The Fund

Bart, Meg, and Andy were familiar faces around the Alumni Fund and development offices a couple of years ago. Administrative interns, more formally known as James Bartlett Littlefield, Margaret Blakey, and Andreas Graham, all of the class of 1980. Their faces are still familiar and warmly welcomed in Blunt Alumni Center.

Having cut their fund-raising teeth on the 1980 undergraduate telethon, Bart, Meg, and Andy went out into the wide, wide world to the Boston Consulting Group, to New York's Bankers Trust Company and 1.8.M., respectively but they're still working their fund-raising magic.

Together, head agents Blakey and Littlefield and participation chairman Graham this year directed a blitz that toppled by several percentage points the Alumni Fund participation record for a first-year-out class that was set 29 years ago by the class of 1951. The 71 per cent of the class of 1980 contributing to the fund is well ahead of the overall 64.9 per cent participation that has Dartmouth leading every college and university in the nation.

As fund director Henry Eberhardt '61 notes, the participation index includes all alumni, graduates and non-graduates alike. "That means," he says, "that the agents have to track down a lot of people who may have dropped out of college after a term or two."

The class of 1980's $15,377 may not have been a heavy item in the $7,488,881 total receipts of the 1981 campaign (against a goal of $7.2 million), but it, too, was a record for a class one year out of college. It also contradicts the gloom- and doomsayers who predicted that alumni of the "new Dartmouth" would never match in loyalty the traditional support of their elders.

Then there was Dave Weld '46, who, after crashing through last year with a reunion-giving record for a 35-year class, came back to the trough and twisted his classmates' arms to the tune of over $180,000, an all-time high for a non-reunion class. "He was obnoxious," says Eberhardt in cheerful admiration. "Didn't let anybody alone and practically camped out on the Green keeping an eye on the totals."

Four new reunion-giving records were set this year, for the 30th, the 55th, the 10th, and the 60th: 1950 with $505,000, 1926 with $215,000, 1971 with $107,000, and 1921 with $73,000.

And 1923 and 1926 had 100 per cent participation. Now that's a tough record to top.

"For all the genetic engineering, however, these Yale men who came north on the Connecticut . . . did not come to the great forest to found another Yale." President Giamatti of Yale, at the inauguration of Dartmouth's 14th president