Voices, a new student group hosting events that enable members of the Dartmouth community to listen and converse with some of the College's most unique students, professors and administrators, is now seeking College recognition.
The group, founded by Grayson Allen '97, Kenji Hosokawa '98 and Ken Yasuhara '98 in the spring of 1995, invites members of the College community to speak to and converse with an audience about a topic of the speaker's choice.
Dean of First Year Students Peter Goldsmith will serve as Voices' first faculty advisor, Yasuhara said, although he indicated that the group may want to have multiple advisors as it increases the scope of its activities.
Instead of passively listening, the audience joins the speaker in a discussion of the topic and related issues.
This term, the group has been working on achieving official College recognition.
As part of the recognition process, Voices has drafted a constitution for the Committee on Student Organizations to review.
The document details the operation of the group and grants a great deal of power to its Advisory Board, which will be open to any student that has attended two Voices gatherings over the past three terms.
This body will select speakers and make decisions about any other activities the group wants to branch out into.
A smaller executive board will carry out the decisions of the Advisory Board.
Hosokawa said the group is "nearly done" with getting recognition from COSO.
At first, the administration was a bit skeptical that Voices could succeed because of the past failure of similar campus groups, Yasuhara said.
During the Summer term, Rohit Chandra '98, Lisa O'Brien '97, Hosokawa and Yasuhara, will act as the executive board of Voices.
"Starting in the fall... we'll get the Advisory Board up and running," O'Brien said.
Hosokawa said Voices "was originally based on an event at my high school, Phillips Exeter Academy, which was called 'Meditation'."
Every week, "faculty members would be invited to speak on a matter of personal significance for 15 to 20 minutes," he said.
A casual conversation about "life in general at Dartmouth," between Hosokawa, Yaushara and Allen led to their effort to institute similar discussions at Dartmouth, Hosokawa said.
Taking Meditations as their model, Voices modified its format to include audience participation and a greater variety of speakers.
"It is an interaction that Voices encourages," Hosokawa said.
"We make an effort to have a professor, a student, and someone from the administration" each term, Yasuhara said and noted that the pool of potential speakers shows no signs of running dry.
"We choose from such a wide range of speakers that inevitably they appeal to different audiences," Yasuhara said.
In the past, former Assistant Dean of Freshmen Tony Tillman, Government Professor Roger Masters and Iason Demos '97 have spoken at Voices' gatherings.
This term, Voices has organized gatherings featuring Kevin Walsh '98, Professor William Cook and Professor Donald Pease.
Walsh will be speaking on "Heresy and Liberal Education" next Tuesday, July 9, at 9:00 p.m., while Cook, who will be featured on July 17 at 8:00 p.m. will discuss "Eating the Peel and Throwing Away the Orange: The Black Movement as Window-dressing for Anti-black Issues," according to an electronic mail message from Yasuhara.
Both gatherings will be held at the Top of the Hop. Pease, who will speak on August 7, 8:00 p.m. in the Wren Room, has not submitted a topic yet.
The current leaders of Voices said they are pleased with the group's growth so far.
"I've been pretty consistently happy with how things have been progressing," Hosokawa said.
Yasuhara said the group has always been able to rely on consistent, intelligent audiences at its events.
Yasuhara said Voices' future will be determined by the amount of student support it receives and said the group is always looking for students who want to help out "to whatever extent they can."
He mentioned that a newsletter, a World-Wide Web page and creating an archive of meetings were possible future projects, and said the group was interested in creating a central listing of all extracurricular academic events.
Yasuhara also said more talks per term was a possibility, but "we don't want to cramp the schedule too much."
