Trustees and Alumni Council Meet

Question: There has been a great deal of change in the College in just the short term in office by the President, but here in January 1973 what does the Board of Trustees consider the top priority for the year coming up?

Answer by President Kemeny: I suppose it depends on what constituency of the College you ask. If you ask the faculty, I am sure the answer would be to make the plans we now have work. I have quoted a group of distinguished faculty members who said, if you make one more change for the next four years, we will lynch you. Not that they are unhappy about the changes, I hasten to say, but they feel that it Will take a period to make all these things come out successfully. The other high priority, I think, clearly is the financial solvency of the institution, and we are working very hard at it. In view of the report made this morning, particularly on the early success of the Alumni Fund, but also some of the other favorable things that have happened, I am quite optimistic that we will achieve the goal of solvency, but it will take a great deal of hard work. There also are some unfinished plant items that the Board will be talking about tomorrow morning, and they must be listed among high priority items.

Answer by F. William Andres '29,chairman of the Board of Trustees: I didn't mean to avoid that question or ask John Kemeny to speak for me. I would like to say that in my opinion—I don't pretend to speak for the Board but I believe I do—perhaps the top priority is to bring this Dartmouth fellowship back into that tremendously mutual devoted force that it has been in the past before it had to face the actualities of change, and to restore the confidence and the commitment that has always been part of the Dartmouth experience and the Dartmouth fellowship. We all cannot guide or manage or lead, and we must accept well-chosen leaders and give them the benefit of our patience and our own solid loyalty, not to them as people but to the institution, in a belief that must not be broken, that this institution will continue to grow, will continue to strengthen, that it is not going to be racked by the differences of opinion that may appear on the surface for awhile and raise a squall or two, and that we are going to go on and be the place that we all really deep down, in spite of all our differences of opinion, love and cherish.

The question was asked and the answers were given at a joint meeting of the Board of Trustees and the Dartmouth Alumni Council in Hanover on Friday afternoon, January 12. Both bodies were meeting in Hanover that weekend, and as has been the custom in recent years, they broke away from their regular agendas to have one session together.

That evening, at the joint dinner of Trustees and Council members presided over by Council President Vincent W. Jones '52 of Alhambra, Calif., President Kemeny gave the principal talk and expanded on the answer he had made earlier.

"This afternoon," he said, one of the questions was: What is the major goal for the coming year? I was somewhat taken aback, and I wonder if you would mind if I changed it to the goal for the decade.

"It is clear that, given the very major changes we have made recently, we cannot add similar drastic changes, immediately, but I do have a very major goal for the decade. I knew I had this, but I had it somewhat subconsciously and it came out when a reporter from Time at the end of quite intensive interviewing asked, 'What is it that you would really like to do at Dartmouth?' And I replied that what I would like is for Dartmouth to have the best undergraduate education in the country.

"It came out almost automatically, but I have thought about it a good deal since then. It is not that we would neglect our three very fine, small professional schools; indeed, I hope we can strengthen them during this decade. It is not that we would neglect our Ph.D. programs. I couldn't very well afford to do that because someone might remind me that a certain chairman of the Mathematics Department started the first Ph.D. program at Dartmouth. But while we can achieve good quality there and be proud of it, I feel that the major opportunity for Dartmouth lies where it has always been historically, and that is in the undergraduate program. There I believe we have an unparalleled opportunity in this decade.

"There are a number of things working for us. and the combination of them may be irresistible. First of all, there is the importance of place. Today, having this institution located in Hanover, New Hampshire, gives us an enormous competitive advantage over many of our sister institutions that have to exist in the midst of often almost intolerable urban problems. It is a great attraction to new faculty to be able to be at an institution of the highest intellectual caliber and yet to be able to live in Hanover. It is a decade in which most of our sister institutions are either holding the line or cutting back, and thanks to the Dartmouth Plan we are expanding. We are expanding at a time when the very best young faculty, ones who would have been bid for by a hundred institutions in another period, now are desperate for a job, and Dartmouth can attract the very best young faculty for the next few years.

"Also, somehow the tide has turned. Ten years ago some of our sister institutions Used to make snide remarks about Dartmouth—'You may have some people who are quite respectable in research but they have this peculiar predilection for being interested in teaching'—and words almost like that were used. But fashions have turned, and all of a sudden what we had been doing all along—namely, emphasizing the quality of teaching—has become very fashionable even in some of our greatest institutions. And we have the great head start that our faculty was attracted in very large measure because that is what they are very strong at. I think that what I told you about the great increase in applications for our next freshman class could be the beginning of a trend, because I strongly believe Dartmouth is the undergraduate institution of the future.

"We are not going to match Harvard or Chicago or Berkeley in the. quality of great graduate or professional schools; we will leave that to them. But there is one area where being Number 2 is not good enough. As our football team has shown for a number of years, if you have the determination and if you have what it takes, it is possible to be Number 1. For all the reasons I have mentioned, I firmly believe that if we work at it, and if we have your support and the support of all the alumni, then by 1980 we can without question be the finest undergraduate institution in the nation

The Alumni Council devoted a substantial part of its three-day gathering to meetings of its working committees and then the discussion of committee reports made to the full Council. Just prior to Friday afternoon's joint session with the Trustees, the Council heard a three-part presentation on undergraduate affairs by Carroll Brewster, Dean of the College; prof. Donald L. kreider, Vice President and Dean for Student Affairs; and Ruth Adams, Vice President of the College, whose first year at Dartmouth is being devoted mainly to the educational and social aspects of inaugurating coeducation, as well as to the goal of increasing the number of women on the faculty.

Before Friday afternoon's question-and-answer session with the Trustees, members of the Board and of the Council heard a lengthy presentation of Development Office plans and activities by George H. Colton '35, Vice President of the College, and Addison L. Winship II '42, Director of Development. At its June meeting the Alumni Council had received a report on long-range budget projections; at the January meeting, as a follow-up, it heard a similar long-range projection of the fundraising necessary to help finance the College's programs.

The budget projection estimated that the College's net annual operating expense, after the deduction of assigned revenue (gifts, grants, and endowment income for designated purposes) would rise from $17,964 million, this year to $23,033 million in 1976-77. To meet this growing expense, development goals will rise along with increased revenues from student fees, unrestricted endowment income, and reimbursed indirect costs. This year's development goal is $11.24 million and for next year it will be $14.67 million. The goal then rises to $16.26 million for 1974-75, and for the two following years is estimated at $17 million and $17.66 million.

Included in these development totals are gifts for current use, including the Alumni Fund; gifts and bequests for endowment; and gifts for plant. The figures are for the three associated schools as well as the College of Arts and Sciences. Medical School support, in the form of both current-use gifts and endowment, is one of the major goals in the five-year plan.