Whole New Generation

It has been said more or less ingenuously that the sole purpose of the administrative and other bureaucratic apparatus of a college is to bring student and teacher together under optimum circumstances.

If that be more than platitude, then members of the Alumni Council were treated at their June meeting to a clear look at the real Dartmouth. Committee reports, the alumni role in policy-making, finances and football, all took a back seat to "the business of learning," as the councilors spent the better part of their one full day in Hanover listening to members of the faculty talk about what they do and why they do it.

The centerpiece was two faculty panels one composed entirely of graduates of the College, the other of non-alumni followed by informal discussion over lunch, with some 40 professors scattered among the tables, talking about their work, answering questions, commenting on matters of professional or curricular interest on campus and elsewhere.

The panelists' perspectives were as various as their disciplines religion, mathematics, philosophy, Romance languages, comparative literature, government, history, and geography. Their tenure at the College ranged from 27 years for Robert Huke '48, who came back directly from graduate school, to one year for Robert Fogelin, who joined the faculty last summer as a senior professor after teaching at Yale for 13 years.

David Sices '54 (French and Italian), faculty representative on the council and moderator of the alumni panel, led off with the suggestion that the storied perception of "the funny, funny faculty" needed finetuning. Indicative of the changes of recent decades, he noted, is the fact that now only 17 of some 300 in the professorial ranks spent their undergraduate years at Dartmouth, in pointed contrast to the 51 alumni who were part of a considerably smaller faculty 25 years ago.

Each of the six panelists took a different tack, but common threads ran through all or most of their remarks: the increasing professionalism of the faculty, the high quality of the students, the need for a more rigorous intellectual climate to attract and hold the former and stretch the capabilities of the latter, the stimulation small graduate programs provide, the pressures of teaching under the four-term, year-round plan, and the essential role of research in maintaining first-rate teaching standards.

Huke, Sices' predecessor as faculty councilor, summed up the pluses and the contrapuntal minuses of the changes he's witnessed since returning to Hanover as a geography instructor in 1953: the growing resources of Baker Library far overshadowing the inconvenience of multiple libraries scattered about the campus; the superb facilities of Hopkins Center and the sports complex vis-a-vis the extra-curricular distractions they offer; the intellectual capability of the students and some erosion of academic requirements.

Stephen Nichols '58 (French and Italian, comparative literature), concentrated on "a whole new generation of professionally committed scholars" recruited in recent years and the challenge the College faces in holding them. "In the old days," he said, "if a faculty member was professionally ambitious, he couldn't stay at Dartmouth; he could only find the variety of challenges elsewhere." Dartmouth's "pioneer programs in adult education in liberal studies, along with the chance to teach graduate students," exemplify the sort of variable teaching goals that can attract and retain "the new breed of professor," Nichols suggested. But "Dartmouth remains underexploited intellectually."

Richard Joseph '65 (government, African and Afro-American studies), born abroad, a Fulbright Scholar in France, a Rhodes Scholar in England, for some years a teacher in Africa, added a quite different perspective, geographically and culturally. His focus was on the mood of the country "there is a political philosophy in ascendancy in which the role of the state in social change is de-emphasized" and its implications for the College, particularly its commitment to black students. "Education remains the main avenue for advancement for black Americans," he said, "and Dartmouth must maintain its commitment, especially as the federal government abandons its role." To honor both "Dartmouth's first and foremost commitment to quality education" and its commitment to black students, "we must have the capability to tell students 'this level of work is not good enough; this behavior is not acceptable.' "this is important to all students, but especially to black students." To do that, Joseph added, the need is to combat racism, to create in young blacks "a new disposition for hard work of an academic or intellectual nature," akin to "the disposition to excel in sports and the arts."

The non-alumni panel, moderated by Hans Penner, dean of the faculty, included three of Nichols' "new breed." Dwight Lahr (mathematics) emphasized the importance of the College's small graduate programs to both undergraduates and faculty members. "A natural extension of undergraduate programs and a complement to them," they challenge the faculty and provide intellectual interaction in professional fields, while the presence of graduate students stimulates the academic growth of departmental majors, he said.

Mary Kelley (history) talked about "who I am, what I do, what role I play, what a historian is." The four interdependent parts of her work, she told the councilors, are the training ("which never ends"), the teaching ("more training it is true that you never know history until you teach it"), research and writing ("you don't really understand history until you're involved in research, particularly with primary sources, and in writing about it"), and institutional and professional commitments. "What I do in the classroom is only the tip of the iceberg," she said. "There's the conceptualizing, the reading, the writing of lectures, the papers. And what I do in the classroom is directly related to my research. In order to be a good historian, a good teacher of history, one has to be as well a good and productive scholar."

Robert Fogelin (philosophy), a recent recruit from Yale where he was, among other things, master of Trumbull College after musing about why on a fine June morning "I am doing this, conversing with Dartmouth alumni, when I could be in the Presidential Range, conversing with God" also concentrated on the fundamental importance of scholarship in undergraduate teaching. Without the teacher's insight and understanding, "education does not take place," he said. "Knowledge becomes a lot of information to be transmitted in dollops into students' heads." To gain insight and understanding, "One must be a participant." He has found Dartmouth students, he said, to be "bright, fairly lazy. If you stick it to them, they rise to the challenge and work." He marveled at their morale, "Two weeks here, and they love it.

... By their senior year, their underwear is green." Fogelin's one complaint was that by the junior and senior years, many of them lack intellectual excitement. "They need to be challenged, encouraged to sit around and drink cheap wine and eat pizza and do bad imitations of Plato's Symposium."