Black Alumni Caucus

College administrators and faculty members are working closely with a group of black alumni on a number of broad areas of mutual concern to themselves and the College in general, President Kemeny has announced.

The "black alumni caucus" is an outgrowth of a conference last spring which drew about one-third of black alumni to the campus to discuss measures by which they might improve liaison with black undergraduates and other segments of the college community.

The major areas of concern, on which groups have continued to meet and consult since the conference, are recruitment and enrollment, career counseling, availability of jobs for undergraduates under the Dartmouth Plan, athletics, alumni affairs, implementation of the College's Affirmative Action Plan, and black representation on various boards and councils.

As Judge Fritz Alexander '47 of New York City, chairman of the Black Alumni Committee who presided over the May meeting, put it, "We are all here to make Dartmouth a better place." Aside from their racial bond, he stressed recently as a caucus spokesman, "We all come out of the Dartmouth Experience."

President Kemeny commented that black alumni have expressed particular concern that the proposed Affirmative Action Officer have sufficient seniority and rank to be effective. He announced that he had appointed a task force of faculty, administrators, and black alumni to define the duties and qualifications of such an officer. Noting the caucus' proposal that the position be filled by a black of vice presidential rank, the President said it was agreeable to him if a job description can be formulated that will satisfy the faculty, high echelons of the administration, and the Board of Trustees.

Black students will be represented on each of the six special task forces which are working with appropriate administrative officers, President Kemeny said.

Besides Judge Alexander, the caucus includes Lisle C. Carter '55, Ithaca, N. Y., Vice President of Cornell University; Julian K. Robinson '52, Dean of Student Affairs at Jersey City State College; Richard A. Fairley '55, Silver Spring, Md., director of compensatory education for the U. S. Office of Education; the Rev. James P. Breeden '56, Roxbury, Mass., faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Urban Community Development Fund; Garvey E. Clarke '57, Hastings-on-Hudson, N. Y., development director for A Better Chance; Reginald H. A. Dodds '58, executive assistant to the corporation counsel, New York City Law Department; the Rev. H. Carl McCall '58, New York City, chairman of the editorial board of The AmsterdamNews and of the city's Council Against Poverty; Archie Whitehead '58, director of New Jersey's minority enterprise program and director (on leave) of economic development for Fairleigh Dickinson University's Urban Institute; Forrester A. Lee Jr. '68, New York City, an associate of the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem; and Keith Jackson '70, a graduate student in urban planning at Columbia University.