Fund Director

Last month Josiah Stevenson IV '57 moved into the first-floor northeast corner office in Crosby Hall, recently vacated by Charles Breed '51, to become director of the Alumni Fund.

After operating in just about every possible volunteer capacity for the College, Stevenson has bowed to the inevitable and made Dartmouth his profession rather than an avocational preoccupation. Perhaps business was interfering with his real work.

Business for Joe Stevenson, for the past ten years, has been Chesebrough-Pond's, Inc. In 1974 he became chief executive officer of its Japanese subsidiary. Japan was familiar territory to the Stevensons, who had lived there earlier, during a three-year tour of duty with the Air Force which followed his 1958 graduation from the Tuck School.

Stevenson, still in the Air Force, first started working for Dartmouth as secretary of the Dartmouth Club of Tokyo. After returning stateside, he was head agent and president of his class, a Third Century Fund volunteer, an Alumni Councilor and president of the Council. Then Chesebrough-Ponds sent him back to Japan, where he served a second term as secretary of the alumni club.

After reaching such levels of international business, what brought Stevenson back to Hanover to devote full time to the College? "The core thing," he says, "is that I don't value anything more than education, particularly the kind of education that Dartmouth offers. I'd rather work toward that goal than sell consumer products." He concedes, too, the ubiquitous lure of North Country living for an alumnus-skier-suburbanite.

This is a particularly challenging year to take over direction of the Alumni Fund, as the College prepares to embark on a capital gifts drive, tentatively called Campaign for Dartmouth. But Stevenson is confident that annual giving will continue to build to ever higher levels. "The Alumni Fund," he explains, "is an integral part of and the foundation for the Campaign for Dartmouth, and all contributions to the Fund will be credited to the new capital campaign."