John Brady, left, a staff supervisor for the annual homecoming bonfire build at Dartmouth College, hammers in a nail as Cam Wright, center, a freshman at Dartmouth, holds a ladder in place and Christian Murray, also a freshman, sets a nail on Friday, Oct. 5, 2017, at the college in Hanover, N.H. Wright and Murray said it will be their first year helping out with and experiencing the annual bonfire. (Valley News – Charles Hatcher) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
More specifically, the town has said that it is unwilling to issue a permit for the college’s annual homecoming bonfire unless there are some significant safety upgrades.
Here’s the text of a letter that Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin sent to college officials last month:
And, yes, as you can see in this video from The Dartmouth student newspaper, touching the fire (or, in this case, pretending to) is a thing. We wrote about it in 2016, when arrests were up compared to the previous year.
Find a full story about the town’s demands in Tuesday’s Valley News.
Actress Mindy Kaling, a Dartmouth alumna, delivered the college’s commencement address on Sunday afternoon. You might have heard she was in Hanover this weekend, especially if you follow either Kaling or Dartmouth College on Twitter. The famous grad posted this pic outside her old dorm room on Saturday.
And then, on Sunday, she did something pretty epic: She acknowledged a Dartmouth meme Facebook group in her speech. Wigs flew.
Dartmouth Memes for Cold AF Teens, a collegiate meme group that actually is pretty dang funny, scored a shout-out from Kaling her address. From the speech (jump to 5:02 above if you wanna watch it go down):
I bet none of you remember a time before the internet. Hell, you probably don’t even remember a time before the Facebook page, “Dartmouth Memes for Cold AF Teens.” Yeah, yeah. I know about that. Made me feel like a real creep researching it. “Hello, I’m a 38‑year‑old woman who wants to join your teen Facebook group. It’s for research, I swear!”
In a post made to the meme group’s page shortly after, Class of 2020 student and group admin Luke Cuomo tagged Kaling and said, “Mindy, I will make you admin if you join the group.” He included a video excerpt of the moment Kaling mentioned the page.
The page’s banner and name also was changed to “Mindy Kaling Ultimate Fan Club” in honor of the recognition.
It’s Mindy’s world, we’re all just living in it. #living
Actor, writer and comedian Mindy Kaling delivers the main address at the Dartmouth College Commencement on Sunday, June 10, 2018, in Hanover, N.H. Kaling graduated from the Ivy League school in 2001. (Jennifer Hauck/The Valley News via AP)
RELATED: Check out the Valley News‘ full coverage of Dartmouth’s commencement ceremony here.
Dartmouth College this week rolled out a new, simplified logo as part of a branding redesign that administrators say will standardize the school’s “visual identity” and present a unified message to the world.
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(Students Zakios Meghrouni-Brown and Kendall Christensen) said they preferred the aesthetic of the shield, the history and academic gravitas of which they felt were lacking in the new symbol.
“It feels a little corporate,” Meghrouni-Brown said.
“Your kids are going to make a lot of money if they come here,” Christensen said, summing up the impression the “D-Pine” gave her.
Meanwhile, Joe Asch, of Dartblog, told the Valley News that “with the new logo Dartmouth has turned its back on its history.”
Not all of the reaction is negative, though. The students quoted above, from the Valley News article, noted that the old shield shows two Native Americans reading from an open book, which they were happy to see go because of its “depiction of Native people (that) spoke to an ‘assimilationist’ view of their place in American society,” calling it racist and imperialist. (The shield will continue to be used in some places.)
