HANOVER — Dartmouth College has launched a working group to develop recommendations for what symbols and images to use after a longstanding weather vane atop Baker Library was removed following concerns raised by Native American students.
The campus iconography working group’s charge, which was announced earlier this month, includes the creation of guidelines for “institutional decision-making that promote historical accountability and align with Dartmouth’s core values and aspirations.”
The group consists of 12 students, faculty, staff and alumni, and was launched at the behest of Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon after the removal of the weather vane atop Dartmouth’s main library last summer.
The 600-pound weather vane, which was erected in 1928 and is now in storage at the Hood Museum of Art, depicts Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock sitting next to what the college acknowledges has long “presumed to be a barrel of rum” while lecturing to a Native American student, who is wearing feathers, smoking a long pipe and sitting on the ground.
Native American students and others called for its removal, saying it “flaunts a racist depiction” and also was a “patronizing and stereotypical depiction of Native peoples.”
The working group intends to provide a recommendation for an alternative to the weather vane.
Dartmouth art history professor Mary Coffey, the working group’s co-chair, said that the group’s intention isn’t to identify and remove imagery around campus that might be found problematic.
“The charge we’ve given ourselves is ‘what would be an equitable process for making those determinations as they arise, because they arise in all different kinds of ways,” said Coffey.
“Right now, the challenge that we have for the most part is that it’s extremely difficult to have conversations about these questions with the many constituencies that the College has. There are no real mechanisms for that.”
The working group is also seeking feedback from the Dartmouth community, asking such questions as:
-Are there aspects of Dartmouth iconography that the committee should be considering?
-How should the college communicate with and get feedback from the college’s “many stake holders;” and
–because “Dartmouth celebrates its sense of place as a defining element of the Dartmouth experience and the institutional identity, what about “the place” is most important to respondents, and why.
Coffey said that the working group is focused on ensuring that such moments of decision-making are also opportunities for education.
“This is an educational institution and a lot of times decisions are informed by scholarship and evidence-based practices. But they aren’t necessarily known, or people outside the academy might not be aware of these things.”
The working group hopes to make publicly available archival information, documentation, and bibliography to help people understand objects like the weather vane and their history at the college.
“We have a different understanding of the College’s iconography today because we have a much more diverse student body, who have different experiences and experience some of this imagery in a very different way from the people for whom it was originally made. And that has to be taken into consideration. It just has to be,” said Coffey.
Frances Mize can be reached at fmize@vnews.com.