Daily Debriefing
By Drew Joseph And Susan Matthews, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Former Dartmouth Trustee Kate Stith-Cabranes ’73 will testify for the Democratic Party on Thursday in the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Stith-Cabranes currently serves as the Dean of Yale Law School, where she also holds the title of Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law. Academically, she specializes in criminal law, criminal procedure and constitutional law, according to the Yale Law School web site. Stith-Cabranes previously served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where Sotomayor later served as the youngest federal judge. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings began on Monday, and are expected to last through the end of the week.
Recent improvements in the stock and bond markets have curbed expected endowment losses at some of Dartmouth’s peer institutions, including Princeton University and Williams College, Bloomberg reported Monday. Princeton, which previously predicted endowment loses between 25 and 30 percent in the previous fiscal year, now estimates that it will have lost closer to 25 percent when calculations are complete, according to Bloomberg. Similarly, spokespeople from Williams told Bloomberg they believe they have not lost the 35 percent they had previously predicted. Schools like Harvard University and Yale University, however, have not readjusted their estimates, according to the news service.
The nomination of Robert Groves ’70, President Barack Obama’s choice for census director, was confirmed Monday by the Senate. Groves had been approved by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in May, after he promised during his hearings that he would not advocate approve the use of statistical sampling while overseeing the 2010 census, according to various news reports. A full Senate vote was then delayed for months by two Republican senators, who sought further assurance from the Obama administration that statistical sampling would not be used to conduct the census. Groves, a survey researcher at the University of Michigan and a former associate census director, gained notoriety among opponents of the controversial technique when he advocated for its use in the 1990’s, saying that traditional counting methods underrepresented minorities, recent immigrants, and the urban poor.