Urban Study in Boston

Featured on Boston WBZ-TV's six o'clock "Eyewitness News" on April 22 was the 1969 Dartmouth-M.I.T. Urban Studies Program, sponsored by the College's Public Affairs Center. To learn first-hand something of city problems, 15 Dartmouth undergraduates are spending the spring semester working in Boston on community service and applied research projects. They live in the South End House in Boston and take part in social service programs of the settlement house, while studying some of Boston's institutional and leadership structures.

Receiving course credit for their work, the students attend weekly seminars at M.I.T. and a series of lectures by authorities in urban affairs. They also work ten hours a week in the South End of Boston and complete a field research project. They are studying the motivation behind the action taken on various matters by agencies and trying to ascertain through their settlement work how responsive the officials are to the community's needs and wishes.

David C. Hoeh, Associate Director of the Public Affairs Center at Dartmouth and director of the Dartmouth-M.I.T. Program this year, commented that the real strength of the program lies in its versatility; each student is free to develop his own plan of study within the ' broad framework of the program. Now in its ninth year, the program was established in response to student interest in the problems of the cities.