THE SHAPE OF DARTMOUTH 1969

IT is a truism to say that in the life of any long-established institution the Present is compounded of innumerable events and influences of the Past - the very old, the old, the recent, and the very recent. And in looking ahead to Dartmouth 1969, it might as well be stated at the outset that seven years are very few in a span of 200 and are not likely to produce any magical changes in the College.

The years until the Bicentennial will be especially significant ones, however, and even though the details are obscure, the broad pattern of Dartmouth's development in the years ahead is rather clearly visible. This look ahead (undertaken on the editor's own responsibility and therefore far from official) must be selective and of limited compass, dealing only with educational program, faculty, and students. Other articles in this issue are devoted to finances, plant, the Hopkins Center, and alumni relations.

Educational Program

Immediately after the war Dartmouth began to give increased attention to world affairs. A major program in international relations was established, the Great Issues Course followed in 1947, and a Department of Russian Civilization was created. A major program in world geography came next, new faculty and new courses brought additional foreign areas into the curriculum, an increasing number of foreign students were enrolled, and modest beginnings were made on study programs abroad for Dartmouth undergraduates. Some of these activities, including Great Issues and the student internships abroad, are now being directed by the Public Affairs Center established last year.

This has been the chief direction of curriculum growth at Dartmouth, but things have not been static on other fronts. Science courses and majors have generally been revised and updated; the mathematics program espe- cially has been strengthened and modernized, leading to the opening last fall of the Bradley Center for Mathematics; a new Department of Engineering Science, allied with Thayer School and integrating engineering with the basic sciences, has been created; and the Medical School has been virtually refounded, with magnificent new facilities that now promise to become the hub of a whole new bio-medical center, including departments of the undergraduate college. Most recently the College has announced two new Ph.D. programs in molecular biology and mathematics, both to be introduced next fall.

Most basic of all in the development of the College's educational program was the inauguration in 1958 of the present three-term, three-course plan, including a general reading program and giving emphasis to independent learning as the only worthwhile kind of higher education. Possible under the "three-three" plan is the addition of a fourth term that will keep the College operating all year around.

The three-three plan is now firmly established, and in the years ahead it will continue to provide the format for the College's educational program. Some misgivings initially expressed about the telescoping of terms and more concentrated workloads have not materialized, broadly speaking, but since three-three's success to date has been more one of structure than of pedagogy, the years just ahead will doubtless see a stepped-up effort to advance the independent-learning part of the plan. Encouraging progress toward that end is already evident, but the present scope of student research and independent work will seem small indeed compared with what will prevail in 1969.

By that time a fourth term should be an accepted part of the College calendar, but not as one necessarily attended by Dartmouth undergraduates. The College intends to introduce an eight-week term in the summer of 1963. Full-credit courses will be open to students, both men and women, from other colleges and to teachers and others, as well as to Dartmouth students. It is not expected that any large number of the latter will elect the fourth term at the start, but if the yearround operation of the College proves economically feasible and educationally worth while, a fourth term by 1969 will be so well established that many tie-ins with the regular Dartmouth course and with other institutions will almost certainly be operative. No one at present, however, seems to be thinking in terms of a year-round, "four-three" plan for the College. Acceleration may have its points, but most minds need rest and time out for digestion.

With its four-term calendar settled, the College can be expected to move ahead strongly with more world orientation in the curriculum. The important thing is that emphasis will now be focused on non-western studies, and currently the Committee on Educational Policy is studying ways in which this can be achieved. President Dickey says the pressing challenge to liberal arts undergraduate education today - "the great new frontier" - is to free itself of western provincialism and to establish a new relationship to global affairs.

To advance this concept Dartmouth will be instituting new courses, bringing in new faculty, and revising existing course offerings. A program in breadth will touch all students in the first two years, and programs in depth will be undertaken in those areas in which Dartmouth is especially strong. Through the extension of present offerings and addition of new ones, tomorrow's curriculum will surely include studies related to the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; and greater attention will be given also to Latin America. It is likely that a larger enrollment of foreign students will include men from these areas, and as more Dartmouth undergraduates study abroad they will go to non-western lands as well as to Europe.

The global character of tomorrow's liberal learning has a built-in problem in the very vastness of the subject matter. Serious thinking is therefore being given by Dartmouth to a new strategy of comparative study, making this the central pedagogical principle of the undergraduate curriculum. Use of this new approach on a broad scale would involve many changes in the years just ahead. Its success would be an important influence on undergraduate education throughout the nation, just as other Dartmouth innovations since the war have had wide repercussions.

Returning for a moment to the emphasis on independent learning mentioned earlier, it is more than likely that tomorrow's College, concerned with non-western studies and a comparative approach, will also be offering more in the way of individual programs and honors work for the superior student. Some thought is already being given to having a regular major and an honors major in almost every department, and with individual work encouraged in all fields and with the Hopkins Center facilities available, academic credit will more generally be given for creative work.

The exceptional entering student already has open to him the flexibility of advanced standing, exemptions from required courses, and honors sections in some courses, such as math. Frank H. Bowles, president of the College Entrance Examination Board, has written that by 1970 freshmen in the quality colleges will be entering at an academic level equivalent to the present sophomore level. Dartmouth's dean of freshmen, Albert I. Dickerson '30, is not persuaded that this will really happen, nor does he view it as desirable that it should, because it would narrow the spectrum of choice among applicants and eliminate many capable boys whose outstanding personal qualities and creativity make them desirable members of the student body. However, the freshman-year program will be reexamined and upgraded to some extent, for the simple reason that the improving quality of work in the secondary schools will inevitably bring this about.

If this can be considered a pressure from below - welcome pressure, to be sure - another pressure from above, that of the graduate schools, also will be a factor in tomorrow's educational planning, as it is today. This is not to say that the strong and purposeful undergraduate college must cut its cloth to the graduate school's pattern, but with an increasing percentage of each Dartmouth class going on to graduate study - the present 65% will climb to 75% or 80% by 1969, it is claimed - there will have to be an increasingly closer relationship between the two levels of higher education.

Cries are already going up that the graduate school is responsible for the decline of the liberal arts, but if this is so, writes Oliver C. Carmichael in his recent book on graduate education, "it has been engaged in undermining its own foundations, for all will agree that a strong liberal arts college training is essential to preparation for graduate work."

Dartmouth has long subscribed to this philosophy and has practiced it in the requirements for its own graduate schools of medicine, engineering, and business administration. And the two Ph.D. programs to be introduced next fall were authorized by the Trustees with the definite understanding that they "be accompanied by evidence that they will strengthen and not weaken the quality of liberal arts undergraduate education offered by the College."

Nothing at Dartmouth will be more interesting in the coming years than to see what flows from the inauguration of graduate programs at the doctoral level. Some compare this step to the opening of Pandora's box. A few additional departments would like to offer Ph.D. programs as soon as permitted to do so, and by 1969 there may be a half-dozen such programs in operation, mainly in the sciences because more research is carried on there and outside financing is more readily available. But whatever the future of this innovation in Dartmouth's life, there is every prospect that the Trustees will continue to insist that undergraduate study and faculty recruitment benefit from it and that doctoral programs be undertaken only in selected areas of real strength where Dartmouth can make some special contribution. The College's fresh approach to the stereo- typed and much-criticized Ph.D. could well be one of its notable achievements in the years ahead.

The College's more familiar graduate offerings in the associated schools offer a paradox. Where once these schools were mainly extensions of the undergraduate course, attended entirely by Dartmouth students, they now have more and more the status of separate professional schools standing on their own feet and attended by many students from other institutions. At the same time, however, they are building a closer educational relationship with the undergraduate college, as represented in the recent joining of engineering with the basic sciences and in the graduate program in molecular biology, bringing Medical School and College departments together. The latter relationship will be extended by the proposed bio-medical center.

The outlook for the associated schools includes some growth in size; further development of their graduate, professional character; and new educational alliances between the schools and the departments of the undergraduate college.

The Faculty

The foregoing summary, imaginative though it be in part, should make it clear that the liberal arts and the undergraduate college are in no danger of losing their primacy in Dartmouth's educational thinking. Such an institution has great respect for teaching and when it has a faculty that combines real scholarship with teaching ability, the institution is fortunate indeed. Dartmouth's good fortune in this respect has been steadily on the rise since the war, and it is the firm intent of the College that in the years ahead its faculty shall fully come up to the ideal of the teacher-scholar.

The problem of recruiting distinguished teacher-scholars is bad enough now ("the competition among some of our leading institutions can become positively ungentlemanly," says Dartmouth's Dean Arthur E. Jensen) but it will become worse as college enrollments swell and the supply of teachers of real quality falls far short of the demand. The College has many assets working for it in faculty recruitment, and its new programs and plans, its ferment of ideas for strengthening the undergraduate college, and its current drive for excellence on all fronts are the sort of evidence of a dynamic, dedicated college that attracts good teacher-scholars. But even though it has this strong competitive position, Dartmouth faces no easy task in getting and keeping the kind of faculty it wants to have in full swing by 1969.

One of the most significant faculty developments at Dartmouth in the past decade has been the considerably greater weight given to scholarly activity on the part of the teaching staff. No diminution of this emphasis can be expected in the years ahead. "It is extremely important that a faculty member keep alive his own scholarship," says Dean Jensen. "Knowledge is exploding at such a rate that the teacher who is not alive to new developments in his field is giving his students an education that may be obsolete. We must consequently have scholars on our faculty and give them opportunities for their continued development."

The opportunity open to the faculty for this continued development is a real point of competition among the leading colleges and universities, with the universities naturally having an advantage. Dartmouth's new Ph.D. programs will enhance the opportunities it can offer, and one important reason for introducing them was the aid they will give in recruiting and maintaining faculty strength for the undergraduate college. The Dartmouth faculty gave its enthusiastic backing to the doctoral programs and, needless to say, it will be straining at the reins to have more of them.

Fortunately for colleges like Dartmouth there are many fine scholars who love to teach undergraduates and who have genuine concern for them as individuals and moral beings. Dartmouth has appeal for this scholarteacher and he in turn has unconcealed appeal for Dartmouth. Being a scholar is all very well but Dartmouth demands also that its faculty be men who can communicate their knowledge effectively and who are persons of in- tegrity with values to impart along with their scholarship. This will continue to be Dartmouth's faculty ideal in the years ahead, and nothing is closer to the heart of Dartmouth's ongoing success than the possession of a corps of teacher-scholars fulfilling this goal.

Students

Not the least of Dartmouth's attractions for the faculty is the quality of its students. The stiffer competition for admission and the successively higher CEEB scores offered by entering classes have been reported for some years running. Dartmouth undergraduates today unquestionably possess stronger academic credentials than those in the past and more work of higher quality is demanded of them. Will the standards keep on going up in the years ahead? To a limited extent, thinks Edward T. Chamberlain '36, director of admissions, but he does not view candidates for admission as academic robots and he sees no basic change in Dartmouth's present selective process, which looks not only for superior intellectual capacity, motivation, and integrity but also for positive qualities of character and personality and for some breadth and depth of interests.

The effort to enroll the ideal student has almost the same intensity as the competition for distinguished scholarteachers. The college world is currently exercised over the reliability of tests in finding him, and although efforts are being made to devise ways to assess motivation and other personal qualities (with no visible success) it is likely that the colleges will place greatest reliance on their own expanded and refined enrollment programs, in which alumni by the thousands will be engaged. This side of Dartmouth alumni activity will certainly grow in importance. And it is envisaged by some that the same sort of cooperation among colleges that led to existing codes on admissions and scholarship practices will be extended to enrollment programs.

Higher tuition in the independent colleges and the growing excellence of publicly supported institutions will pose a serious problem in attracting superior students to Dartmouth. Scholarship aid will be a partial answer but the fundamental answer will have to come from the quality of what Dartmouth has to offer —in educational program, faculty, students, facilities, campus life, and moral values.

College costs are climbing faster than family incomes, and although the increased availability of loans, some government financed, is a help, outright scholarship grants will be needed by a growing percentage of students in the privately supported colleges. Robert K. Hage '35, Dartmouth's director of financial aid, believes that a national program of federally financed scholarships is the only real answer in sight and is sure to come. And the greater inflow of foreign students, all of whom need large amounts of financial aid, will also necessitate government support if this desirable development in U. S. higher education is to be encouraged.

The Dartmouth undergraduate, once he solves the financial problem of being one, will find in 1969 that his fellow students are more unabashedly interested in the intellectual life than they are now. Many faculty members, believing that today's students are much better than they let on, are puzzled by the pains they take to cover up their intellectual quality outside the classroom. The assembling of a new class in Hanover will always be the occasion for high spirits, but freshman orientation has already become more attentive to the serious business of the College, and there is no reason to expect a reversal of this trend.

Student government, the Interdormitory Council specifically in the case of freshman orientation, is largely responsible for this trend. While articles professing to tell the facts about student thinking across the nation assert that student government is being downgraded, student government at Dartmouth is having a healthy development and means something. Dean Thaddeus Seymour praises it for its active interest in the larger aims of the College and sees it as having an established place in student life in the years ahead.

The Undergraduate Council played the leading role in getting an honor system adopted this year, although it took faculty action to bring matters to a head. If this effort to substitute personal honor for faculty policing in academic work is successful, the honor system will doubtless be applied to other aspects of student life. As Dartmouth has grown, it has become more difficult for the College to show concern for the individual student and to meet the obligation of developing his character and personal morality. The William Jewett Tucker Foundation is testimony to the College's concern, and the honor system is testimony to the students' concern. "What sort of men with what sort of values will we have in 1969?" asks Dean Seymour. To him this is the central question, and as the academic program moves steadily ahead he wants it matched by equal effort to keep the intellectual and moral sides of the College in equilibrium.

And what of equilibrium between academic work and interests outside the classroom? Dean Dickerson is convinced that now that the three-three system has shaken down, there will be what amounts to a renaissance in student-activities. These interests already have an impressive variety, and what is being done is being done better. There is confidence that student extracurricular life - activities, athletics, and social life - will keep pace with the rising academic standards of the College, providing a "total education" superior to anything Dartmouth has offered before.

Equilibrium in all its strengths and obligations is not a bad goal for Dartmouth 1969. With educational program, faculty, and students in har- monious alliance, may it be written of Hanover as Will Durant wrote of a town in Europe: "It was a university town, full of the frolic of students, the odor of learning, the excitement of independent thought."

Shapers: Academic Program

Shapers: Student Program

Prof. John W. MaslandProvost of the College

Prof. Leonard M. Rieser Jr. '44Deputy Provost of the College

Prof. Arthur E. JensenDean of the Faculty

Thaddeus SeymourDean of the College

Albert I. Dickerson '30Dean of Freshmen

Edward T. Chamberlain Jr. '36Director of Admissions