Earlier today, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees announced that Harvard professor Jim Yong Kim would ascend the green presidential throne in Hanover. Dr. Kim was the chair of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and previously headed up the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department. Winner of a 2003 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Kim is now the first minority male to hold the office of president at an Ivy League college. He might also have super powers.

The news sent the publishers of Dartblog reeling all the way to the *DELETE POST* button as they had quite impressively announced the presidential pick earlier today. Must’ve been a bad tip since Dartblog’s pick, Jamshed Barucha, definitely did not get the job. Given his budgetary experience as Provost of Tufts, Barucha might’ve been a smart pick since Kim is already getting criticized for managing only $120 million for the measly WHO rather than something closer to Dartmouth’s strapping $700 million operating budget.

Nevertheless, Kim means business. According to his acceptance remarks, he’s getting started by mobilizing some global ambition in those earthy little woods-dwellers:

If we teach nothing else at Dartmouth, we must teach our students to find their passion, to aim high… work hard… and settle for nothing less than to transform the world. I know Dartmouth students can achieve anything to which they commit themselves.

Cue the triumphant return of Dartmouth mascot Keggy the Keg. Get the details after the jump.

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The day after I wrote about Keggy’s kegnapping, Deadspin reported that Keggy had been found, albeit “suffering one torn off eye and a badly damaged nose.” Since I was in a rush, and because blogs are particularly renowned for their reliability, I took Deadspin’s word for it and emailed Jacko Editor-in-Chief Dylan Kane that I had heard of Keggy’s glorious recovery, and that I wanted to hear about all of the juicy details relating to the incident.

He replied:

Um, definitely not! Who told you that? No, Keggy is still missing. I might as well give you the rundown, I never did over the phone:

We last saw him safely sometime over the summer. July, maybe? Definitely late June he was here.

He must have been missing by the end of August, because the room he was in got reassigned from patriotic, American, apple-pie, penis-joke-based publications (like us) to the international students’ orientation crew (not so much) at that time, and the people who did said reassigning say he wasn’t in there at the time they took it over, which was more or less the end of August.

He was locked to the table with a bike lock, which we found there, undamaged, without Keggy. So either someone knew the combination, or we were lazy and left it, like, one digit off from the combination. We really don’t know.

The mechanics of wearing a giant plastic cylinder are complicated. We use a modified frame pack inside, with some pieces of wood to support the top of the keg. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, but it beats the alternative, which is having no support and resting the keg’s entire weight on your upper shoulders and top of your receding hairline. It also comes with a costume: green tights, green t-shirt, white shorts, orange high-tops. So whoever took him took ONLY the shell. They can’t possibly wear the costume or look much like Keggy, because they left all that stuff behind.

So Keggy is, in fact, still M.I.A. After hearing that I re-read Deadspin’s post on Keggy and realized that the blog had mistaken Keggy’s current kegnapping with the Sigma Nu kegnapping incident in 2003. Since Jacko’s site only mentions the first incident (without a date) it’s easy to see how such a misunderstanding could arise.

Read the rest of Kane’s email after the jump.

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Keggy the Keg, quite possibly the coolest mascot in the history of the universe, has been kegnapped. According to a campus-wide missive sent by The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern – the comedy magazine that spawned the beloved anthropomorphic beer keg and was responsible for creative stunts like “Drinking Time” and, most recently, the “D.Y.E.” – staff members returned to campus during pre-orientation only to find that Keggy had been “forcibly abducted” from his home in room 205 of Robinson Hall.

For the uninitiated, Keggy the Keg is the unofficial mascot of Dartmouth, which is offically mascot-less. He rose to prominence in 2003, during the Student Assembly’s mascot search project, which was aborted after a poll showed that most students disliked the idea (who wouldn’t) of having a moose parading about during athletic events.

Who could possibly commit such an heinous crime? When I first heard about this I immediately thought of the College’s administrators. After all, at times they’ve been known for denying Keggy entry into sporting events, and since they run Dartmouth they could easily have abducted him when everyone was off-campus for the summer. But this question-and-answer on Dartmouth’s website seems to suggest a kind of resigned acceptance of Keggy, and plus his theft has been reported to both Dartmouth Safety & Security and the Hanover Police.

If anyone has any information about Keggy’s kegnapping, please – for the love a freeflowing tap and the safety of all those who reside in the backwoods of New Hampshire – notify Jack-O-Staff or the toughs at H-Po. Not only will you get the satisfaction of knowing that order has been restored in the quiet town of Hanover, but you’ll also get a boatload of free Keggy loot to boot.

From The Dartmouth’s annual “Hey, spring break just happened, think we can squeeze 500 words out of it?” newsstory, “Spring Breaks Run the Gamut”:

For some students life at Dartmouth is raucous enough and already resembles the revelry that students at other schools seek during their spring breaks.

“It’s like a perpetual spring break at Dartmouth,” Scott McKnight ‘11 said.

We always suspected Dartmouth was the odd Ivy out. A proposal: Instead of those latently classist “State Night” parties Ivy Leaguers like to throw (you know, party like a state school kid, drink beer through funnels, pretend you care about sports?) let’s switch to “Dartmouth Night.” It’ll be less classist but way more elitist, if the rank-counting hairsplitters on our comment boards have anything to say about it.

More on the Beer Bong of the Ivy League, after the jump.

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It’s all over, folks. Dartmouth is done. On September 8 all the lights went out in Hanover as Ed Haldeman, Chair of the Board of Trustees snuffed the candle of democracy once and for all. By adding eight (unelected) charter trustees to its membership, the Board has ensured it will never again be troubled by the niggling complaints of semiconductor tycoons and former Reagan speechwriters.

Nah, just kidding. Dartmouth’s still kicking, though things will never be as self-determined as they used to be. Yet I feel like as long as wikipedia pages like this one continue to be well-maintained, Dartmouth is going to be alright.

The response in the meantime from alumni has been vitriolic, to say the least, since naturally every step away from the 1891 constitution is a step into hell. One alumnus ominously comments in our inbox, “This stinks of Russia circa 1905. Sooner or later, there is going to be a catastrophic reckoning,” and threatens to withhold donations, “until democracy is reinstated.”

After the jump: dueling strongly-worded letters to alumni (I know, I know — why aren’t these thrilling documents before the jump?)

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