PROF. JOHN G. KEMENY CHOSEN AS DARTMOUTH'S 13TH PRESIDENT

THE search for Dartmouth's thirteenth President, conducted intensively for more than a year, came full circle last month when the Board of Trustees settled its choice upon a member of the Dartmouth faculty - John G. Kemeny, A.M. '56, holder of the Albert Bradley Third Century Professorship and one of the nation's foremost mathematics educators.

The election of Professor Kemeny was announced on January 23 by Lloyd D. Brace '25, chairman of the Board, following a special meeting of the Trustees held in Boston. Mr. Brace had served as chairman of a special Trustee committee which began the task of finding President Dickey's successor soon after Mr. Dickey announced in September 1968 that he planned to retire sometime during 1969-70, his 25th year as head of the College.

President-elect Kemeny will officially assume office on March 1, three months before his 44th birthday. By agreement with the Trustees he will continue to teach one or two courses of his choice after he becomes President. Dartmouth has had teacher-presidents before, and some who had taught here before taking up other positions, but Professor Kemeny is the first man to be named President directly from Dartmouth's own faculty.

Speaking for the Trustees, Mr. Brace described Dr. Kemeny as "one of the truly creative minds in America today." He called the selection of this outstanding educator "an unequivocal commitment to Dartmouth's continued growth in academic excellence." He said that more than 200 persons, leaders from all walks of life, had been considered for the presidency and that Dr. Kemeny had been chosen on the recommendation of the full Search Committee as "the best man fitted to lead Dartmouth into its third century."

A philosopher-mathematician who started his academic career 22 years ago as research assistant to Albert Einstein, and a prime mover in developing computer time-sharing as an educational tool, Professor Kemeny has been a member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1953. In mathematics, where he served as chairman of the department for 12 years, and in several other areas, he has had a key role in shaping the curriculum of the modern Dartmouth, including the present three-term academic year. For the past two years he has been Coordinator of Educational Plans and Development.

He is also chairman of the College's Committee on Equal Opportunity, charged with advising on the implementation of Dartmouth's commitment to equality of opportunity for students from disadvantaged minorities, a member of the Trustees' ad hoc committee studying Dartmouth's programs and priorities with special attention to the question of coeducation, and chairman of the Foundations Committee of Dartmouth's Third Century Fund campaign. In this latter role he has been strikingly successful. The campaign goal for foundation gifts was $6 million; at present the total stands at $7.2 million and is growing.

Dr. Kemeny will be the first Princeton graduate and the fourth non-alumnus to serve as President of Dartmouth since the College was founded by a Yale man in 1769. He is married to the former Jean Alexander, an alumna of Smith College who was born in Burlington, Vt., and brought up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. They have two children: Jennifer, 15, and Robert, 14.

President and Mrs. Dickey have been preparing for some time to turn the President's House over to Dartmouth's new first family shortly after the Trustees made their selection. They are building a home of their own in Hanover, to be ready this spring. President and Mrs. Dickey will leave Hanover on March 1 for a vacation in the South. On that date also Mr. Dickey will officially become Bicentennial Professor of Public Affairs, a new chair created by faculty action and Trustee vote, and announced as a surprise to him at the Charter Day dinner on December 13. Mr. Dickey plans to continue his longtime professional interest in foreign affairs, especially Canadian-American relations.

Professor Kemeny was born May 31, 1926, in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a commodities export-import broker, and was brought to this country by his parents in 1940 to escape the Nazi tide then closing in on Hungary. Knowing German and Latin in addition to Hungarian, but virtually no English, he was enrolled as a sophomore in New York City's George Washington High School. Three years later, and not yet 17, he was graduated in January 1943, at the top of his class of nearly 1,000.

He entered Princeton a month later in the first class under a wartime acceleration program and was graduated summa cum laude in 1947 on schedule despite a year and a half out for World War II military service. He had joined the Army early in 1945 and was assigned, while still in his teens, to serve as mathematician in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He worked under the celebrated mathematician Dr. John von Neumann, at the computing center there, in what has been described as the first serious attempt to solve complex theoretical and practical problems by means of batteries of calculating machines.

Returning to Princeton in 1946 he received an A.B. degree and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa the following year with a major in mathematics and also enough credits for a major in philosophy. Throughout his career he has continued to pursue both disciplines - one in the sciences and the other in the humanities.

In 1948, while studying for his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton, he was selected to be research assistant to Professor Einstein, then working on his Unified Field Theory at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. For one heady month during this demanding but rewarding year, both Dr. Einstein and his protege thought Mr. Kemeny had worked out an improved version of the theory Professor Einstein was formulating, but it turned out not to be so and, as Mr. Kemeny recalls, he was left with a concept that was "beautiful in its simplicity but, unfortunately, not consistent with the facts."

For his doctorate, awarded by Princeton in 1949, Dr. Kemeny made a comparative analysis of "type" and "set" theories, two of the major" theories of logic on which contemporary mathematics are based.

He immediately joined the Princeton faculty as Fine Instructor in Mathematics, specializing in logic, but in 1951 shifted to the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. A fellow assistant professor (of classics) at Princeton at that time was Robert Goheen, now president of that university.

Named a Bicentennial Preceptor in Philosophy in 1952, Dr. Kemeny left Princeton a year later to join the Dartmouth faculty with a dual appointment as Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy and a mandate to rebuild Dartmouth's mathematics department then being rapidly decimated by the nearly simultaneous retirement of most of its members. In 1954 he started what was to be an unprecedented 12-year stint as chairman of the department, during which time he recruited an outstanding faculty, initiated a mathematics honors program, and inaugurated a mathematics doctoral program, the first such program in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences after Dartmouth decided to revive its graduate studies.

At the same time, largely through the Mathematical Association of America, as a visiting lecturer, as chairman of its panel on teacher training, chairman of the Northeast section and, from 1960 through 1963, a member of its board of governors, Dr. Kemeny helped importantly to promulgate what now is known as the New Math at both the college and grade school levels. He also served (1957-60) as chairman of the U.S. Commission on Mathematical Instruction.

Meanwhile, as his mathematical studies shifted from logic to probability theory, he became fascinated with the rapidly growing potential of computing. Convinced that modern quantitative problems had become so complex that knowledge of the computer should become an integral part of liberal learning, Dr. Kemeny also was instrumental in Dartmouth's decision to pioneer in developing the time-sharing computer for educational programs.

With Mathematics Professor Thomas E. Kurtz, now Director of Dartmouth's Kiewit Computation Center, Dr. Kemeny is co-inventor of the computer language BASIC and co-designer of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, on which more than 85 per cent of all Dartmouth students now gain "hands-on" knowledge of the computer and its uses.

Last year the annual John G. Kemeny Prize was established to recognize students making outstanding contributions to computer knowledge. And, as the Albert Bradley Third Century Professor, Dr. Kemeny this year has created a new experimental inter-disciplinary course on how the computer may be used more effectively to solve problems of modern society and to make life better for individuals in a technological age.

From his base of scholarship in mathematics, philosophy, and computing science, Professor Kemeny has turned his mind to several other areas of thought and teaching. At one time - when he was simultaneously chairman of the mathematics department, teacher of philosophy, and member of the steering committee for an honors program linking math and the social sciences - he was actively engaged in all three academic divisions of the College.

President-elect Kemeny is the author or co-author of 12 books ranging in subject matter from mathematics and computing to the philosophy of science and education. His book, Introduction to Finite Mathematics, has sold 200,000 copies since its publication eleven years ago and has been reprinted in several languages. He has also written widely for professional journals, and his article "A Philosopher Looks at Political Science" became a text for a government course at Dartmouth. He has also been a contributor to the New York TimesMagazine, Atlantic, The Nation, Scientific American, and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1968, Professor Kemeny received an honorary doctorate of science from Middlebury College in 1965 and an honorary faculty M.A. from Dartmouth in 1956. He is an adopted member of the Class of 1922. He is vice-chairman of the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Computing, a consultant to the Educational Research Council of America, and associate editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysisand Applications.

He is a former member of the National Research Council (1963-66), a former consulting editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, a national lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America (1957-58) and for the Society of Sigma Xi (1967-68), and a member of the Educational Testing Service's graduate record examination board (1966-67). He is also a member of the American Mathematical Society and the American Philosophical Association.

Active in civic affairs in Hanover, President-elect Kemeny served on the town's School Board from 1961 to 1964, including one term as vice-chairman, and he is a director of the New Hampshire Council for Better Schools and a member of the corporation of the Mary Hitchcock Hospital. In 1961 the Junior Chamber of Commerce named him the Outstanding Young Man of New Hampshire.

Faculty Statement

In Hanover, on the afternoon of January 23, the announcement of Professor Kemeny's election to the Dartmouth presidency was accompanied by a statement from the four faculty members of the Search Committee John H. Copenhaver '46, John W. Finch, Donald L. Kreider, and Louis Morton. "Professor Kemeny has the full and enthusiastic support of the Presidential Search Committee," they said. "He is a man of extraordinary talents and is, in our opinion, an excellent choice."

The committee members explained something of the work of their committee and also of the Presidential Analysis Committee which the Trustees established in the winter of 1969 to define Dartmouth's problems and opportunities during the next decade and the talents needed in the new President in the light of this analysis.

The faculty members concluded by saying: "It is our unanimous opinion that John Kemeny is the outstanding choice to continue the long tradition of distinguished leadership at Dartmouth. The appointment of this nationally known educator and scholar to the presidency is a clear signal to the entire academic community that Dartmouth will continue to be a leader in liberal arts education."

Election of the President of Dartmouth College is the final responsibility of the Board of Trustees. In its vote in Boston on January 23 the Board approved the recommendation of its special presidential committee of Trustees Brace, Lazarus, Oelman, Orr, and Zimmerman, which in turn had concurred in the choice of the advisory faculty search committee.

Professor Kemeny will officially take office with an installation ceremony in Webster Hall on Sunday, March 1. At that time, he has said, he will make an address outlining some of his current thoughts about the new administration.

President-elect John G. Kemeny, A.M. '56

Shown at a Third Century Fund leadership meeting in Hanover are (I to r) President Dickey,A. Kelvin Smith '20 of Cleveland, Professor Kemeny, and Rupert C. Thompson Jr. '2B.

With daughter Jennifer looking on, Professor Kemeny useshis home teletype connected with Kiewit Computation Center.

Dartmouth's new First Family: President-elect Kemeny athome with his wife Jean,daughter Jennifer, 15, andson Robert, 14.