making it to the  2o10  Super Bowl. “The great thing about sports is that everyone starts at zero and zero, so you get a fresh start every year,” says Blackburn. “You just have to find a way to go out there and win.”  

Jennifer Wulff is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to DAM.

]]> http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/behind-the-lines/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/beyond-the-glory/ http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/beyond-the-glory/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:44:44 +0000 suejenks http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/?p=10139 While two Olympic medals are the most tangible manifestation of my successful hockey career, my time “in the crease” provided much more than medals to my team, our fans and, in retrospect, to me.

After our team’s success in both the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics I had many requests for speaking engagements with various groups—schoolchildren, businesses and charities. Usually the request was for a “motivational” speech. While all true champions combine focus with a strong desire to succeed, the underlying theme of my talks was the need to believe in one’s own potential as fundamental in any endeavor—from physical activities to business challenges to personal relationships.

“How did you get there?” I was often asked. My Grandma T. was a big influence in my life when I was growing up. Gram was stern and old school, and I learned never to say, or even to think, “I can’t.” She repeated and reiterated so often and in so many different ways the idea of believing in yourself that it became an inherent part of my thought process. Success also required hard work. For each sports season, each new round of music lessons and orchestra tryouts, the choice of participation was mine. Once I had decided, my parents’ only condition was that I do it right. I would prepare for each lesson. I would work hard at every practice: soccer, hockey or tennis. I would not miss a workout. I would be one of two players at a practice on Halloween (and unlike the other player, who hated candy, I was a chocoholic!). I would miss my high school prom for a hockey game (though perhaps it could be said I had 19 escorts since I was the only girl on my school’s team).

Walking into rinks on our 1998 pre-Olympic tour the U.S. women’s hockey team attracted many stares. “What are those girls doing carrying big heavy bags?” “You play? How cute, sure, that might be fun to come and watch a game.” For the most part people didn’t know women’s hockey existed. We played for personal achievement, for each other and because we loved the game and wanted a new generation of girls to experience the excitement of our sport.

Unknown to us at the time the coverage of our team during our two weeks in Japan changed all that. I came home to cameras at the airport, TV trucks in my driveway, autograph seekers and phone calls to my parents’ house in Winnetka, Illinois. We stopped looking over our shoulders to see whose autographs people wanted. We started embracing our responsibility as role models and, for some, heroes. I began to realize the gold medal wasn’t just about me and my personal goals, it also represented universal themes that connected me to more people than I could have imagined.

After winning gold in 1998 I retired from hockey and returned to Dartmouth. But my love of the sport and the peace I felt when I was performing at my absolute best drew me back to the ice. I missed the quiet mind, the meditation of being in the zone and the simplicity of all my focus and energy being directed at definable perfection. So I came out of retirement, well before Brett Favre made this fashionable. As an Olympian I felt blessed. As an American I simply could not pass up the opportunity to play in my own country. Once again I had a definable goal. However, just as I had changed in those four years, so too had the sport—and my perspective.

Where Nagano was a magical mystery tour of wide-eyed firsts, the campaign heading into Salt Lake City in 2002 was much different, as internal and external forces redefined our team chemistry. There were agents, sponsors and media, as well as veteran players, new players and an unpredictable coach. And we were now public figures. People knew who we were when we walked into a rink. They would be waiting for us, asking for autographs or just offering a nod of encouragement against our rivals. We gave clinics in most cities and we had young fans anxiously waiting for us in hotel lobbies. I tried to take it all in.

As an athlete it is so easy and necessary to remain highly focused on the practice or the game ahead, especially in the sterile environment created for athletes to avoid distractions. Four years after my first Olympic Games, however, I did not want to put the whole experience in a tiny box labeled “mine.” I wanted to see it from the eyes of a little girl who was meeting her hero instead of functioning as an athlete just wanting to make it to the bus and back to the hotel to meet a sponsor and grab some grub. I wanted to remain humble, approachable and compassionate, while unrelentingly focused on the task at hand. I learned to constantly adjust the balance of a myopic internal focus and a broader perspective as leader and role model to the public.

I’ve heard it said that athletes are an inherently selfish breed. It does take an immense amount of time, disciplined effort and sacrifice to train, which can leave a person tired and cranky, all of which require understanding and support from family and friends. There is pressure all the time—to make the team, to stay on the team, to win a starting position, to keep a starting position. These are personal triumphs, or so I believed.

Until we won.

I came to realize that winning Olympic medals was much bigger than the achievements of the 20 individuals to whom they were awarded. From the morning after our gold-medal victory in Nagano I started receiving and responding to e-mails. On that first morning, I read an e-mail from a 6-year-old girl who wrote to congratulate me and the team. She added that her mom had let her go to school late so she could see the end of our game, and she seemed somewhat astounded by this fact. I e-mailed her, thanking her and adding a few personal notes about the Olympics. She wrote that her mom had just agreed to exchange her unused figure skates for hockey skates.

The next e-mail was from her mother, telling me how we had made the country proud and how she had cried when we won. Then she thanked me for writing her daughter, for being approachable and personable and for the influence I had on both of their lives. It was my first dose of impact. I was surprised and humbled.

My favorite memory of the Olympics is of another letter I received, this one from a friend of my grandma. She wrote to me about losing her son to cancer more than 50 years ago. He was my age at the time, 21, and an athlete. The pain of the loss had kept her from reading about, watching or enjoying sports for almost half a century. However, as a friend of the proud Grandma T., she followed every minute of our team. She wrote personally about how she, too, had cried—for us, for our team, for herself and for her son. Watching the Olympics had given a piece of him back to her and now, long after the Olympics had ended, she continued to turn to the sports section first. She actually thanked me for giving that piece of him back to her. I wasn’t sure I deserved that thanks. I thought people were crying for us and for our team. It took longer than it should have to realize that we won a medal for them, too.

Sarah Tueting is a life/executive coach and lives in Park City, Utah, with her husband, Dan Lemaitre.

Claims to Fame: Competed for Japan in 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games, winning a silver medal in the slalom in 1956; won a record six NCAA titles and five national titles while competing for the College; International Olympic Committee (IOC) member since 1982, vice president 2005-09; vice president, International Triathlon Union, 1996-08; has advocated the inclusion of more indoor sports at Winter Games to better promote Olympic movement; led campaign for Tokyo as 2016 Summer Games site

Pre-Dartmouth: Came to Dartmouth, after studying English for six months, thanks to mentor and AIG founder C.V. Starr, whom he met by chance in a Tokyo ski shop in 1951

Career: Joined Starr’s company as trainee in New York City in 1959 then returned to Japan, where he became chairman, AIG Japan, 1994; after retiring in 2008 founded his own information technology and consulting companies

Degrees: A.B., geology; Harvard Business School (P.M.D), 1969; doctor of humane letters, Dartmouth, 2006

Family: Son Takaharu; wife Yoshie

“My family and friends were much worried about my heading to the United States just two years after the signing of the U.S.-Japan peace treaty. I wasn’t worried because of the people I had met at the 1952 Oslo Games and while competing in the States after that.”

“My English when I arrived at Dartmouth was even worse than it is today, so I was a bit afraid of my interview with President John Sloan Dickey ’29. When he asked if I was familiar with ski sports I said only, ‘Yes, sir.’ He could see I was nervous and to relax me he began to explain them. The next day he learned I had been in the Olympics.”

“As the only Japanese student on campus I was pretty recognizable even to those who paid no attention to skiing.”

“Right after I won my medal in 1956 I had to return to Hanover for exams. There weren’t any congratulatory receptions since I wasn’t American. When I went home in the spring, media people and fans flooded the airport. That made me realize, ‘I have done something.’ Before that it was just like winning one of the carnivals.”

“Sports technique is not enough to become the best sportsman. You have to learn to use your head to win. From C.V. Starr I learned that those are two different things.”

“I used ‘cha cha’ to describe the way I skied because that dance was very popular at the time. The media picked  up on that. I also compared my skiing to doing the mambo.”

“I had some spectacular falls. Once I got so buried in powder at Mount Tremblant I almost couldn’t find my way out.”

“They used to show my 1956 crash at Cortina in the Olympic museum in Lausanne. I was very interested to watch it and amazed I survived in one piece.”

“Being known in Japan was a big advantage when I went into business.”

“I feel very sorry for Mr. Starr about what happened to AIG. I always remember him telling me, ‘We have to properly behave, to follow the local rules and regulations. We must provide a product that the market wants rather than what the company wants to sell.’ That was a good lesson for me.”

“My early desire to become a diplomat has to some degree been realized as a member of the IOC.”

“Musicians and artists don’t distinguish between amateurs and professionals, so why should sports? Having professionals join the Olympics meant the technical level of amateurs went up quite a bit and made the Games more attractive to spectators and viewers. I wish the professionals would stay in the Olympic Village rather than at five-star hotels.”

“People in Tokyo are very sad not to have the Summer Games in 2016 but realize we cannot win always. I am very happy about the support shown for Rio de Janeiro and for South America to have its first Olympics.”

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have appeal as host cities, but the Games shouldn’t be too political. The Olympic charter would have to be changed to allow two cities. These are not very close and are a little too small.”

“I would love to present a medal to a Dartmouth athlete. I always look for them when I hear there are people from Hanover competing in the Games.”

“I stopped skiing eight years ago at the age of 70 because I couldn’t afford to break my legs. We have a lot of kamikaze skiers in Japan.”

“Probably I will never retire because something I hate is to lie down by the swimming pool. I get so irritated, so nervous. I can’t sit still.”

Despite a frightening crash that smashed his helmet and kept him off skis for months, there’s no quit in the downhill sensation.

If the only thing you knew about Scott Macartney came from roughly 90 seconds of YouTube footage, you’d be surprised he is still upright, much less aspiring to his third Olympic team. The video is easy enough to find. Just start typing “Scott Macar…” into YouTube’s search field, and “Scott Macartney crash in Kitzbühel 2008” pops up in the autofill. Once you click through the graphic content warnings, you too can join the roughly 3 million people worldwide who have viewed the small portion of Macartney’s life that he doesn’t remember.

You can see him whiz through a speed trap at the Kitzbühel World Cup downhill course at 87.74 miles per hour, the fastest time recorded that day. You can see him hit the final jump and twist high into the air. Then you hear the Austrian announcer say, “helmet gebrocht” (helmet breaking), which is what happened when Macartney’s head hit the ice. In another version an announcer just starts whispering “mein Gott, mein Gott, mein Gott” as the gruesome crash unfolds.

There’s yet another YouTube video of Macartney being airlifted off the mountain to a hospital in Innsbruck, where he was placed in a medically induced coma. It was January 19, 2008, Macartney’s 30th birthday. His coaches and doctors passed the night thankful it appeared he would make it to 31.

Had that been the final race of Macartney’s career, he would have retired with a resume matched by only a handful of Americans who ever put on skis. In his two Olympics he accumulated five top-30 finishes, including a seventh place in the Super-G at 2006 in Torino, a mere quarter-second outside the medals. He had twice medaled in World Cup competitions.

What’s more, he had plenty of things beyond competitive skiing with which he could fill his retirement. In addition to his degree from a reputable college, he had the contacts he made from serving on the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association board of directors, and he and Dartmouth buddy Derek Draper ’02 had begun planning an online ski coaching business. He was also involved with World Cup Dreams, a nonprofit foundation that helps fund up-and-coming American skiers. He had plenty else to do that wouldn’t involve slamming into ice at close to 90 miles per hour.

But quitting never occurred to Macartney. With no swelling in his brain—the helmet, breaking as it is designed to do, absorbed the worst of the crash—he was brought out of the coma the next day. Four days later he left the hospital. Within a week and a half, even though he was still in something of a fog, family and friends practically had to restrain him from getting back to strenuous training. Four months later, with his cognitive functioning fully returned, Macartney started sliding around on skis again.

“That was one of the most dramatic crashes in the history of the sport,” says Bryon Friedman ’02, Macartney’s roommate at Dartmouth and on the U.S. ski team. “I probably would have quit the sport on the spot if I had been there to see that crash. But I never heard Scott talk once about quitting.”

Macartney’s parents, Laurie and John, a schoolteacher and a principal who still live in Scott’s hometown of Redmond, Washington, didn’t even bother asking him to consider retirement. “I knew darn well he was going to keep racing anyway,” Laurie says.

This, after all, was the kid who would come home from first grade with drawings of himself skiing in a downhill suit with Olympic rings in the background. From the time he was in junior high school he slept under a poster of Tiger Shaw ’85 with the words “Tiger Shaw, Olympic Skier, Dartmouth Graduate.” That pretty much explains how he ended up in Hanover. Driven? Motivated? That doesn’t begin to cover it. Skiing was his life. It would take a lot more than a gruesome crash to get him off the slopes. He moved on.

It’s just that no one else could. When he returned to the World Cup circuit for the 2008-09 season the crash was all anyone asked about. Finally, after an ambush interview by an Austrian newspaper reporter—who promised no questions about Kitzbühel, then presented Macartney with the “gift” of 9-by-11 glossy pictures of the crash so the newspaper could photograph him looking at them—Macartney decided he was no longer answering Kitzbühel questions.

“It’s an easy story to sell, it’s a story that gathers a lot of attention, it was a spectacular crash. I understand all that,” says Macartney. “But as an athlete who is still trying to compete at the highest level I have to look forward, not back.”

Soon he had bigger problems. At Macartney’s next race, just as he was finally returning to form, he landed on the back of his skis after a jump, tearing his ACL, injuring his meniscus and ending his season. In an unfortunate twist, that accident—which Macartney calls “the most annoying and ill-timed injury of my career”—is now a far greater threat to Macartney’s bid for a third Olympics. He underwent reconstructive surgery last January, receiving a ligament graft from a cadaver, and is just now getting back to competitive skiing. The final team won’t be selected until a few weeks before Vancouver. But no one doubts Macartney when he says he’ll be full strength by then.

“The beauty of Scott is you just add water, and the muscle appears on that guy,” says Friedman. “He looks like a running back—his legs are huge, his upper body is huge. He’s just super strong.”

And at 31, an age when downhillers are in their prime, he’s been there before.

“Salt Lake [in 2002] was all about the experience of being in the Olympics,” Macartney says. “Torino was all about having a chance to medal.”

Maybe that makes the third time around all about winning a medal—the only kind of YouTube footage Macartney hopes the world sees of him in the future.

Carolyn Treacy Bramante ’06

When this multi-tasker discovered the biathlon, it was “love at first shot.” Now she has set her sights on her second Winter Games.

It’s all about changing in the parking lot. This is one of the ways Carolyn Treacy Bramante explains how she manages handling the training load of an Olympic athlete while pursuing a medical degree and a master’s in public health and a variety of research projects, all while organizing a full slate of community outreach activities.

So just say it’s a typical day in the life of the University of Minnesota medical student/U.S. biathlon team member/volunteer activist. She starts with a two-hour roller ski run. Then she attends lectures. Then she scoots off to a two-hour interval training session. Then she sneaks into the lab for a while. Then she volunteers at a free clinic at night. How does she pack it all in? Easy. She changes in the parking lot.

Another example: Two winters ago Bramante won the City of Lakes Loppet, a 35-kilometer cross-country ski race in Minneapolis, barely pausing at the finish line to accept her medal. Then she jumped into her car to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., where—as the president of her school’s chapter of Physicians for Human Rights—she had been selected to participate in a national summit on HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. She made the flight with time to spare. Why? She changed in the parking lot.

“That’s just an example of a little thing you can do to save time, because then you don’t lose 15 minutes going back home and changing,” says Bramante. “You do that six times and you’ve just gained an hour and a half.”

It’s an acute sense of time management that seems to have been with Bramante since, well, birth. Her parents, Anne and Kevin Treacy, swear that the day their daughter was born she propped herself up on her forearms and had a look around, as if she just couldn’t wait to conquer everything she saw.

“It made her an incredibly difficult toddler,” says Anne. “She was never a kid who would sit still for anything. The only time she ever allowed herself to be held or cuddled was when she got sick.”

Climbing trees and playing on monkey bars eventually gave way to swimming in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter. At age 14 she attended a U.S. biathlon recruiting camp. It was, says Bramante, now 27, “love at first shot.”

After all, biathlon is the perfect sport for the serial multi-tasker. While sometimes misunderstood—one popular joke is that biathlon is for triathletes who can’t swim—biathlon marries Nordic skiing (which requires strength and endurance) with target shooting (which requires steady hands and steely concentration). It’s a bit like running a half-marathon and stopping every couple of miles to thread a series of really small needles.

For Bramante that just meant it was a good challenge. She threw herself into junior competitions and made the national team. In 2002 she was a member of a relay team that earned a silver medal at the World Junior Biathlon Championships—the first relay medal ever won by a U.S. team at a world championship competition.

She matriculated at Dartmouth the next fall, taking full advantage of the D-Plan’s flexibility to continue training with the national team. In 2006 she qualified for the Olympics by the narrowest of margins—a perfect performance on her last set of targets at the U.S. trials proved to be the difference—then ended up anchoring a U.S. relay team that finished 15th, its best Olympic showing ever. Bramante’s signature achievement was starting 30 seconds behind the Canadian team but finishing 49 seconds ahead of it.

After graduating in 2007 she and her husband, Anthony Bramante ’06—they met through the Dartmouth Outing Club, got engaged atop Mount Moosilauke and were married in July 2006—spent their “honeymoon” teaching English in Siberia and formulating plans for the future. Anthony shocked friends and family by joining the Marines (an intelligence officer with an interest in military policy, he is now home from his first tour in Iraq). Carolyn, who was already notorious among her teammates for spending her “down” time at World Cup events studying, shocked exactly no one by going off to medical school.

“Staying involved academically keeps me from overtraining,” she says. “Like today, I did four and a half hours of training in two huge interval sessions. But tomorrow I’ll just train for an hour and a half or two hours.”

Oh. Is that all?

“When I started med school,” she explains, “I sort of had to cut out all the fluff workouts.”

Of course merely studying and training aren’t enough. Bramante comes from a Catholic family that ingrained the importance of charity at a young age, whether it was her grandmother constantly volunteering or her ophthalmologist father founding a program to provide free eye care on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. At Dartmouth Bramante helped start a chapter of Unite for Sight, an eye-care outreach group, was a student leader in the DOC and volunteered with the Tucker Foundation.

“She just gets involved in everything,” says Cami Thompson, Dartmouth’s cross-country coach, for whom Bramante skied on and off during her five years in and out of Hanover. “She’s one of those people who wants to save the world.”

Her parents, who still live in Bramante’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, say their daughter never stops seeing—or inventing—ways to help people. Her current project, a medical outreach program for the homeless, started when, while delivering free meals to the homeless during the holidays, she was struck by the paucity of their healthcare.

“As an Olympic athlete I have access to all these resources and get to spend all this time focusing on keeping my body healthy,” she says. “And here were these people who didn’t even get access to the most basic resources.”

So last year she co-founded Inter-professional Street Outreach Program (ISTOP), a program that sends medical students and their professors into Minneapolis’ toughest neighborhoods to provide free healthcare. ISTOP now has 259 volunteers making trips into the field four times a month. (Volunteers use Bramante’s official Olympics duffel bag to haul medical supplies.) Jacob Feigal, ISTOP’s co-founder, attributes the program’s success to Bramante’s bubbly personality, disarming leadership style and nonstop energy.

“Med school is full of busy people, but she’s the busiest person in the room,” says Feigal. “We just laugh at her level of activity.”

Not that Bramante ever hears them. By that point she’s already in the parking lot, changing for whatever comes next.

Have the X Games cast ski jumping in a different light when it comes to television? Absolutely. When I first started doing the commentary for TV in 1988 the large hill ski jumping was aired Saturday or Sunday at 7 or 8 p.m., a 40-minute show that was close to the same level as figure skating and men’s downhill and the hockey final. It was a big deal. That changed in Torino in 2006, but I don’t resent it at all. NBC wants to put on what’s going to sell soap. The mindset has moved toward the snowboards and the Shaun Whites.

How has that affected your commentary? Long ago my approach was, “You’ve got to show the Americans.” And the producers would say, “Nobody cares that an American came in 43rd when they thought he might come in 47th.” I guess maybe I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. At the ski-jumping venue there are 100 cool stories going on and 100 little personal victories and losses, any one of which might be compelling, but you’ve got 15 minutes. You’ve got to pick the one or the five you think are going to resonate with the guy sitting on the couch in Des Moines, because you don’t want him flipping over to Desperate Housewives.

Whom should viewers expect to medal in Vancouver? Here’s the dirty truth: I show up at events and I follow it online a little bit. I know who these guys are, but Gregor Schlierenzauer, the Austrian who’s hot now? I’m not sure I’m even pronouncing his name right, and I sure as heck wouldn’t recognize him if I ran into him. So in Vancouver I’m the “expert” and the director says, “Hey, is that Schlierenzauer over there?” And I have to look at his bib number, then at my cheat sheet and say, “Yeah, that’s Schlierenzauer all right.” By the time the Olympics are over I’ll know everything I need to know.

What does it take to be a good jumper? It’s not very complicated physically, but it’s very much a mind game. There’s the fear element, the danger element that’s real. Basically it’s a very simple move that the reasonable brain is telling the body is suicide. So it’s a matter of feeling comfortable and confident enough to do it.

What should viewers know about jumpers’ techniques? The move at the takeoff is 10 percent of the difference. Ninety percent of the difference is between the ears, and that doesn’t show up on a screen.

What body type is best suited to ski jumping? Anorexia helps. I don’t mean to be flip about that. It’s been such a problem it looked like concentration camps in the tents where the kids took their suits off. It’s all about aerodynamics. If you can present a big flying surface and light weight, you’re going to be far more effective. [The sport’s organizers] have taken serious steps so that your suit can’t be bigger than your body. And there are all kinds of rules about having reasonable weight for your height and not having oversize skis that would give you a bigger area.

How has that changed since your ski-jumping days? Totally. We always said “fat don’t fly,” but what really changed is the “V” style that jumpers now use. Each ski is a flying surface and a skier’s body is in the middle. When I was ski jumping we were behind the skis. Now it’s like spreading out a sail more. Aerodynamics plays a bigger role than strength at the takeoff. And the jumps have gotten bigger, too.

What are the ideal conditions? The only thing that’s important is consistency. That everybody has the same conditions. With technology today the hill itself is virtually perfect, so it’s all about changing winds. If the wind is moving up the hill it gives you a huge advantage. A tailwind is like a vacuum. It just sucks you down.

Do you think you’ll ever see an American medal in ski jumping? Yes. Eventually somebody’s going to care and throw enough money at it. When you’ve got 300 million people as driven as Americans are, I think it’s crazy to bet against us. I don’t think it’s imminent though.

What’s it like to be part of the NBC team? It’s a huge army and there are all kinds of protocols. Every Olympics they have a big meeting beforehand with every analyst, every color person, every lead broadcaster. You sit in a room and they show you good stuff they like and stuff they don’t like. They keep saying, “Tell the story. Tell the story. Tell the story. Stay on it.” There’s lots of prepping as to how they want you to do it. I guess maybe I’m sort of an exception now—most of the people, even the color commentators, are doing other TV.

What do you think about those former athletes, now commentators, who are assigned to sports very different from the ones in which they competed? I don’t watch much sports TV, so I don’t have much to compare it to. I don’t get why viewers need a reporter as well as an analyst, especially somebody who doesn’t know the sport at all. You’ve got somebody who’s never been in a turtleneck before trying to ask questions of kids who are passionate about a sport this guy has no understanding of. He’s passionate about trying to understand. Maybe from some perspective it’s just like the couch potatoes’ questions.

James Page ’63
Alpine Skiing  •  1964 Innsbruck
“My most enduring memory is of standing at the top of the ski jump near Innsbruck, Austria, Olympic number bib on, waiting for my turn to take my first Olympic jump and thinking that the goal and dream I had had my whole life had been realized. But it was also a kind of empty feeling, because there was nothing I had planned for beyond it. It was a classic case of finally realizing the journey is often more important than the destination.”

Sarah Parsons ’10
Hockey • 2006 Torino
“It sounds very cliché but my strongest memory was walking into the stadium for opening ceremonies. Seeing all the flashing lights and thousands of people was pretty cool. I was so excited that while trying to film and take pictures of it all at the same time I managed to drop and break both my video camera and my camera.”

Erich Wilbrecht ’84
Biathlon  •  1992 Albertville
“My most indelible memory of the Games was walking into the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremonies. We walked through a tunnel into the bright lights of the stadium and the crowd exploded with cheers and applause. It caught me off guard. I was grinning wide and actually feeling a bit patriotic, which was the last emotion I expected. For me it brought to the forefront the larger purposes of the Games—those of international exchange and friendship, all under the auspices of high-level competition. Whether you like it or not, you are an Olympian for life. It provides you with instant credibility, even with total strangers. That still surprises me today.”

Walter Malmquist II ’78
Nordic Skiing  •  1976 Innsbruck, 
1980 Lake Placid
“In 1980 we were on our home turf in Lake Placid. We had the attention not only of the world but of America, an unusual phenomenon when it comes to winter sports. American athletes and spectators publicly celebrated many fabulous performances by American athletes. ‘USA! USA! USA!’ was chanted slopeside, at the ice rinks and the bobsled runs. Those cheers inspired confidence, determination and a higher level of performance in American athletes than years of physical and psychological training.”

Stacey Wooley ’91
Biathlon  •  1998 Nagano,
 2002 Salt Lake City
“All the athletes get to the opening ceremonies way before they start. Officials put everyone, all nations together, in a big holding room for more than two hours and gave us Oreo cookies and disposable cameras. Everyone went around trading cameras and taking a few pictures and trading again. Lots of the pictures were of people eating Oreo cookies with big smiles and black teeth.”

Patrick Biggs ’06
Alpine Skiing  •  2006 Torino
“The feeling I experienced in the start gate was similar to going into a final exam with your diploma on the line, needing an A to graduate. Nailing down a good run was similar to sinking that last full to clench victory in an epic pong battle. The disappointment of skiing out of the second run? Probably the same as showing up to the Hop for a cordon bleu special, then realizing it was yesterday. That about sums it up.”

Gretchen Ulion ’94
Hockey  •  1998 Nagano
“During the gold medal game I vividly remember watching the clock tick down, knowing that we had only a one-goal lead. We had been leading Canada in close championship games before and each time had watched that lead slip away. Then teammate Sandra Whyte took the puck and scored an empty-net goal. Our bench erupted—we knew we’d won. Counting down those last 10 seconds was so exciting and then hitting the ice to celebrate was pure mayhem. When I visit schools and share my gold medal with children, I feel it is important they know that what I treasure most is my entire Olympic experience and the challenging road I took to get there, not just the hardware I brought home.”

Arnold C. Oss Jr. ’50
Hockey  •  1952 Oslo
“The ability to travel to Europe and play various countries at the Olympic games was fun. I was there from Thanksgiving through Easter. The Europeans thought we played rough. The Russians did not join the Olympic community at that time, so we didn’t get to play against them. There were only seven to nine teams in total and we played every one.”

Geoffrey Pitchford ’64, Tu’65 
(Great Britain)
Alpine Skiing  •  1960 Squaw Valley
“My strongest memory is the contrast between the opening and the closing ceremonies. The Games started with each team marching behind a standard-bearer holding high its national flag. The Games ended with all the participants mixed together, regardless of nationality or sport, ambling along rather like a bunch of tourists from every corner of the world, enjoying the uniqueness of a very special moment. I was able to achieve a personal goal, one that came at the cost of delaying both my education and the start of my business career, but one that also brought me to the United States and to Dartmouth and Tuck: I had learned about the College from several alumni on the U.S. ski team between 1956 and 1960.”

Tim Caldwell ’76
Nordic Skiing  •  1972 Sapporo,
 1976 Innsbruck,  1980 Lake Placid,
1984 Sarajevo
“During one relay race we were doing really well, and I remember the look of excitement on my teammate’s face as I came into the tag zone. It was a great day. I rarely actually think about the experience. There are too many other things going on. Yet it is always with me. I skied internationally from 1971 until 1984. During that time our equipment evolved from wooden to fiberglass skis, from leather to synthetic boots, from pine tar as a base wax to alpine wax for speed, from strict classical technique to so-called freestyle. The evolution was fascinating and exciting. Frequently our team was on the leading edge of the changes. Dartmouth’s year-round schedule allowed me to compete internationally each winter without missing many classes. With its great skiing tradition, there were plenty of other students to train with in the summer and fall while I was at school. The only drawback for me was that I never was able to compete for the College.”

Richard W. Taylor ’59
Nordic Skiing  •  1964 Innsbruck
“The Olympic experience for me was not one but two—the team I did not make and the one I did. In my tryouts for the 1960 team I failed. Not making that team was devastating at first. I then worked at the Games, trained and finished the season by winning the national 30-kilometer championship. In all, it was a fine year, but it most importantly proved to me that my joy in the sport was not defined by making a team of some sort but by the movement itself and the sensations of its power and grace. Making the team in 1964 was less informative. To be sure, there was excitement and deepening experience, but the Games themselves were too big, too clogged with officials and needless administrators. Nordic team members were not able to get tickets to most of the other events, for example—our officials had them all. During my race, the 50 kilometer, I came finally to the crest of an exhausting climb, there to feel the firm hand of a German skier—who was not in the race—at my low back, running beside me for a short way, lifting me over the top.”

Walker T. Weed III ’71
Nordic Skiing  •  1972 Sapporo
“People always make the Olympics such a big deal nationally, but in terms of the actual ski competition, the competitions at the world championships are probably run better. There’s so much hoopla at the Olympics—a gazillion paperweights, people who are affiliated with the Olympic committee, everybody is vying for a free plane ticket. It’s not as pure a competition as the worlds. A lot of that has to do with the TV coverage and people constantly saying who has the most medals. It was a very positive experience and I don’t regret it at all, although I’ve often told friends of mine that my Dartmouth skiing experience was almost greater than the time I spent with the U.S. ski team.”

Leslie Thompson Hall ’86
Nordic Skiing  •  1988 Calgary,  1992 Albertville,  1994 Lillehammer
“In Calgary there was a lot of man-made snow because they didn’t have a big snowy winter. At that point we hadn’t cross-country skied on manmade snow very often. I asked my coach about downhills. I was nervous about the jumps and rolls. He said to pre-jump it—lift my legs and push down on the other side so I wouldn’t fly through the air. So I told myself to go fast and pre-jump, but instead of that I basically launched myself off and fell, landed on my face and got a huge black eye. I had to race with a black eye and got lots of comments. People asked if I got into a fight with my teammates or something. But I don’t think I intimidated the competition too much.”

Donald Nielsen ’74
Biathlon  •  1976 Innsbruck,
 1980 Lake Placid,  1984 Sarajevo
“The Olympics were an amazing experience, but they were not really a culmination. Instead they were a kind of justification for continuing the kind of thing I had always loved best and which was such a strong part of my life at Dartmouth: running alone in the woods, in the mountains, feeling the wind in my hair, breathing in the scent of the pines. I actually preferred training for cross country and biathlon to the racing itself, but the racing pulled you forward with purpose and a vengeance, and the Olympics were useful shorthand to explain to people why one might take a decade and spend it running in the woods. One summer I ran almost all of the White and Green Mountains barefoot. I couldn’t stand shoes that year and felt so damn alive from the contact with the dirt and leaves and roots.”

Sarah Konrad ’89
Biathlon/Nordic Skiing  •  2006 Torino
“As a two-sport athlete I needed to move my temporary residence from one Olympic Village to another halfway through the Games. Staff from the ski team came in the evening to pick me up and make the move. In the village below Sestriere, my destination, the Italian police did not want to let us through. I didn’t have the appropriate credentials for Sestriere—dealing with a two-sport athlete was not in the operational plan. It took a half hour sitting in a dark van on the side of the road and many phone calls to straighten things out.”

Thomas Corcoran ’54
Alpine Skiing  •  1956 Cortina,
 1960 Squaw Valley
“One day during pre-Olympic races in Europe in 1960 I had a true epiphany, and in an instant I knew why I had long been an also-ran among the world elite in the giant slalom (GS). It had to do with taking a lower, faster line between gates and stepping up before making the turn into the next gate. As a result I won the next GS races in Europe and the United States, and I went into the Olympics with a high level of confidence. Because my newfound expertise came late, I had not yet moved into the first-seeded group and drew 24 for my starting number, a big disadvantage because of course erosion. I finished fourth, just out of the medals but the best finish for an American man in Olympic GS until Bode Miller won a silver medal in 2002. I look back on my experience with fondness and a quiet pride. I did my best and finished on a high note. If I had started earlier I’m sure I would have earned a medal and perhaps won, but it was not to be.”

John Caldwell ’50
Nordic Skiing  •  1952 Oslo
“It was great to make the Olympic team in 1951. It was my first exposure to international competition, and I—and the rest of the team, for the most part—got whupped real bad. I was so embarrassed by my performance, but also by the lack of experience we all went to those Games with, that I have dedicated a lot of time since then trying to promote the sport. Actually, my name is probably pretty well known in Nordic skiing circles, partly as a curmudgeon, no doubt.”

Just why would a legally blind Nordic skier want to enter a biathlon? “To have more competitive opportunities and to win more medals,” says Rob Walsh ’88, whose macular degeneration began when he was 10 but whose Nordic skiing career began only when he arrived in Hanover. The innovative technology employed for Paralympic biathletes provides a window on how Olympic events can be adapted: Shooting from a prone position, Paralympians wear headphones and use rifles wired to targets. Audio tones indicate proximity to a target. “It doesn’t really matter whether you can see or not,” says Walsh, summing up the basic premise of Paralympic competition.

The challenge is what it’s all about. Alums who appreciate that have been influential behind the scenes working as guides and coaches and with the organizations that expand international competition for top-tier athletes and develop recreational programming at the grassroots level.

Joe Walsh ’84, a vision-impaired two-time Paralympic Nordic skier who preceded his brother on Dartmouth’s cross-country ski team, oversees both types of programming as managing director of the Paralympics division of the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Tryg Myhren ’58, Tu’59, has mobilized the cable TV industry, through a 14-year-old event called SkiTAM, to raise more than $1 million for the U.S. adaptive ski team each of the last six years. He’s engaged in developmental outreach as well, inspired in large part, he says, by Dartmouth disabled skiers including Sarah Billmeier ’99, longtime team member Carl Burnett ’03 and the late Diana Golden-Brosnihan ’84.

Paralympic competition originated as an outlet for World War II veterans with spinal cord injuries. Now, with thousands of veterans confronting debilitating injuries sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan, efforts to expand sports opportunities as a matter of both physical and mental rehabilitation has taken on a new urgency.

“Most young people who go into the armed services are very fit and athletic,” says Myhren. “For them to wake up with catastrophic injuries is especially devastating. Naurally, almost all of them are deeply depressed. We believe adaptive sport can provide a path for many to new-found fitness, productivity and confidence.” It has been gratifying, he says, to see vets respond to video footage of Paralympic events shown at military hospitals and to talk to them about the programs offered at developmental centers being started around the country.

Dartmouth skiers would figure prominently in any all-time highlights reel. Two decades ago arguably America’s most successful alpinist in adaptive skiing (the U.S. team changed its name from “disabled” in 2008 to more accurately reflect the talents of its members) was Golden-Brosnihan, who told DAM in 1988, “A pet peeve of mine is that the public refuses to view what we do as athletic.” Although Billmeier says public perception “still has a long way to go for people to see disabled skiers as competitive rather than participatory,” there are encouraging signs that Paralympians are now viewed as the elite athletes they are. At the 2006 Paralympic Games in Torino, says Myhren, who was chef de mission there, a full stadium for opening and closing ceremonies and packed stands for all events—standing, seated and guide-assisted alpine and Nordic skiing, sled hockey and wheelchair curling—spoke to growing support. Similar attendance is expected in Vancouver.

Golden-Brosnihan, who lost her right leg to cancer at the age of 12 but nonetheless skied competitively in high school and for Dartmouth, helped lay the foundation of such support. She not only amassed an impressive 10 gold medals in the 1986, 1988 and 1990 Disabled World Championships, but also fought for the inclusion of disabled skiers in U.S. Ski Association races—and for disabled skiers in the Olympic Games. She especially valued the gold medal she won in the exhibition giant slalom at the 1988 Calgary games. Four years later the Paralympic Games were placed on the same rotation at the same venues as the traditional Olympics.

Golden-Brosnihan was a special inspiration to Martha Hill Gaskill ’82, who was a ranked tennis player but only a recreational skier before losing her leg to cancer a year before she came to Dartmouth. Gaskill also competed in Calgary, winning bronze. “When I first saw Diana I thought I could help her around campus,” says Gaskill. “Then I realized she’d been coping with life on one leg a lot longer than I had. When we raced in Calgary we were representing not only the United States but all people with disabilities.”

Both were also representing Dartmouth to skiers such as Billmeier, an amputee since the age of 5 and a racer from age 8. By the time she entered Dartmouth in the fall of 1995 Billmeier had already won gold medals in the Paralympic Games of 1992 and 1994. By the time she retired from competitive skiing in 2001 she had won 13 Paralympic medals and six world championship titles.

Serious competitive skiing became an outlet for all of Dartmouth’s winter Paralympians not in spite of their disabilities but because of them. “I wouldn’t have been an athlete without my disability,” says Burnett, who was paralyzed below the waist in a car accident at the age of 5 and took up skiing seven years later.

“Paralympians are a unique group in sports,” says Ramona Hoh ’02, a three-time medalist for Canada who was born without fingers on her right hand. “Whatever it is that qualifies you to compete is not a liability, so you’re not disabled.”

The Vancouver Games will also be Campbell’s Olympics, the crowning achievement in a public service career that began in 1969 in Vancouver City Hall during a summer internship between his junior and senior years at Dartmouth.

In September, as 12,000 volunteers prepared for the Olympic torch relay around Canada, Campbell spoke about British Columbia’s once-in-a-lifetime chance to show the world why its license plates proudly state: “The Best Place on Earth.”

“The Olympics comes and it goes and you don’t get it back,” says Campbell. “There’s an enormous doorway of opportunity, and it is already starting to close. So we need to make sure we walk through that doorway and keep it open for the long term.”

That opportunity will showcase British Columbia, a sprawling province along Canada’s mountainous west coast that has a bigger land area than any U.S. state except Alaska. It’s home to Whistler Blackcomb, one of North America’s finest winter resorts, a majestic coastline with more than 6,000 islands and a vibrant urban center in Vancouver. Home to about half of the province’s 4 million people, the city just opened a long-awaited mass transit line to its airport.

Campbell, who loves skiing the deep powder at Whistler’s Seventh Heaven, is holding out hope that Canada’s athletes—especially its hockey teams—can bring home gold medals in February. Campbell didn’t play much hockey growing up, but he skated well enough to land on an intramural team at Dartmouth.

“They figured I was from Canada so I’d be good,” he recalls. “I played three games. I scored three goals. Then I hung up my skates.”

Campbell’s support for bringing the Olympics to Vancouver dates back to the 1990s, when he served as leader of the B.C. Liberal Party, the right-of-center party then in the minority, with strong ties to the province’s business community. After the Liberals’ landslide victory in 2001, when the party won an unprecedented 77 of 79 seats in the legislature, Campbell was named premier and stepped up the campaign to bring the Olympics to British Columbia. He was among seven Canadians, including hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who in 2003 made the case for Vancouver to the Olympic organizing committee in Prague.

The city won on the second ballot, beating out PyeongChang, South Korea, by just three votes—“Our landslide,” as Campbell jokingly calls it. “We jumped into it, we pushed hard and once we were selected it has been full speed ever since,” he says.

Subsequently the provincial government, with Campbell at the helm, has become intimately involved in the Games. He won backing for close to $800 million (Canadian) for the construction of Olympics venues, which included the construction of practice facilities in communities far from Vancouver (to ensure that provincial tax dollars were spread throughout the region). He has worked closely with the Vancouver organizing committee (VANOC) on issues involving transportation, security and the environment.

He has also served as an Olympics ambassador, helping round up corporate sponsorships and aid from Canada’s other provinces while forging agreements on involvement by four of the province’s 203 indigenous tribes, or First Nations, as they are called. The First Nations will be the first aboriginal hosts in Olympics history, and by the fall of 2008 First Nations’ companies had received contracts for construction and services totaling $53 million. The 2010 Games logo is based on a symbol from the Inuit peoples in Canada’s north.

“The Olympics can help unify the world and can also help unify our country,” says Campbell.

Unlike other recent Olympics, there won’t be any nail-biting over whether the 15 venues created for the Games—from the bobsled run to the 120-meter ski jump to the skating oval—will be done by the time athletes arrive. The venues were completed nearly a year ago, giving Olympic organizers time to work out the kinks during competitions held in 2009.

Campbell visited each site during construction. After a facility was completed he returned for a ceremony during which he draped a gold-plated medal around the neck of each construction worker.

“Anytime we needed Gordon he was there, and when we didn’t want him involved he didn’t need to be there,” says VANOC executive vice president Dan Doyle. “He’s a terrific guy to have on our team. And once he commits to something you can’t move him off it.”

Campbell launched his political career in the riding—that’s Canadian for district—where he grew up: Vancouver’s West Point Grey neighborhood, not far from the University of British Columbia. His father, a physician who taught medicine at the university, committed suicide when Campbell was 13. His mother, a kindergarten assistant, then raised Gordon and his three siblings. He arrived in Hanover in 1965, intent on studying the sciences on a premed track, but a freshman seminar with English professor Jim Atkinson quickly changed his intellectual bent. Campbell turned to English, history and the liberal arts.

He fell in love with Chaucer and coincidentally joined Tabard, named for the watering hole in The Canterbury Tales where pilgrims stopped to tell their stories. He was at Dartmouth during the tumult of the late 1960s, with the contentious race for president in 1968 and debate over the Vietnam War.

He married his Vancouver sweetheart, Nancy, soon after graduation and they set off for Nigeria to teach for two years with the Canadian University Service Overseas, the nation’s version of the Peace Corps. Not long after returning he began his political career by working on the mayoral campaign of Art Phillips, for whom he had worked during his college internship.

Today, Campbell, 62, known as “Gord” among friends, sports a shock of snow-white hair combed to the side and dark-framed glasses and often appears without a tie. He enjoys getting out in public and doesn’t shy away from dressing up—or down—for the occasion. To kick off a school hockey tournament he’ll come dressed in a Vancouver Canucks jersey. To promote cancer research he’ll don his cycling togs, bike cleats and helmet to ride alongside Lance Armstrong.

He finds respite from the pressures of public service at his summer cottage at Half Moon Bay, nestled on the coastline about 60 miles north of Vancouver. There he has been spotted in his Dartmouth sweatshirt and cap, paddling along the coast where seals sun themselves along the rocky shores.

“Up there he’ll let his hair down and be completely relaxed,” says Jim Moodie, a longtime friend. “He has two personas—Gordon, the premier who is very driven and very professional, and Gord, who likes to paddle around with a group of friends for an hour or two.”

On the public stage he’s known as a decisive leader who often delivers speeches without notes, encourages lively debate behind closed doors among cabinet ministers with differing opinions, and has won legislative approval for North America’s first carbon tax in 2008. The tax, set at $10 per metric ton and scheduled to rise $5 per year to $30 in 2012, is designed to cut the use of fossil fuels and address concerns about global warming. It should help reduce carbon emissions in Canada by a third by 2020, according to the British Columbia Ministry of Finance.

“Every once in a while you’ve got to ask: What’s the best thing to do? and then get on with it and take the consequences,” says Campbell, who won his third term as premier in May, when his party won a majority of 11 seats. “If you don’t believe in what you stand for there’s no reason anyone should back you up.”

After the election he pushed through legislation that combined the federal goods and services tax with the provincial sales tax to create a 12 percent sales tax in the province. The new tax, which will save businesses up to $2 billion and improve the province’s international trade, spurred thousands of B.C. residents to 20 protest rallies, where they demanded that Campbell’s Liberal Party change its position.

“There is a natural tendency in public life to postpone the difficult decisions, but Gordon has never done that,” says B.C. Attorney General Michael de Jong, a longtime Campbell friend. “He is someone who is drawn to difficult decisions and he has a passion for engaging people on these issues.”

When February arrives in 2010, more unforeseen difficult decisions are certain to arise as the world’s eyes settle on British Columbia—and Campbell.

“This will be the first time I give a speech to 3 billion people,” he says, noting the anticipated worldwide audience for the opening ceremonies. “The Olympics spawns hope in people. It has created such an opportunity for us, and it’s important for us to build on that.”

David McKay Wilson, a New York-based freelance journalist, has contributed to DAM since 2004.

This is a corrected version of what appeared in the magazine.

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A. Roger Ekirch ’72, a history professor at the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, has earned the university’s 2009 Alumni Award for Excellence in Research. Ekirch studies American and European history and most recently published At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, an analysis of how preindustrial Westerners lived during the nocturnal hours.

Jonathan Bagger ’77, Johns Hopkins vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral programs and a physics and astronomy professor, has been elected to the board of directors for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a NASA-funded consortium of institutions studying health risks and treatments related to long-duration spaceflight.

Sandy Wood ’77, head coach of the University of Rhode Island women’s tennis team for the last five years, was named the 2009 A-10 Coach of the Year after leading his team to a 15-4 overall record.

Allison Exall ’87 of Dallas-based firm Curran Tomko Tarski, LLP, has been named a 2009 Best Lawyer in America in environmental law in the annual U.S. News & World Report listing, as well as one of Texas’ top environmental lawyers by Who’s Who Legal.

Henry Tisdale, Adv’78, president of Claflin University, last spring received an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University, where he delivered the honors convocation address. Under his leadership, Claflin earned top honors from Forbes.com, which in 2008 listed the South Carolina university among the top 5 percent of America’s best colleges and the best historically black university.

Evelyn Stevens ’05 won the four-day Fitchburg Longsjo Classic in Massachusetts, one of the most prestigious stage races on the National Racing Calendar circuit. Stevens, who is in her first season of competitive bicycle racing, rode as an amateur guest with the Lip Smacker pro team.

Ann McLane Kuster ’78 threw her hat in the ring for New Hampshire’s second congressional district seat in June. “I’ve been very involved in Democratic politics, but I’m not a career politician. I’m a community activist at heart,” the Concord, New Hampshire, lawyer, who was profiled in the May/June 2008 issue of DAM, told the Valley News. Kuster’s maternal grandfather, Lloyd Neidlinger ’23, was an all-American football player and served as dean of the College from 1934 to 1952.

Success magazine detailed in its June issue how Patrick Byrne ’85 took American’s love of outlet shopping, combined it with a memorable TV ad campaign and award-winning customer service, and built a $60 billion Web-based business during the past 10 years. Overstock.com sells almost 700,000 closeout items online, with annual sales nearing $1 billion. “Whether it’s a high-end or a low-end product we have it, and we sell it at the best prices,” said Byrne, an Asian studies and philosophy major who was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

His parents were Colombian immigrants and his father worked at McDonald’s, so Sebastian Restrepo ’07 assumed Ivy League colleges were out of reach. But a private college counselor he met by chance steered him toward Dartmouth and, as Restrepo told the Columbus Dispatch last May, “The only thing she asked from me is to help someone else through the [college] process.” Through his new HighRise program, Restrepo this summer matched 12 low-income Columbus, Ohio, high school seniors with recent college graduates who serve as mentors and will assist with college applications.

As an undergraduate Mara Rudman ’84 took a seminar that examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As chief of staff of President Obama’s National Security Council the Harvard Law School grad will work to implement the president’s goal of creating a Palestinian state. “Mara manages to be simultaneously incredibly tough-minded and yet optimistic,” Daryl Press, the Dickey Center’s War and Peace Studies coordinator, told the Boston Globe in May. “She feels strongly that the president is making this a real priority and as a result she thinks that there is a real possibility for breaking the logjam.”

During his sophomore year, when Dailan Long ’07 was searching for a research paper topic for his environmental justice class, he found one in his back yard: A power company was planning to build a 1,500-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Burnham, New Mexico, where his mother’s family and Navajo ancestors have lived for generations. Long is now helping to lead the fight against the Desert Rock power project, which he says will pollute the area’s air and water. “I feel that the community has called me to be here and has entrusted me to do this work,” Long, who ultimately plans to go to medical school, told the Associated Press in June.

For 10 days in late May and early June The Daily Show producer Tim Greenberg ’92 and correspondent Jason Jones traveled around Iran to investigate American stereotypes about the nation for a special report, Jason Jones in Iran: Access of Evil. “The trip has been in the works for over a year, from back in the Bush era when he was calling Iran the ‘Axis of Evil,’ ” Greenberg told the New York Daily News in June. “We can’t tell you how many people came up to us, unprompted, and said, ‘The world thinks we’re all terrorists. We’re not.’ ”

Putnam Investments hired CEO Charles E. “Ed” Haldeman Jr. ’70 in 2003 to restore investor confidence after an improper trading investigation. In late June Haldeman, who also serves as chair of the Dartmouth trustees, resigned from Putnam, The Wall Street Journal reported, because he’d been asked to help rescue another troubled company: Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage company that fell into government receivership last summer. “He has a humanistic demeanor that doesn’t diminish from his ability to make hard decisions,” fellow Dartmouth trustee Pamela J. Joyner ’79 told the Boston Globe in July.

This summer the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction, Vermont, exhibited works by Peter Michael “Mike” Gish ’49 and his son Peter Anthony Gish ’84. The father also has two sets of murals on permanent display at the hotel. He painted them in 1950 at the suggestion of revered Dartmouth philosophy professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. The murals, which depict Vermont scenes and history, can be viewed any time.

Who’s the hottest senator on the Hill? The Huffington Post polled readers last June and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand ’88 was runner-up to Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell. Third place went to Indiana’s Evan Bayh.

Roy Rowan ’41 wrote of his opposition to aging gracefully in the April issue of Smithsonian. “So many of my contemporaries have given up and let themselves disintegrate during what they facetiously call their ‘golden years,’ ” Rowan wrote. “For me it’s a matter of doing the things I’ve always done. More slowly, for sure, but more thoughtfully too.”

“It took me almost a quarter of a century to find the proper way to get my words and pictures married. At Dartmouth I couldn’t even get them engaged.”

“English and writing was my major, but I think that’s a mistake for anybody. That’s teaching you the mechanics of getting water out of a well that may not exist.”

“My animals look the way they do because I never learned to draw.”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

“Sometimes people find morals where there are none. People have read all kinds of things into Green Eggs and Ham, including biblical connotations. There’s a teacher—and this one nauseates me—who says the book’s message is that you shouldn’t make up your mind against anything until you’ve tasted it. I’m getting blamed for a lot of stuff I haven’t done.”

“I like children in the same way that I like people. There are some stinkers among children as well as among adults.”

“If you sat 50 years with your worms and your wishes, you’d grow a long beard long before you’d catch fishes!”

“I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children. I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my Standard Oil contract [drawing ads for Flit insecticide].”

“If you want to get eggs you can’t buy at a store, you have to do things you never thought of before.”

“[Maurice] Sendak has the courage not to be influenced by editors. Everybody said his book Where the Wild Things Are would drive kids crazy, and they love it. Like me, he isn’t writing for kids; he’s writing for all people.”

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

“The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the Cat cleans everything up at the end. It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t go quite as far as Lenin.”

“All my books are part of a war against illiteracy. I try to inspire children to read…to lure children to the printed word and just get them turning pages.”

“I disagree entirely with certain stiff-neck educators who say you shouldn’t trouble kids with adult problems. They see it, they hear about it, they know it’s there. You’re not telling them anything they don’t already know.”

“Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.”

“I think I’m part Grinch.”

“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-matuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond ‘Z’ and start poking around.”

“I still climb Mount Everest just as often as I used to. I play polo just as often as I used to. But to walk down to the hardware store I find a little bit more difficult.”

“I’d rather write for kids. They’re more appreciative; adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.”

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

“The last time I was being wheeled into an operating room the guy who was wheeling me stopped and gave me a sheet of paper to autograph. I think he was figuring on getting my last autograph.”

—Quotes compiled by Lee Michaelides

Maybe not every day, but the nonprofit group, which Marcuse established in 2004, does give members access to an impressive array of power brokers. Its guest speakers list reads like a Who’s Who of foreign policy and global development experts: officials from NATO and the U.N., deputy secretaries of State and Defense, a former CIA director and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I believe strongly in [YPFP’s] mission,” says Aspen Institute president and CEO Walter Isaacson, who has not only addressed the group but also helped it raise money by agreeing to an auctioned lunch date. “Josh seems very motivated and full of energy, and our public diplomacy as well as our foreign policy depends on people like that getting enthused about American foreign policy. I’ll learn more from them than they’ll learn from me.”

In addition to large events with prominent speakers, YPFP also hosts smaller, specialized discussion groups, spirited happy hours, a job advice network, a foreign policy blog and community service projects that target refugees and underperforming schools in Washington.

Animating Marcuse’s commitment to the organization is his abiding belief that the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world—notably global warming, AIDS, mass migrations, human trafficking, terrorism and insurgency—can be addressed effectively only by people from vastly different sectors working together. Hence the group’s commitment to bringing future foreign affairs experts together early in their careers for both serious discussions and socializing. It’s an effort to help them find some common ground, Marcuse explains, before they’re on opposite sides of an important issue, testifying at a congressional hearing or working out military and humanitarian operations in a war zone.

Marcuse, 27, is modest about his role in the organization, but he doesn’t downplay what he hopes it will achieve. “We want to create a community of future leaders,” he explains one day in his K Street office, space that’s loaned, along with access to meeting rooms, by a foreign policy think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “We want to give our members specific knowledge and training and relationships to enable them to succeed over a period of decades,” he says. “Ultimately that’s what we all came to Washington to do. We didn’t come to make money, we didn’t come to get famous—that’s what New York and L.A. are for. People come to Washington because they want to make the world better. And YPFP is trying to help them do that.”

Born out of informal discussion among friends, YPFP—with a 2008 budget of about $58,000 raised primarily at events such as dinners, concerts and auctions—has mushroomed into a chartered nonprofit with a membership approaching 5,000 people that includes everyone from young government and think-tank staffers to graduate students, lawyers, investment bankers and humanitarian aid workers. In January YPFP introduced $35-a-year dues but welcomes non-dues-payers to its larger events and job board. It has branches in Washington, D.C., London, New York and Brussels, a detailed membershipapplication process (which asks about education and job details, language proficiency, travel experience and involvement in foreign policy research) and a multi-tiered, corporate-style management structure. Several Dartmouth alums serve or have served in top positions, including Sean Oh ’04, who recently stepped down as vice president for finance, and Ben Bawden ’99, the group’s managing director for finance.

The twist? Of the approximately 175 staffers, all are volunteers who mine their contacts to attract speakers. Marcuse, for example, works full time at the defense-consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which gave him a six-month leave of absence last year so he could establish YPFP’s Brussels branch, develop a new Web site and recruit a network of advisors. Bawden is senior vice president at a lobbying firm run by Bobby Charles ’82, a former assistant secretary of state.

All this prompts Marcuse to describe the venture as “this great experiment.” The big question, he says, is “Can young people run a great nonprofit for young people with no resources and make it better than any organization that has a full-time professional staff and millions of dollars?” Moreover, he asks, can it be done by a group of workers who already have supercharged full-time jobs?

The son of two psychoanalysts, Marcuse thinks the appeal of YPFP is that it gives staffers a chance to gain significant management experience at a time when they may be at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy in their full-time jobs. Linda Jamison, Marcuse’s longtime mentor and a CSIS senior fellow, also thinks Marcuse is filling a need. “D.C. is a city of young people, and they’re looking for a way to network and to increase their knowledge and experience,” she says.

Jamison is not alone in recognizing his achievements. In December Marcuse was one of two recipients of a leadership award from the Student Movement for Real Change, an international nonprofit focused on combating poverty.

“There’s not much I can do as a 27-year-old today,” Marcuse says. “But if I can bring the right people to the table today, five, 15, 25, 30 years from now it’s going to have a huge impact.”

Kaitlin Bell is a freelance writer. She lives in New York City.

After buying the sleeping bag he took me to my first soccer game in 25 years. My last one took place next to Thompson Arena late on a clear and crisp fall afternoon, surrounded by flashing maples with the sky turning a shade found only in a Van Gogh painting. It featured me, an 18-year old freshman (or fresh “viman” as Dartmouth President John Kemeny would say—always with evident pride) who was less than fully formed in her head and her heart, but, like her oldest today, at the pinnacle of her physical prowess.

My mom always said that paybacks for parents were hell, but this one was great, stupendous actually. I would say there was a certain symmetry to the experience, but I have taken him to perhaps 3,000 soccer, basketball, baseball, football, hockey and lacrosse games and he was to take me to one. So it was decidedly asymmetrical, but extraordinarily cool nonetheless.

To come with me had been Jack’s idea and I had reluctantly agreed. When I came down the stairs, nervous about absolutely everything, he looked me over and very gently but firmly directed me to take off the cleats and socks. It turns out I am supposed to wear flip-flops to the field and then “gear up” at the site. Who knew?

I handed him the directions and we got in the ’99 Suburban, the very one that has carted a small world’s worth of sports equipment and water bottles, snacks, trash and sweaty boys. This time it was largely empty and clean, and he drove. We pulled into the parking lot, 10 minutes short of the requisite hour-in-advance. (Parents, children—it is always the same, get there an hour ahead of time so you can be sufficiently overheated and overanxious by game time.) “Whoa momma,” he points out, “those women look young!”

Thanks, Jack. I have signed up for an over-30 league. One of my most perspicacious friends explained to me that this means everyone will be between 30 and 32—definitely not 48. Ever the optimist, I didn’t believe her, but they are young indeed. Nobody else has gray up top and they don’t appear to be color-your-hair types either. I’m terrified, but he pushes me out of the car. I look back and his face is already buried in Sports Illustrated. I know then that of all the things I have taught him over the years perhaps the most important is to always have reading material ready and waiting in the car.

With great trepidation I approach one of the two groups of gathered women, praying that this is the Psychedelic Furs and not the opposition. The women nod, no extended introductions, and I am handed a jersey. I have forgotten my $25 in my purse in the car so I walk back. When I open the door Jack’s oversize smile greets me and he asks what’s wrong. I tell him nothing is wrong, yet. I just need money. He asks if they are nice. I say they are fine, I’m fine, don’t worry, and the radical role reversal is complete.

By game time he has ambled up to the field. I notice a couple of the women watching him, probably thinking: Who is this big, handsome young man and why is he watching us? I answer silently: He is watching me, just as I have watched him for many years, and I am so proud I could burst.

The whistle blows and I am going against a tall 31-year-old who has evidently played a hell of a lot of soccer, and recently. The first few minutes are brutal. They pass me the ball, but I throw it away. I cannot mark her—I can’t keep up with her. I can’t even breathe. But then I look up at Jack and he smiles, that magical and calm and poised smile, and I feel his warmth and confidence and I can run with them. I make a play and another and then there is a throw-in and I arc the ball up to my very husky and demanding young teammate (the same one who had said before the game that she couldn’t play many minutes because she has to save herself for Sunday football on the mall). She passes it back to me, and I blow by the defender and hear them all exclaim, “Nice play, Kate,” and I know it will be all right. I can run, I can handle, I can pass, but mostly I can hustle, because I have spent 18 years teaching my three sons, above all else, to hustle.

On the ride home Jack tells me I was great, more athletic than most of them. I wonder if he’s lying. I don’t think I ever lied to him. I have a lot of faults and character flaws, but sycophancy isn’t one. Still, I wonder, did some other soul slip that in to him along the way? With great seriousness he counsels me to practice all the time, every day—practice matters the most. And I know then he is mine, all mine.

By next Saturday he will be gone, so I will go to that game alone. But he was there for my first, just as I was at his first. Paybacks are stupendous.

Kate Silberman Balaban and her husband, Mike, live in Washington, D.C., with sons Jack, 19, Hank, 16, and Joe, 12. She watches lots of athletic contests when not practicing law at the Justice Department.

No hands went up.

“He snickered and said the Kinsey report said it was definite that two or three of us might never get married because we were gay,” recalls one of the students, Ed Hermance. The prof, he adds, was “almost taunting those of us who were in the closet.”

Indeed, Hermance kept his sexual orientation a secret. It’s no news flash that the College didn’t exactly extend a warm welcome to gays during the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Dartmouth has always had a complicated relationship with men who are not perceived as virile, masculine, athletic or outdoors-oriented enough,” wrote Allen Drexel ’91 in his senior thesis on the history of women and gay men at the College. “People who were not perceived as up to snuff in the manliness department were stigmatized and dramatically differentiated from the other guys, who used this alienating gesture to reinforce their own sense of self as real men.”

But 13 years after his graduation Hermance did out himself—to the entire alumni body—with a note to his class secretary, Arthur W. Hoover ’62, who ran it in the Alumni Magazine’s Class Notes in the June 1975 issue.

“Dear classmates,” he started. “During this lull in the flow of wedding, birth and promotion announcements, perhaps this is a good time for me to announce my non-marriage and rambling occupational motion, both of which stem from the fact that I’m gay. What follows is offered in the hope that reflecting on our common past and on my subsequent experience will be useful in changing the present, both at the College and in the many places we all are now.”

Hoover turned his entire column over to Hermance’s letter, which concluded with several calls to action, including “talk about gayness, homosexuality, etc. It doesn’t matter much what you say and think now, the talking itself is what’s needed. The silence is deadly.”

The silence didn’t last long. During the ensuing late 1970s Hermance started hearing from alums interested in forming a group that would support gay alumni and student interests. From his hometown of Philadelphia Hermance published a newsletter for a small following that began calling itself Dartmouth Lambda.

Around the same time gay students on campus started organizing in the face of glaring, and sometimes violent, discrimination. As Drexel described in his thesis (titled “Degrees of Broken Silence: Dartmouth Man, Gay Men and Women, 1935-1991”) the inclusion of women on campus and the “slow erosion of Dartmouth’s he-man mythology appeared to create an opening, however tiny, for the discussion [of homosexuality].”

When students such as Stuart Lewan ’79 and Bill Monsour ’77 formed support groups for gay students, they and others became targets of discrimination and ridicule. In one example from the early 1980s reporters from The Dartmouth Review reported on a confidential meeting of the Gay Students Association (GSA) and published the members’ private, personal stories.

So in 1983 Hermance sat down and wrote another letter responding to what he today calls a “crisis at the College.” Published in the May 1983 Alumni Magazine letters to the editor section, his letter called for student support and criticized the administration’s decision that year to eliminate sexual orientation from the list of grounds on which the College cannot discriminate. Hermance cited a letter from President David McLaughlin ’54, Tu’55, to the College’s affirmative action review board in which McLaughlin claimed “the affirmative action plan is the wrong place to make this statement [of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation]” because, he argued, it would only apply to employees and not students.

Hermance called on other interested alumni to contact him and organize against these policies and to support the GSA. “The response was just terrific,” he recalls. The following year McLaughlin reversed his position and the board of trustees voted to extend equal opportunity protection to gay and lesbian students in November 1984.

The small network Hermance had cobbled together from Philadelphia eventually moved its center to New York City, home to more alumni, and became the Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual