Daily Debriefing
By Astrid Bradley And Allie Lowe, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The student loan company Sallie Mae will be bought by J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and two other New York-based private equity firms for $25 billion, Sallie Mae announced Monday. The company, which currently controls 23 percent of the nation's student loans, is the country's largest college student lender. The buyout agreement stipulates that Sallie Mae receive $200 billion in funding from the two banks - money that will allow the company to continue providing low-cost loans, even if it faces limited capital access in the future. The sale will likely raise concern among government officials and consumer advocacy groups, The New York Times reported. Sallie Mae has faced scrutiny from several Washington officials, who have argued for an end to the federal subsidies the company currently receives.
In campus-wide e-mail message, Rich King '06 Th'07 apologized to the Dartmouth community for his reference to Native American drum circles in an earlier e-mail that he sent Monday on behalf of Sustainable Dartmouth to advertise Earth Day. The original message invited students "to weigh our individual trash bags, make a big pile, take pictures, sunbathe, have a drum circle, smoke lots of pot." King said that the original e-mail was intended to make fun of the stereotypes traditionally assigned to hippies by American culture, not as a reference to Native Americans. "Drum circles are a very serious rite in many cultures and should not be trivialized in the context of those cultures," he said in the apology. King claimed sole responsibility for the incident, but neither he nor Sustainable Dartmouth could be reached for comment.