The Dartmouth Saga

Greetings From Hanover

Featured image We are wrapping up an enjoyable trip to the East Coast, starting on Wednesday when we flew to New York for PJ Media’s Duranty Prize dinner, which I reported on here. We stayed at the Union League Club, a fine old institution. I took this photo of my youngest daughter in the club’s Lincoln Room, which features portraits of all the presidents. Well, not quite all the presidents: just the »

Live from Dartmouth

Featured image Jill Biden made news introducing her husband at Dartmouth yesterday afternoon, testifying that she has seen Joe up close, making a wide motion with her hands. The reaction of the students in attendance strongly suggests what was on their minds, though Vice President Biden’s remarks predictably focused on the size of handouts rather rather than hands out of size. Biden effectively embroidered his pitch with allusions to the Romney video. »

A portrait of Dartmouth’s most important critic

Featured image The Valley News provides an informative, balanced profile of our friend Joe Asch. Joe writes the Dartblog, an indispensable source of information about developments at Dartmouth College, from which three of the four Power Line authors graduated. Our publisher, Joe Malchow, started Dartblog in 2004, when he was a freshman. Recently, as the Valley News says, Joe Asch has broken several big stories on Dartblog, including one about fraternity hazing »

Who played whom at Dartmouth?

Featured image Dartmouth president Jim Kim is leaving the College after only three years to become head of the World Bank. Scott reported about this development here. Kim made good use of Dartmouth. It represented a relatively prestigious place to hang his hat for a few years until the Obama administration came to its senses and found a suitably important place for him. And his Dartmouth connection with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner »

Dartmouth’s problem now the world’s…

Featured image or at least the World Bank’s, with the formal appointment of Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim as the bank’s new president. President Kim stuck around Dartmouth barely long enough to get his ticket punched (not quite three years). He is the shortest-serving Dartmouth president since the reluctant Rev. Daniel Dana (1820-21) who, unlike Kim, made his distaste for the position clear prior to his appointment. Except for Kim’s apparent lack »

Sweet smell of success (WTF? edition)

Featured image In the adjacent post I describe Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim as unqualified to head the World Bank — the position to which he has been nominated by President Obama — but that may be too charitable. His views on global economic development (the mission of the World Bank) are so wide of the mark they are scary. He appears to believe that the rest of the world is »

Sweet smell of success (World Bank edition)

Featured image Today President Obama nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. The New York Times reports on the nomination here, the AP here. President Kim stuck around Dartmouth barely long enough to get his ticket punched (not quite three years). Except for his apparent lack of relevant background for the position — no one had guessed that Kim was in the running for the nomination — »

Speaking of Metamorphoses

Featured image I have a few regrets related to my undergraduate education at Dartmouth. One of them involves a course I didn’t take. Having taken a fantastic Latin course on Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses from Classics Professor Edward Bradley in the winter of 1970 — that’s me with my old copy of the Metamorphoses in the photo with Professor Bradley at the left — I signed up for his course on the »

Dartmouth’s cult of personality

Featured image A long-time reader with connections to Dartmouth College can’t decide whether he’s more amused or appalled by what he calls the “Kim worship” on display in the latest issue of the Alumni Magazine. The issue features a 17-shot photomontage of Dartmouth president Jim Kim, plus an odd image of Kim which our reader compares to the style used to idealize certain left-wing dictators (as well as Barack Obama during the »

A Dartmouth memory

Featured image I started writing for The Dartmouth daily newspaper as a reviewer in the fall term of my freshman year in 1969 and continued to write for the paper until I graduated. I reviewed plays, books, and films. Writing for the paper, I also interviewed campus visitors such as the literary critic Alfred Kazin, the sculptor Elbert Weinberg, and the one and only William F. Buckley, Jr., all now deceased. As »

Two under 30

Featured image Forbes has compiled an impressive list of 30 under 30 (years old) deserving recognition in law and public policy. Taking a place of honor on the list is our own publisher, Joe Malchow (age 26): “Stanford Law student and conservative activist co-founded Internet advertising firm Integer.” Having founded and manned Dartblog as a Dartmouth freshman, Joe has provided invaluable assistance to us on Power Line since he was a sophomore »

Sweet smell of success, cont’d

A long-time Power Line reader who follows events at Dartmouth closely calls our attention to a letter from former Dartmouth professor Jon Appleton to Joe Asch of Dartblog. Professor Appleton parted with ways with Dartmouth after Carol Folt, then the Dean of the Faculty and now the Provost, ruled that any students in his course who so chose could elect to receive a “credit” rather than the letter grade given »

Sweet smell of success

The Washington Post has edited its interview with Dartmouth President Jim Youg Kim into the video below. Paul commented on the video here and here. It’s a thought-provoking video. President Kim quotes his father and cites his father’s role in his his professional accomplishments. President Kim’s father was an immigrant unbound by the constraints of political correctness. Steering his son away from the study of philosophy as an undergraduate at »

About Those Roses

Asked where they had their most memorable campus experiences, Dartmouth students polled back when I was an undergraduate most frequently identified the Hopkins Center for the Arts. It is certainly the site I would have identified if asked. I still recall, to take just one example, the one-man show derived from the works of Samuel Beckett that Jack MacGowran performed at the Hop’s Moore Theater just before MacGowran died in »