... And a Woman Trustee

The other unprecedented Trustee decision, also announced by President Kemeny at the faculty meeting and greeted with only slightly less applause and cheering than the admissions announcement, was the election of Priscilla Frechette as the first woman to serve on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. Sally Frechette, as she prefers to be called, will assume the position to be vacated September 17 by William H. Morton '32 on his 70th birthday Although Board rules require Trustees to step down at age 70, they are permitted to postpone their retirement until the following Commencement. Morton, a former president and director of the American Express Co. and a Trustee since 1972, agreed to give up his position nine months early in order to permit a change in the composition of the Board.

Frechette, a resident of Keene, New Hampshire, is completing a master's degree in business from the University of Massachusetts and graduated from Smith College in 1942 with a major in mathematics. (The Trustees appeared to have a special fondness for Smith; a College officer who observed the deliberations confided that the other front-runners for the job were also Smith alumnae. Kemeny joked to the faculty that Frechette's interest in mathematics was "the one of her many other outstanding attributes" that most endeared her to him.) She has served as chairman of the Kingsbury Machine Tool Corporation in Keene and is presently a director of that company as well as of the Ashuelot National Bank and the Public Service Company of New Hampshire. She recently was elected to the board of the Forum on New Hampshire's Future; she is a member of the board of New England College and a former member and chairman of the Keene School Board.

With the advent of coeducation, the Trustees have been under some pressure to include women within their ranks. The Alumni Council nomination of George Munroe '43 was challenged in 1977 by a petitioned nomination of the Reverend Pauli Murray, who received an honorary doctorate of laws from the College in 1976. She was defeated, to nobody's surprise, in a poll of alumni, the first time the procedure had been used for contesting the Alumni Council's nomination. The General Association of the Alumni subsequently voted to tighten the procedures to require that Alumni Trustee eligibility be limited to individuals who had matriculated at the College or one of the associated schools, and that the petition to nominate an alternate to the Alumni Council's choice be signed by 250 instead of 100 alumni.

Prior to Frechette's election as a Charter Trustee (one nominated and elected by the Board itself), individual Trustees' comments on whether or not the next vacancy would be filled by a woman ranged from "It's a foregone conclusion" to "The Board is considering a number of qualified candidates, some of whom are women." Although no regulation requires that Charter Trustees be Dartmouth alumni, it is a longstanding tradition only partly fractured by the ex-officio presence on the Board of New Hampshire Governor Hugh Gallen and President Kemeny, an adopted member of the Class of 1922.

For the Board to keep tradition and elect an alumna would have meant choosing from a relatively small pool of only slightly more than 800 alumnae - women only recently out of college and, like their male classmates, most likely busy scrambling for graduate degrees or careers. Taking advantage of the friendly concept of the "Dartmouth family," however, the Board was able to find a qualified .candidate who has both an affinity for the College and proven ability. Sally Frechette is the widow of Henry H. Frechette '41, the mother of David '67, the mother of Edward and Peter - both Dartmouth freshmen - and the cousin of Donald Williamson '42, George Kingsbury '38, and of R. Putnam Kingsbury '35.

Other Trustee actions concerning the composition of the Board were to re-elect Berl Bernhard '51 to his second term as a Charter Trustee, Donald McKinlay '37 to his second term as an Alumni Trustee, and David McLaughlin '54 to a second one- year term as chairman.

Priscilla Frechette