Spaulding-Potter Grant Spurs Regional Program

THE potential of a university complex to be of public service and to touch the lives of people and institutions in a wide arc around it is being explored by the College in a series of regional programs.

Under a recent grant of $500,000 from the Spaulding-Potter Charitable Trusts of New Hampshire, Dartmouth is now engaged in the effort to inventory, mobilize, and coordinate its human and physical resources for activities that will have regional impact, from medicine to the computer sciences. It is visualized that the grant will work essentially as "seed money" for projects addressed to critical needs or emerging problems of the region.

Frank Smallwood '51, Professor of Government and Associate Dean of the Faculty, who is coordinator of the regional programs, has identified four major areas in which "we could do some useful work." They are:

(1) Regional medicine, extending a program already going forward under the leadership of Dr. Carleton B. Chapman, Dean of Dartmouth Medical School.

(2) Environmental studies, drawing on the work of the sciences and social sciences, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business Administration.

(3) Community research and social "outreach" coordinating and helping to extend the programs of the Tucker Foundation, the Dartmouth Outing Club, the Dartmouth Christian Union, the Public Affairs Center, the Center for the Study of Social Change, and several student activities in this area.

(4) Further regional utilization of key Dartmouth facilities such as the Kiewit Computation Center, Hopkins Center of the Performing and Visual Arts, Baker Library, Carpenter Art Gallery and Library and the Dartmouth Museum, and the development of other services such as continuing education programs and educational TV.

In all these areas, the role of Professor Smallwood as coordinator is to keep the various participants informed about what others are doing to get maximum benefit from the total institutional effort, identify places where new projects might be useful, and otherwise guide, advise, and coordinate all the regional activities on the multiple fronts.

Dartmouth for some time has been carrying on a variety of regional programs in such areas as emergency medical service, mental health, river pollution, conservation of natural resources, teacher

training, computer services for private and public secondary schools, faculty speakers and consultants, traveling art shows, drama and music programs, and social outreach through such agencies as the Tucker Foundation, sponsor of Project ABC and Outward Bound, and the Dartmouth Christian Union, which has sponsored student tutoring and prison and hospital work among its many activities.

These varied forms of regional service have been separate efforts, but under Professor Smallwood's direction and with the resources provided by the Spaulding. Potter grant the effort is now being made to coordinate the various regional activities, to undertake new projects of regional importance, and to instill into all these hitherto separate programs a unifying sense of direction and mission.

"Dartmouth does not in any way seek the role of patron," explains Professor Smallwood. "Rather it seeks to be a catalyst in the hope that projects, once started and their worth proven, will be financed by community and other sources, public and private.