My letter to President Jim Yong Kim of Dartmouth College

Dear President Jim Yong Kim

28 December 2009

Best of luck in what portends to be a brilliant and long tenure riding herd on the Earth Ox that is Dartmouth College. I have every assurance from reading your press and my strong intuition that your presidency will not be a public relations, internecine, and financial disaster like that of your predecessor James Wright who, among other things, turned the Dartmouth investment portfolio into a conventionally contrived hedge fund.[1]

The most enduring of my many distinctions in my association with Dartmouth College might be receiving my degree in 1993 twenty-nine years after my original class of 1964 graduated – a record as far as I know. This eclipsed my father Wayne’s [class of 1937] record for the 16 lb. hammer throw which stood for twenty-five years. I was also, in real life, if there is such a thing, the person responsible for the ‘Deltas’ – Alpha Delta Phi – being put on double secret probation by then Dean Thaddeus Seymour.

Rants aside, I am writing to tell you that my Dartmouth education, despite being severely marred by an acute drinking problem, has enabled me to lead an incredible life, which, to my knowledge, does not appear to be diminishing. Among other things;

1. I entered the computer business in 1962 after being expelled for two years by Dean Seymour. After leaving Dartmouth in 1966 having completed my four years but not being granted a degree, I worked on the Apollo moon landing project in Houston and Cape Kennedy and continued working as a computer data communications consultant for almost twenty years.

2.  It was my good fortune to stop my drinking addiction at age thirty-one in 1973 and as a by-product suffered an overwhelming spiritual conversion experience.

3. I stopped any regular employment at age thirty-nine. Over the past many years I have been to India, where I had a guru, fourteen times and the Mt. Everest area eight times, including two weeks in June 2009 at age sixty-seven.

4. About a year ago I moved to Los Angeles as I had no where else to go. Since then I have gone broke, landed a speaking part on a large IBM commercial, gone to Nepal for a month, camped with my dog for six weeks at Lake Tahoe, the Sierras, and Death Valley, and am now looking for more work as an actor.

5. Strangely, as a survivor of a severe case of bulbar polio at age fourteen and much later Lyme’s disease, and barely able to walk for ten years due to a worn out hip joint which only got replaced two years ago by Medicare, I am now able to consider attempting to become the oldest American to summit Everest.

My creative genius was greatly furthered by my liberal education at Dartmouth – although a chemistry major I excelled in art and classics courses. In LA now my life appears to be totally about my body – how I ‘look’ at auditions, my weight, etc. – it’s a joke. I think I should be addressing myself to writing a new constitution for the United States of North America but I keep getting interrupted to audition and hike thirty to fifty miles a week to stay in shape.

Get a hold of me if you come to LA – we can schmooze.

Carlos Ballantyne ‘64 – Seal

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[1]

Dear Mr. Ballantyne:

Dartmouth's endowment is overseen carefully and very capably by Chief Investment Officer David Russ. Over the past years, returns have been excellent, with gains in every asset class. The College is not immune to the current upheavals in national and global markets. No one is.

Sincerely,

James Wright

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Sir:

 

I demand that 50% of Dartmouth’s endowment be parceled out over a small range of independent creative financial managers. There are many who have done well in the very – not tough – CREATIVE investment environment that has been long predicted by many savvy followers of the markets.

 

Some of the managers who come to mind include;

George Soros

Roy Niederhoffer

John Paulson

Jim Rogers

 

If you are unable to locate these people or the funds they operate let me know.

I learned to think creatively, critically and, most importantly, independently, while at Dartmouth, something the financial overseers at the Little Green have failed at abysmally.

Carlos Ballantyne

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12/28 addendum:

I additionally fault the involvement of many of the Board of Trustees who work in the ‘investment’ business particularly the Chairman who I would tell, given the opportunity, right to his face he is malfeasant.

I also refuse to contribute one penny to Dartmouth College until it razes that monstrosity Webster Hall which has been transmogrified into a ‘library’ by a misguidedly accepted donation. The symmetry of the Baker Library and the whole green is set askew by this granite blight.