The long-planned Life Sciences building (”The Hanover Life Sciences Building,” i.e. not a building on the Medical School’s Lebanon campus) will enclose about 142,000 square feet, comprising four large classrooms, eight seminar rooms, eight teaching laboratories, and as many as thirty research labs. Although its mission as a joint College-Medical School facility makes it seem somewhat similar to Gilman, on the edge of the medical campus, preliminary maps are showing the new building somewhat north of the Modular Lab.

Less expensive than the chance to rename the Medical School is the chance to rename the main hall of Baker Library, at $10 million. The hall will be refurnished as a “Scholars’ Green,” a sort of slightly busy study room. Since the card catalogs were moved out, the place has seemed rather empty, and having something like another Tower Room would be nice. With Novack just downstairs, there would be no need to put in a screaming espresso machine.

Professor Richard Kremer, David Pantalony, and Francis Manasek have helped design an exhibit and have written a book about Dartmouth’s collection of historic scientific instruments.

General Sylvanus Thayer’s 1860s donation of $70,000 for a Thayer School of Architecture and Civil Engineering (1871) would be worth about $61.7 million today, after five percent annual compounding; Edward Tuck’s 1899-1929 donations for the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance (1900) would be worth about $121.4 million. It is harder to estimate how much the right to name the Dartmouth Medical School would be worth, since Dartmouth itself funded most of the cost of starting the institution in 1797 and has failed ever since to take advantage of the opportunity to name it for a benefactor. But now we know: the opportunity to name the Medical School is probably worth $150 million, which is the amount Dartmouth now seeks for that right, according to a Development Office brochure.

One wonders whether the school will be called the “[Name] Medical School” or shift to the “[Name] School of Medicine at Dartmouth College” to match the other two professional schools.

A granite post on North Main Street (visible to the left of the pickup in a Math Department photo) has been left up during the construction of the latest building adjacent to it, Kemeny Hall. The post appears to be the last surviving element of confectioner E.K. Smith’s 1868 house.

[Update 12.31.2006: construction photos showed the post lifted out of the ground, and photos of the completed Kemeny Hall do not show it.]

A somewhat disjointed article on Dartmouth’s local pre-soccer form of soccer, Old Division Football, has been posted.

The only information of any interest outside Dartmouth might be the conclusions, obvious enough but still not widely known, that:

1. The first soccer game in the world between two universities seems to have been the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869. Oxford and Cambridge did not play until 1872. (The Football Association wrote the rules of “soccer” in 1863, and Rutgers was using those rules, possibly with slight variations.) The story that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American gridiron football game before rugby had arrived is so obviously incorrect that it is hard to imagine why it is still told, yet it is the official line at Rutgers. Back then, soccer was called “football” and allowed the use of the hands, just not running with the ball.

2. The first college football game in the U.S. was the McGill-Harvard rugby game of 1874. College football and pro football as we know them today are descendants of the rugby that McGill played. The first college football game between U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875. Princeton, Rutgers, and the other schools that had been playing soccer dropped it and switched to rugby. All American football is played under the rules of rugby as used by Harvard and Yale and modified by them and their later competitors during the succeeding decades.