An Exciting 20-Year Forward March

John Sloan Dickey '29, President of the College for 20 years, has led Dartmouth to higher ground on every front

THE postwar years in American higher education have been characterized by growth and change more drastic and far-reaching than anything experienced by colleges and uni- versities in all their years before. Dartmouth has been part of this inescapable pattern, and it has had the great good fortune to be able to build upon strength and to guide its changes toward the goal of what it believes to be the mission of the liberal college in the modern world.

It is also Dartmouth's great good fortune to have had John Sloan Dickey '29 as its President during these postwar years. His pervasive leadership, now rounded out to twenty full years, has brought the College to new high ground as it nears the 200th anniversary of its founding and has given it an excellence, an effectiveness, and a prestige far beyond any enjoyed in the past.

Future historians of the College will have a vitally important period to deal with when they come to the years from World War II to the Bicentennial. They are bound to call it one of the great and decisive chapters in the story of Dartmouth. In its effect on the future course and development of the College, this period, launched with the inauguration of John Dickey in November 1945, will in all likelihood be placed beside the years of the Dartmouth College Case and the refounding years of the William Jewett Tucker administration, which the Hopkins administration carried forward to real fruition.

When John Dickey took office twenty years ago, he devoted his first public address, at Dartmouth Night eight days after his inauguration, to the role of the historic college such as Dartmouth. After a strong advocacy of the pursuit of truth "without let or hindrance from prejudice or any other interest," he stated what has been a recurring theme in his thoughts about college education: "In all your learning get not only wisdom but also build the will and acquire the capacity for doing something about those things which need doing. I personally care not very much whether your doing be in the public service or in the ranks of the citizenry; I do want very much that this generation of educated men of Dartmouth should 'be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.' "

A few months later, in his first Convocation Address, President Dickey stated an admonition that Dartmouth undergraduates ever since have picked up and tied to him: "Your business here is learning. All else is subsidiary."

It was natural, therefore, for President Dickey from the very outset to call for a sharper purpose and a stiffer pace, and to devote a major part of his thought and effort to Dartmouth's educational program. An essential corollary of this was a stepped-up effort to recruit and maintain a faculty of the highest quality. In January and again in July of 1946 faculty salaries were increased - the first in a steady series of increases and fringe benefits - and a long-range program was adopted "to assure Dartmouth of being able to maintain and gather a distinguished teaching faculty second to that of no other liberal arts college."

The President stimulated the development of cooperative courses of an interdepartmental and interdivisional nature, and in an educational move closely identified with him, there was introduced in September 1947 the celebrated Great Issues Course, required of all seniors and designed to serve as a bridge between classroom and active,' intelligent citizenship and "to develop in Dartmouth students an attitude of public-mindedness and a broad sense of the responsibilities of educated men." The phrase "publicmindedness" also has taken its place in the lore of the Dickey administration. And in its further purpose to provide a substantial and vital common experience in undergraduate education, the Great Issues Course was the embodiment of still another educational aim to which President Dickey has adhered throughout his twenty years as head of the College.

Skimming quickly through the first decade of John Dickey's presidency, these other important developments can be cited to indicate the scope and pace of Dartmouth's forward march: an Undergraduate Council established to direct an enlarged program of student self-government . . . minimum salary levels for staff employees ... a Faculty Council of forty members created . . . the Dartmouth Outing Club reorganized ... a Dartmouth Development Council established . . . the College's financial and business department reorganized . . . Social Security adopted for all personnel . . . the William Jewett Tucker Foundation established . . . a new Department of Russian Civilization established ... a Bequest and Estate Planning Program launched . . . coordination of the admissions and financial aid operations, with new offices established, and development of a national enrollment program ... a new Office of Placement and Staff Personnel... a new Office of Student Counseling ... the curriculum broadened with three new interdivisional programs ... the Faculty Council replaced by an executive committee of twenty. . . the Stefansson library acquired ... a program for corporation support organized ... a new Department of Plant and Operations created . . . a Commission on Campus Life named by President Dickey to study all phases of student life . . . Davis Rink rededicated with artificial ice . . . the Trustees accept and approve the recommendations of undergraduates, as expressed in a March 1954 referendum, that Dartmouth fraternities must within six years rid themselves of nationally imposed membership restrictions based on race, religion or national origin .. . plans announced for three new dormitories, a new faculty apartment house, new faculty houses, and for the enlargement of Thayer dining hall to accommodate sophomores as well as freshmen .. . creation of the office of Provost of the College to be in charge of academic affairs.

All these developments in the first decade, particularly increased faculty and staff compensation, necessitated an annual operating budget three times as

large as when President Dickey took office. Tuition increases helped, other financial resources grew rapidly, and the annual Alumni Fund rose from $337,000 to $775,000. Dartmouth's total assets in the ten-year period increased 47 % to $46 million and endowment 65% to $36.7 million.

THE accomplishments and reorganizations of the first Dickey decade set the stage for the second, which has been packed with more "forward thrust," to use a Dickey phrase, than any like period in Dartmouth's history. The year 1955 serves neatly to divide the decades and to mark the active launching of the most comprehensive and most impressive venture of President Dickey's administration.

The Dartmouth Trustees in the fall of 1954 established the Trustees Planning Committee, under the chairmanship of Harvey P. Hood '18, to set goals for the development of the College on every front during the 15 years leading up to the Bicentennial year 1969-70. As President Dickey explained it to the Alumni Council the following June, "We came to the point a year or so ago where it seemed to the Trustees, to myself and my administrative associates, to many of you with whom we conferred, that Dartmouth was ready to begin a systematic, organized, sustained effort to plan her future in all critical areas of college life and work, so that come 1969, we would not simply hold a year of vain self-congratulation ... but would celebrate because she had produced an undergraduate educational operation that was worthy of celebration as she moved from her second to her third century."

Rarely, if ever, has a college critically examined itself from stem to stern over a period of years as has Dartmouth during the past ten years. And rarely has a college set for itself, and achieved, such a variety of educational, building, and social goals as has Dartmouth during that period. President Dickey has called the TPC program "fifteen years of sustained rededication and refounding," aimed at "bringing this institution to a running start of preeminent performance when it enters its third century."

The TPC program has four years to go, but even if no more major changes are brought off before the Bicentennial, which is most unlikely, it has been remarkable in its success. In his Convocation Address last year President Dickey reviewed the first two-thirds of the TPC effort and was able to list nearly a score of plans that had been translated into programs: interdisciplinary programs at both faculty and undergraduate levels in public affairs and human relations ... an

overseas study program for language majors ... faculty fellowships... adoption of the three-term, three-course plan with its basic objective of encouraging independence in learning ... major new instructional facilities in the arts, biological sciences, chemistry, drama, the languages, mathematics, psychology, medicine, and music ... new student housing to accommodate an undergraduate and graduate enrollment increase of 20% during the decade ... the total refounding of the Dartmouth Medical School, including the doubling of its enrollment, a new faculty, and huge expansion of faculty research ... the rounding out of the Gilman Biomedical Center with the Kellogg Auditorium, Dana Biomedical Library, and the Gilman Life Sciences Building ... a basic recasting of Dartmouth's approach to engineering education . . . the Nervidesigned Leverone Field House ... the nationally known Hopkins Center with its pervasive influence on liberal learning and the cultural life of the campus community ... the Comparative Studies Center and its program for both faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences ... the Kiewit Computation Center and plans for making the computer part of the educational experience of at least three-fourths of Dartmouth undergraduates ... new Ph.D. programs in mathematics, molecular biology and engineering, and a general expansion of educational programs at the graduate level ... and a Summer Term around which has developed a whole group of new activities such as the Congregation of the Arts, Project ABC, Peace Corps training, and the Alumni College.

To finance a large part of the TPC program the College successfully conducted in 1957-59 a Capital Gifts Campaign for $17 million. The alumni, who were primarily responsible for this achievement, also have lifted the annual Alumni Fund from its 1955 level of $775,000 to this year's record-breaking total of nearly $1.8 million. And a third resource of the greatest value was the ten-year realization of $16 million through the growing Bequest and Estate Planning Program.

In far more ways than fund-raising the role of the alumni in the life of the College has been strengthened during President Dickey's administration. The living alumni body, which has grown from 22,000 to nearly 31,000 in the past twenty years, will soon reach the point where the majority will have been undergraduates under President Dickey. Thousands of alumni are now actively engaged in the work of the College - as Trustees, Overseers, Alumni Council members, advisory board members, class and club officers, Fund agents, enrollment workers, and liaison men. Alumni clubs in the past twenty years have grown from 90 to 137 in number, with thirteen clubs now located in foreign lands. Dartmouth's two top alumni governing groups have been enlarged and reorganized under President Dickey; the Board of Trustees has grown from twelve to sixteen members, and the Alumni Council from forty to fifty members.

Dartmouth men find it easy to make common cause with John Dickey in his great design for the Dartmouth of 1969 and years to come. Despite all the changes he has presided over, John Dickey has demonstrated a deep sense of the historic institutional purpose of the College and has made its preservation and viability another recurring theme of his administration.

Speaking last year of TPC, he said: "The foundation of this effort was an institutional purpose created by those whose lives and hopes were earlier built into this place. The plans and efforts of this rededication are grounded in the conviction that it is the job of the American undergraduate college to foster the growth of a man in all good directions. ... Among these good directions, the development of intellectual competence is 'the first among equals.' It is not that man lives by brains alone, but simply that the work of the mind is the prime business of higher learning. . . . We seek to travel the way that leads a man toward a free and magnanimous mind as well as a sharp one. These qualities of mind are not synonymous, but neither are they natural enemies; they go together in a civilized man and in a free society that means to stay free. To this end Dartmouth, in rededication to her founding purpose, chose to continue her commitment to liberal learning."

The essential character of the liberal learning to which Dartmouth is committed has been examined by President Dickey in many of his speeches and writings since he took office. Two key words used many times are competence and conscience. In his article in the AtlanticMonthly of April 1955 he wrote: "I suggest that the American liberal arts college . . . can find a significant, even unique, mission in the duality of its historic purpose: to see men made whole in both competence and conscience. Is there any other institution at the highest level of organized educational activity that is committed explicitly by its history and by its program to these twin goals?"

In that article President Dickey also wrote: "I am increasingly persuaded that the cause of liberal education will not be overrun by vocationalism if the college holds to its birthright and remains committed as a matter of purpose to serious concern with the issues of conscience.... To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding sense of moral direction to guide the use of that power is bad education."

all the accomplishments that might be ascribed to his twenty years as President of Dartmouth College, John Dickey himself would unhesitatingly wish the foremost to be good education.

Shields designed by John Scotford '38 depict highlights of years since TPC plan was launched.

Trustees Begin Study

TPC Plans Formulated

Tucker Foundation

"Three-Three" Adopted

Capital Campaign

dical Convocation

$1 Million Fund

Hopkins Center

Alumni Council's 50th

Golden Alumni Fund

Summer Program

President Dickey addressing alumni...

broadcasting over WDCR before lastyear's Princeton game ...

and enjoying a 1929 reunion.