ADVOCATE OF PLENTY
The New Director of Admissions, the Many-Sided Albert I. Dickerson '30, Declares that Dartmouth Should Get More than Its Share of the Best Men
HIDDEN AWAY in the back corner of the old Faculty Room of Parkhurst Hall is the office of a man who has had as great a variety of administrative responsibilities at Dartmouth College as any other single person. His most recent acquisition is the title of Director of Admissions. In addition, Albert Inskip Dickerson '3O has been, at one time or another, Assistant to the President, Director of the Dartmouth College News Service, Executive Assistant to the President, Executive Officer of the College, Executive Secretary of the Alumni Fund, Chairman of Dartmouth College Publications, Clerk of the Board of Proprietors of The Dartmouth, member of the Council on Stu- dent Organizations, member of the Committee on Student Residence, clerk of the Committee Advisory to the President and member of the Board of Directors of the Dartmouth Eye Institute. In addition he has been class secretary of 1930 and the editor of the famed Bulletin, a mimeographed news sheet "with a total paid circulation of zero."
In view of his multitudinous tasks, one would expect the Dickersonian sanctum in Parkhurst Hall to be a bee-hive of activity, and that A.I.D. himself would be a hard man to see—perhaps able to sandwich you in for a few harried minutes. Paradoxically enough, the converse is true, and therein lies the great mystery of Al Dickerson. To the casual visitor, the alumnus back for an occasional glimpse of the College, it would appear that he is never busy. As you pass through the door of his office he's there, with an easy, sincere grin and a handshake, and he somehow manages to convey the impression as he settles comfortably into his chair that he's been just hanging around the office waiting for you to come in.
A few stray papers on the top of his crowded desk are shuffled into a semblance of order, and out comes the familiar Dickerson pipe and tobacco pouch and he's ready to talk as long as you are. For the occasional visitor, it appears to be a welcome break in the office routine to Al, but anyone connected with the administration of the College who has occasion to drop in several times a week is given the same friendly, unhurried reception. And there's the nub of the mystery—how can a man with the load of work Al Dickerson carries be always available, always ready for a chat, and still maintain the uniformly high caliber of both production and quality in his output? It's a question you can worry around and pry into at great length and then arrive at only a partial answer. Part of the answer lies in the bulging briefcase he habitually takes from the Ad Building to his Norwich home, every day of the week and over the weekends, but the greater part of the answer lies in the simple fact that Al is a very competent man with a large capacity for work.
Despite the quiet friendliness and good humor of the man, Al Dickerson possesses a large quantity of self-effacement and a good, balancing mixture of humility in his makeup. He had been in office as Director of Admissions but a few days when he casually asked a recent graduated editor of The Dartmotith who had shown an intelligent interest in admission problems if he "could drop into the office for a few minutes." A meeting was arranged for the following day, and the first words Al asked the graduate after they were settled down, were, "Just what do you think I ought to do about my new job?"
Despite his claims about the Bulletin's circulation, it is probably the most-sought-after publication of the College. Originally started by Professor Russell R. Larmon '19, in the dim, prehistoric days of the '20s, the Bulletin was and is intended to be the agency whereby alumni officers can maintain an inner-circle touch with Hanover and the College. Under the Dickerson editorship, which started in 1934 and is still spasmodically functioning, the chances of someone other than an alumni officer getting on the Bulletin mailing list are about as good as .Caspar Milquetoast's making Who's Who. Nothing delights Al more than engaging in a lengthy correspondence of good-natured disparagement with a nonofficial alumnus trying to make the mailing list. And most alumni who have chanced upon a stray issue of the Bulletin try in one way or another to become regular subscribers of it.
The reason for the demand for the Bulletin lies with the author and his prose style which still betrays its early heritage of his undergraduate Dartmouth column, "The Gilded Shovel," the literary living-room of Andy the Tapeworm and Lucinda the Louse. He possesses the knack of taking the grist of Hanover-Norwich-Dartmouth life and fluently and perceptively milling it into an interesting and palatable meal. The greater part of one war-time issue was devoted to one of the innumerable, seemingly endless Wilder Dam hearings and was one of the peaks that stand out above the extremely high level of his efforts. Whether he be writing of aircraft-spotting on a cold Norwich night, of the numbing, lung-searing bicycle ride down the Norwich Hill, across Ledyard Bridge and up West Wheelock Street to the Hanover Plain, or of his verbal proprietorship of a Hanover tree—the Bulletin Elm, which for many years was his office-window frame —the Bulletin from issue to issue mirrors the life of the College and the town with an amazing fidelity. Although editorially it is constantly on guard against becoming a "sports dope sheet," these mimeographed pages reflect the active, accurate and extremely competent interest in sports of their editor.
Yet the Bulletin is only one part of Al Dickerson. His main administrative function as Executive Officer of the College is, in effect, that of a vice-president; but there are probably a great many alumni who don't know him, and a smaller number who have never heard his name. Which might imply a failing in his main job were it not for the self-effacement of the mana rare lack of material ambition without the usual accompanying laziness. Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, he shows his Southern antecedents only in his calm, unhurried temperament. Twenty years of New England life have sharpened the edges of a Southern drawl so that his speech is more flatly mid-western than either Yankee or Dixie.
As clerk of the Board of Proprietors of The Dartmouth and ex-officio angel in the Administration Building for the wild-eyed undergraduates who people the back reaches of Robinson Hall, Al has on more than one occasion spoken in behalf of the hard-fought-for right of freedom of undergraduate expression, and has more than once quietly and effectively been the devil's advocate for some editor who got freedom and license mixed up or became a trifle too lax with his studies.
Although he is one of the easiest men in Hanover to see, he is also one of the hardest to interview. Whether you beard him in his office, downtown over coffee and English muffins, or at his Main Street manse in Norwich, he is always ready with, "You don't want to waste hard-to-get paper on me," and before you realize it he has you talking about books, yourself, sports, or anything else in the world but Albert Inskip Dickerson. You have a fine, easy time particularly at his home and maybe his wife, Lucia, will join you to add her trenchant wit to the conversation at hand, or son Gregory will give a performance of his marionettes or young Inskip will get you into a game of catch, and you leave after a leisurely bottle of beer or a drink. It isn't until you're back in Hanover and start looking for notes that you realize that, although you had a very enjoyable time, you learned very little about one Dickerson.
Perhaps the biggest single question since his appointment as Director of Admissions has been one asking of his qualifications, theories and experience as an educational administrator, particularly as the important keeper of the gates in Dartmouth's selective process of admission. No one who knows Al Dickerson and knows the quality of the work he has done in an amazing variety of administrative tasks can doubt his qualifications or his ability as an administrator. His several years as Executive Secretary of Dartmouth's burgeoning Alumni Fund are proof enough, saving mention of all his other jobs.
As for his theories, Al tells them best himself: "What I am about to say now will seem silly at a time when Dartmouth, in common with most colleges, is deluged with applications for admission. But for colleges as for people—because colleges are people—one's reach should exceed one'sgrasp. Dartmouth's nationwide grasp has long been a source of satisfaction to Dartmouth men and of envy to others, but our reach has got to exceed it. We've got to be out for more and more of the best men from the schools—and that we means, of course, the alumni primarily. We don't just want our share. We want our share and a good deal more. As part of this effort, I expect soon to be seeing a good deal of the schools and in the process I hope also of the alumni.
"Not the least important of the alumni contributions in the admissions sphere is the growing number of local scholarship funds which they are building up—a process which not only enlarges our inadequate financial aid resources, but also has valuable publicity effects in the local community. It seems to me that it is going to be important for us to focus attention more and more on the outstanding boy of limited means—because he has two hurdles to get over, the selection hurdle and the financial hurdle, and it is vitally important to Dartmouth that for such a boy this College should not seem too remote and inaccessible.
"One related point that I have been speculating about is the possible danger that word will get around that Dartmouth is so fantastically difficult to get into that even the better men will decide not to stake their hopes and their efforts on such a long shot and will prefer to apply at some college which is easier to get to. I think this potential danger is worthy of the attention of the alumni in Dartmouth's practically worldwide public relations organization. And, of course, to the extent that we are successful in keeping our reach out in front of our grasp we will increase this particular danger.
"I would like to add that although I have been on the job only a short time, I am tremendously pleased to find that my new work keeps me in touch with the same fine alumni group I worked with on the Alumni Fund and in the President's Office."
Any doubt about Al's experience fitting him for the position should be dispelled by a brief look at the remarkable parallel between his career at Dartmouth and that of his beloved, capable predecessor, the late Bob Strong. Dean Strong's first position at Dartmouth was that of Assistant to the President; so was Al Dickerson's. Both were at various times Executive Assistant to the President; both were Executive Secretaries of the Alumni Fund; and both were editors of the Bulletin.
As proof of his administrative capabilities, look at the Alumni Fund returns since the year of his accession to the position of Executive Secretary of the Fund in 1933. Although it is customary each year to have an Alumni Council chairman for the Fund (and in no way attempting to belittle their respective efforts as titular head of the organization), not one of them would fail to admit that it was Al Dickerson who bore a large portion of the burden of work and who provided the continuity of effort and thought from year to year. In 1933, with the country in the depths of the depression, the Fund had fallen off from its former peak years of the late '20s, when it was always above the $100,000 mark, to $67,000. But from that year on, it rose steadily from year to year, with one minor recession in 1942 when it was 400-odd dollars, to $417,000. Admitting that there has been a great upward swing of the economic pendulum over that period, and with a bow to the proverbial generous loyalty of the Dartmouth alumni body, there is still no gainsaying a job well done. Increasing the Fund total by 500% from 1933 to 1946 is a feat that is dependent on more than economics and alumni loyalty—it is not done without extremely capable leader- ship.
Taking over as Director of Admissions during this postwar jam of delayed veterans, new students, ex-V-12 men and sons of alumni will be no easy task, as Al Dickerson knows; and trying to fulfill his duties in any manner approaching Bob Strong's will be nearly impossible, as he is the first to admit. When a college can physically accommodate only 3,000 men, and that only by stretching its teaching and plant facilities to the utmost, the task of wading through I 0,000 applications and winnowing out some quite capable applicants, and telling others even more capable that they must wait one, two or more semesters before they can begin or continue their college educations, is not only a tremendous task, but also a disheartening one. It is a job that requires enormous capacity for work, as well as patience and sympathy. It requires a man as well as an official.
On the record, Al Dickerson qualifies as a man and as an official.
THE NEW CUSTODIAN OF DARTMOUTH'S UNDERGRADUATE QUALITY poses for the Magazine in his Parkhurst Hall office. The stoking of the Dickerson pipe is a gesture his many friends will quickly recognize.
WITH HIS PREDECESSOR, the late Bob Strong (left), with whom he worked closely for many years, Al Dickerson is shown smoothing the matriculation path last fall for newly arrived undergraduates.
AN ARDENT SPORTS FOLLOWER, the new admis- sions director is shown getting inside soccer dope from the best possible source, Coach Tom Dent.
