Faculty Salary Rise Made Permanent
IN A SPECIAL COMMUNICATION to the entire faculty late in January, President Dickey informed Dartmouth's teaching staff that he had been authorized by the Board of Trustees to make permanent the temporary wartime salary increases which went into effect with the accelerated yearround program. He characterized this action as "a permanent step in the direction of bringing the pay of Dartmouth's teachers as nearly into line as possible with what is their just and necessary due," and also stated, "My pleasure in being able to take this step is only slightly less than my sense of the necessity for continuing in this direction to the utmost of the College's ability."
In commenting upon the financial limitations within which endowed educational institutions must operate, President Dickey declared that "Dartmouth has been more fortunate in this regard than any other comparable institution I know" and paid tribute to the annual generosity of Dartmouth alumni which made such a state-ment possible
The President's memorandum to the faculty follows in full:
FROM THE PRESIDENT TO THE MEMBERS OF THE .FACULTY
On January 12 the Trustees of the College voted to authorize the President to make permanent the temporary wartime salary increases which have been based on a continuous teaching program. I now wish to inform you that the College regards those salary increases as a permanent step in the direction of bringing the pay of Dartmouth's teachers as nearly into line as possible with what is their just and necessary due. My pleasure in being able to take this step is only slightly less than my sense of the necessity for continuing in this direction to the utmost of the College's ability.
You, I am sure, fully understand the limitations which surround the financial policies of educational institutions, especially the endowed institutions whose increments of new endowments have diminished drastically while the rate of return on endowments has generally gone down, too. Dartmouth has been more fortunate in this regard than any other comparable institution I know. The alumni of this College through the Alumni Fund have shown an almost unbelievable capacity and willingness to bridge yearly the steadily widening gap between income from endowment and the obligations to which the College is committed.
It is because of this factor and almost solely because of my confidence in this in- estimable asset that I feel justified in char- acterizing the present action as a "step." No one can promise that this will be so, but I do pledge my best efforts to that end.
1 O J Nothing has pleased me more in these first months than to find an apparently unanimous and strong feeling among the alumni that the maintenance and the con- tinuous strengthening of Dartmouth's in- structional resources must have first call now and always on the free financial re- sources available to the College. This con- viction was crystallized in the report of a committee of the Alumni Council which was unanimously adopted by the full Council at its recent meeting. Along with recommendations for action in the near future on plant needs of the College the report stated: It is clear from the replies to correspondence and from conferences on postwar needs that there is a large and gratifying degree of unanimity among Dartmouth men that the Number One need of the College is to maintain, acquire, and adequately recompense the strongest possible teaching staff. We recognize that the faculty and staff of the College have definitely not been adequately compensated for their great interest in their vital work for the College and that this situation should be corrected as soon as possible. Your committee joins whole-heartedly in establishing this as the first of our objectives, and we recommend its en- dorsement by the Alumni Council. We recognize that achievement of this goal is not to be realized overnight, that it is a continuing process, and that President Dickey and the Trustees will need a period of years in which to make such further progress in this matter as will be hailed with pride and satisfaction by the alumni.
In making this announcement regarding one aspect of our reconversion policies, I should like as one who arrived here after the victory corner had been turned (a) to pay just this word of tribute to each of you who helped bring the College through so far so worthily and (b) to say that there are still trying days ahead before the corner will have been turned for the College and that we still shall all have to rely on each other's energies, patience and imagination, as well as our own, to finish this phase and to begin the next worthily.
I wish that it were feasible to make these communications more personal, but I should like each member of the faculty to feel free to match his time with mine in discussion of any matter, great or small, which he feels is of importance to the College.
COL. WILLIAM H. COULSON (right) General Staff Corps, U. S. Army, well known to alumni as co-chairman of the effective Dartmouth Parents Association receives the Legion of Merit for his work in the administration of "complex responsibilities charged to the War Department by the Renegotiation Act," from July 1943 to November 1945. He served with the Purchases and Renegotiation Divisions of the Army Service Forces, and is the father of John L. Coulson '4O and William H. Coulson Jr. '4O.
