VOL. CLXXIII NO.81
RAIN HIGH 72 LOW 48
FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2016
Town passes three zoning ordinances
Students and professors respond to GRID panel
The Dartmouth Staff
The Dartmouth Staff
By MEGAN CLYNE
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HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Hanover residents voted on Tuesday to pass several zoning ordinance amendments that will directly affect construction plans on the west end of campus. These changes were a culmination of a three-year effort by the planning board to sort out and remove all inconsistencies in the current ordinances. Hanover Planning Board chair Judith Esmay identified three of 13 amendments relevant to the College’s plans for new construction that were proposed by the College. The first proposed amendment would increase building heights from 35 feet to 60 feet along the West Wheelock corridor, since 60 feet is the allowance for all other structures in the institutional zone. This amendment also included the provision of a 20-foot rear setback and 10-foot side setback from the GR-2 properties abutting the “I” district in this region of campus. This amendment affected the new building addition to the Thayer School of Engineering, which is still in the planning stage and has not yet received approval for construction. The new structure would be built in the Cummings Parking Lot adjacent to the current Thayer building and close to West Wheelock
street. The planned building’s location and height violated the existing law and resulted in the amendment proposal. According to the official town ballot, 601 people voted in favor of the amendment and 272 against it. Computer science professor Hany Farid, whose department will be housed in the new building, said compromises like these between the College and Town of Hanover are fairly common. Nonetheless, Farid said he was relieved after the amendments passed. If this request had been voted down, he said, it would cause problems for the computer science department and the College at large. Farid noted that the computer science department will share the building with Thayer when it opens in 2020, which will allow these two similar areas of expertise to be in closer contact. The new structure will also provide students with more wide open spaces to do their computer science assignments, Farid said. Another amendment directly impacting the College’s expansion plans included improvements to storm water SEE ZONING PAGE 2
By ZACHARY BENJAMIN
Jasbir Puar’s April 30 presentation at a panel sponsored by the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth remains controversial, both for its content and for attempts to record it. Puar, a professor of women and gender studies at Rutgers University who in the past has been accused of anti-Semitism for her writings and remarks about Israel, was invited to speak at the panel, entitled “Archipelagic Entanglements.” The panel was part of a larger seminar series organized by English professor Aimee Bahng and postdoctoral fellow Max Hantel entitled “Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialisms.” Puar was one of six speakers in attendance at the event. Puar’s talk, entitled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” was divided into three parts. She began with an overview describing the intentions of the project: to frame discussions about Israel and Palestine by combining various areas of study, including object-oriented
ontology, posthumanist theories, postcolonial theories, theories of settler colonialism and disability studies. Puar then described two examples that she said demonstrate “the mired forms of occupation today.” The first was a gated community built in the city of Rawabi by a Palestinian millionaire, the first of its kind in Palestine, she said. She claimed that despite its many luxuries, the community is devoid of water, and that construction was entirely dependent on receiving permission from Israel, which controls the territory. She also discussed controversies between solidarity activists, whom she described as critical of the project for its complicity with the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank, and the property developer, whom she said characterized the project as a counter-settlement strategy. Puar also discussed what she described as Israeli control over Palestinian telecommunications networks. She discussed forms of “digital fragmentation” that separate geographical
areas of Palestine from one another, making it difficult for them to communicate. Puar also criticized the presence of checkpoints in the West Bank and the rise of technologies meant to relieve the boredom of waiting to pass through, saying that they implicitly support and profit from the occupation. More generally, Puar was critical of what she saw as dehumanizing attitudes that emphasize the use of technology at the expense of human life. “Algorithmic computations are rationalized in the service of a liberal yet brutal humanism and humanitarianism, whether through the calculation of deaths of Hamas, where 28 deaths are humanitarian killing and the 29th death is collateral damage, or the perfection of drone technology as a sublimated rationale for killing of Gazan civilians,” she said. The second part of Puar’s lecture was largely a summary of a previously published paper, entitled “The Right to Maim: Disablement and Inhumanist Biopolitics in Palestine.” SEE PUAR PAGE 3
College releases survey results and diversity report
By SONIA QIN
The Dartmouth Staff
Approximately 21 percent of Dartmouth’s community members have personally experienced exclusionary, offensive or hostile conduct in the past, according to results released last week from the fall campus climate study. A total of 781 undergraduate
students, 336 graduate students, 25 post-doctorate or research assistants, 368 faculty and 1,243 staff members participated in the survey. Based on the results, gender non-conforming survey respondents experience more hostile conduct compared to women and men, while participants of color and multiracial participants experience more
hostile conduct than their white counterparts. Respondents of color also indicated that they believed the hostile conduct was based on their ethnicity. The study, conducted last October, is the College’s firstever extensive community study examining campus climate. A working group of faculty, staff and students organized the study and contracted Rankin and
Associates, a consulting firm, to help analyze collected data. The study was initially announced as a part of College President Phil Hanlon’s “Moving Dartmouth Forward” policy initiative. In the winter, the College formed three working groups to pursue conversations on diversity and inclusion with input from students, faculty and staff. Dean of the College Rebecca Bi-
ron and vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer chaired the student working group; vice provost for academic initiatives Denise Anthony chaired the faculty working group. Ahmed Mohammed, director of talent acquisition in human resources chaired the staff working group. Recommendations from SEE DIVERSITY PAGE 2