Dartmouth inaugurated the Ivy League's first Asian-American university president on Tuesday: former Harvard Medical School professor Jim Yong Kim.

Addressing a crowd of over 5,000, Kim sought to allay the concerns of some critics that he may be too focused on the practical effects of medicine to appreciate the arts and humanities. But Kim did his share of name-dropping to show that a liberal arts education and leading a useful life often go together.

“Reading ‘The Tempest,’ debating Aristotle’s ethics or choreographing a dance are supremely practical activities," he said. "They provide the experiences of beauty and shared meaning which are central to building a more just world.”

Kim appropriately did not address the more racist criticisms that arose over one of Dartmouth's most widely circulated e-mail updates soon after he was named president in early March, including:

Unless "Jim Yong Kim" means "I love Freedom" in Chinese, I don't want anything to do with him. Dartmouth is America, not Panda Garden Rice Village Restaurant.

Whoever wrote that comment does not seem to have bothered to do a simple Google search: Kim is Korean, not Chinese.

Kim has had no apparent previous connections to Dartmouth—he did not study there and has not taught there—but his resume is very Ivy League-heavy. He graduated from Brown and earned his MD and Ph.D. from Harvard before teaching at Harvard from 1993 to 2009. Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Allan M. Brandt attended the inauguration ceremony as Harvard's delegate.

More Ivy League news, including the death of a racy 19th-century Stanford tradition because of swine flu, after the jump.

Stanford

Swine flu has claimed its first casualty at Stanford: Full Moon on the Quad, an illustrious tradition dating back to the late 19th century, where seniors make out with freshmen under the first full moon of the year. University administrators have canceled the event for this year, citing that it's a "recipe for disaster." It remains unclear how seniors and freshmen will compensate for the disappointment.

Yale, Cornell, Princeton

Senseless death seems to have become a recurring theme around the Ivy League. Only a couple of days after Yale pharmacology student Annie Le's body was found on the day she was supposed to get married, Sylvia Bingham, a recent Yale graduate who was passionate about social justice, died in a bike accident in Cleveland. As evidenced by the string of quotes that the Yale Daily News threw together, their reporting attention was still focused on Le. Warren Schor, a 20-year-old Cornell junior, also recently died of swine flu.

But most recently, Princeton's Eliot Ramsay Kalmbach ’09-’10, 24, died Tuesday afternoon after falling from a mountain in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. He was going on a cross-country trip with a friend before starting a technology internship this fall. According to his sister, Kalmbach was planning to finish his graduation requirements in the spring. Some online commenters have written that Princeton should give him a diploma post mortem in his honor.