Spirited Beginnings

"I have thought long and hard. Could we avoid this campaign? I had only one idea capture the spirit of this campus, bottle it, and sell it. But I don’t know how.” President Kemeny, 1977

“If you start compromising the quality of Dartmouth, there is no purpose in having a Dartmouth,” President Kemeny told the Trustees, alumni club officers, and other members of the College community at November 4th ceremonies marking the official inauguration of the Campaign for Dartmouth.

Maintenance and preservation of quality and the qualities which make Dartmouth a place unto itself was a theme reiterated over and over in the remarks of

various dignitaries, as it is in the purpose of the drive itself, a five-year, $ 160-million effort to bolster the financial underpin- nings of the College an endowment that has been seriously eroded by inflation, a sagging stock market, and quadrupled energy costs.

Board Chairman David T. McLaughlin ’54 spoke of “continued leadership” and “the preservation of the liberal arts tradition.” Trustee Norman E. McCul- loch Jr. ’5O, chairman of the campaign, called on alumni and friends of the College “to preserve all that Dartmouth is and means.” President Emeritus John Sloan Dickey ’29 testified to the continuation of a commitment to that contract that “gives this institution the life and the capacity to generate life. ...” Senior class president Stephen Meili pledged student support so that “Dartmouth may maintain its high standards of academic excellence” and its “commitment to the education of a heterogeneous student body.”

Likening the campaign to the summons issued by President Tucker after Dart- mouth Hall burned in 1904, President Kemeny said “I can’t show you a burning building, but what uncontrollable outside forces have done to the endowment of all private colleges is just as clear a threat to the College’s future.”

With photo-murals of his 12 predecessors in the Wheelock Succession looking down from the walls of Spaulding Auditorium, the President pledged himself to carrying out Eleazar Wheelock’s irrevocable will his purpose “to leave nothing undone within my power . . . that this school of the prophets may be and long continue a pure fountain.”

The continuity of the Wheelock Succes- sion was recognized not only by President Dickey’s presence at the ceremony, but at a celebration of his 70th birthday at a reception afterwards in Alumni Hall and at the commemoration of the 100 th an- niversary of President Ernest Martin Hopkins’ birth on the following Sunday, when McLaughlin and President Kemeny laid a wreath on his grave at Pine Knoll Cemetery in Hanover.

Concentration on the high purposes of the official opening of the largest capital campaign in Dartmouth’s history was somewhat distracted by two headline- grabbing events that coincided with the Trustees’ fall meeting. On Thursday, the day before the ceremony, Jake Crouthamel ’6O announced his resignation as head football coach, effective at the end of the current season. And the Afro- American Society, Women at Dartmouth, and the Committee for Equal Access spon- sored a day-long teach-in, capped by a protest rally, on Friday.

“A wish to pursue other interests,” was the reason Crouthamel cited for leaving Dartmouth after seven years, three Ivy League championships, and a 4L20-2 record. (For further comments on his resignation, see Big Green Teams.)

The protest, which attracted about 100 students and climaxed with a brief sit-in in the lobby of Hopkins Center as guests were arriving for a pre-kick-off cocktail party, was a scatter-shot attack based on a number of complaints loosely grouped un- der an umbrella of “Institutional Racism, Sexism, and Class Bias.” The primary emphasis seemed to be on limitations placed on the admission of women and Dartmouth’s non-participation in an amicus curiae brief in the Bakke case, presumably because the language came too close to supporting quotas for minority students. At a press conference the follow- ing Monday, President Kemeny called a student accusation that the Trustees had backed down on a promise to hold an open meeting this fall “an irresponsible statement,” contrary to the facts.

Failing to, deliver their petitions to the Trustees, the protesters gave the documents instead to Ralph Manuel ’5B, dean of the College. As they dispersed, one commented, “We made our point. I think everyone upstairs heard us loud and clear” a patently impossible dream, con- sidering the decibel level in the Top of the Hop with several hundred alumni and guests assembled for cocktails.

John and Chris Dickey celebrated the President’s birthday with a few hundred friends.

Opposite: tis the season for familiar viewsfrom unusual perspectives, this one takenfrom the roof top level of Rollins Chapel.