The Deanery

When an announcement of the appointment of two new assistant deans of students came across our desk one sultry July afternoon, it set us to thinking about the growing popularity of deaning as an occupation hereabouts - and probably in other hotbeds of education.

By latest count - as close as we can come in monitoring the ongoing ebb and flow - the new crop brings the total of Dartmouth deans to 31, not counting assistants to deans, who number five.

Deans at the College - not of the College, an identifiable sub-species - come in a remarkable variety of vintages, ranks, and models: unequivocal (9), associate (10), and assistant (12). They occupy themselves with faculty and academic affairs (6), the library (1), the associated schools (9), student affairs in general (13), and their moral and spiritual life in particular (1).

For some historical perspective on this burgeoning genus, we browsed through accounts of Dartmouth's past and learned that, in 1888, as "the duties of the clerk of the faculty grew more onerous [and his pay escalated from $100 to $200]... a committee was appointed to consider the desirability of appointing a dean, but apparently it never made a report." It was five years before the position was finally established. "At first," Richardson's History of Dartmouth College tells us, "the demands of the office were not so arduous as to occupy his entire time, but in 1898 they had so increased that he was relieved of all teaching duties." The first assistant dean came over the horizon in 1911, the first associate in 1915, the first freshman dean appeared in 1921, and we were off and running.

But, to keep it all in proportion, we note that the first dean was appointed about the time that salaries of full professors were raised from $2,000 to $2,200, and that only 40 years before, the College had had only one non-teaching employee, "the worthy but overloaded Professor of Dust and Ashes."