HANOVER
The president of Dartmouth College has apologized for a string of incidents this fall that many American Indian students viewed as racist.
In an e-mail sent to students, president James Wright urged students to do more to make the university a welcoming and respectful place.
“They are members of this community … they are your classmates and your friends,” Wright wrote of the American Indian students. “And they deserve more and better than to be abstracted as symbols and playthings.”
The American Indian Council, a group made up of faculty, staff and a few students, took out an advertisement in the student newspaper describing a troubling series of events.
According to the ad, fraternity pledges disrupted an American Indian drumming circle on Columbus Day, and earlier this month, the crew team held a “Cowboys and Indians” theme party. Team captains later apologized.
Though the school discontinued its unofficial American Indian mascot in the 1970s, some students and alumni have continued to use it. The Dartmouth Review, a conservative, independent student newspaper, gave incoming freshmen T-shirts featuring the symbol. And at Homecoming, at least one Dartmouth student sold shirts depicting a rival school’s mascot performing a sex act on a “Dartmouth Indian,” the university said.
