Part of the Solution
"Tremendous excitement and shock, too." That's the way Ann Fritz Hackett '76, a manager with a Washington, D.C., consulting firm, recollects her reaction to being elected a charter trustee of Dartmouth.
She is not the youngest trustee in the history of the College. Samuel Phillips: probably retired that cup in 1775, when he was elected at the age of 23. She has another distinction, however, as the first alumna to become a member of the board.
Trailblazing is no novelty to Hackett, who was a member of that first small group of women to matriculate as Dartmouth freshmen in 1972. That pioneer impulse, which no doubt commended her to the trustees, brought her to Dartmouth originally, the first of her family to come here. "I am the sort of person who is excited by the thought of having an experience that's going to be different, that is going to be mine for the creation."
It was a big change for Hackett, who grew up in Baltimore, a strong Princeton town, and attended an all-female secondary school. "When I was first considering college, Dartmouth hadn't even announced it was going coeducational," she recalls. "I wrote, just sort of oh a whim, and they sent me an application.'
She had been thinking Princeton, too, but Ann Fritz preferred being part of the solution to getting involved in hand-medown problems. "Princeton had recently gone through coeducation and was having some difficulties. I wanted to go to a school where I could be part of creating the opportunity and solving the problems as they arose."
Hackett looks back on her four undergraduate years with a fondness long endemic among Dartmouth alumni.. "I didn't come expecting problems. I really didn't," she says. "I think it is true that those first years of coeducation were very difficult, but I realize that almost more in hindsight than I did at the time." Women entering their first year had it easier, she feels, than transfers or exchange students who came with fresh recollections of allwomen's colleges or preconceived notions of what coeducation should be. It was helpful to keep in mind, she says, that lingering resentment "was directed more at coeducation in general than at me specifically. cifically. You were not treated badly by people who knew you."
The warmest feelings she reserves for the community of women in North Mass, where Hackett lived all four years. "There were not many existing structures at Dartmouth at that time to facilitate a sense of community for women sports teams were one way, dorms were another, singing groups and so on yet another, but you had to go.find them."
Find them she did, getting thoroughly involved in campus life from the start. As an undergraduate, Hackett was captain of women's tennis, played varsity field hockey, and chaired the dormitory council. She was a member of Green Key and a director of Fire and Skoal, the first coeducational senior society. That studies never suffered is manifest in her election to Phi Beta Kappa her junior year.
From Dartmouth, Hackett went to Stanford for an M.B.A., joining Strategic Planning Associates immediately thereafter. In 1980, she was promoted to manager, a title she shares with her husband Lance, a Brown graduate with a business degree from Harvard.
As active as an alumna as she was in undergraduate affairs, Hackett was '76's first class secretary, continues as class agent, and is an ex officio member of the Alumni Council.
As a trustee, she looks forward to the pinnacle of service to the College. Her most significant qualification, she contends "I certainly wasn't chosen for my experience and wisdom' is my perspective, having been through a coeducational Dartmouth and been an alumna since. The experiences and the issues and the opportunities and the problems have all been greatly influenced by coeducation and year-round operation, both of which started my freshman year."
Aside from financial concerns "how to manage an institution like Dartmouth in the kind of inflationary environment we're facing today" Hackett sees the direction of student life as a major issue of the next few years. "So much has happened to Dartmouth in the last decade coeducation and year-round operation started, the fraternity system undergoing great stress, sororities introduced, Collis Center built without a major focus on student life. Now there should be a conscious plan on how student life should evolve. That includes dormitory living, social life, and educational life. All three have to be interwoven to some extent." Perhaps not coincidentally, the trustee Hackett succeeds, Robert D. Kilmarx '50, shared these concerns.
Hackett was to meet first with the full Board of Trustees late last month at the annual summer retreat at the Minary Center. ter. She was anticipating nothing but good no fatherly indulgence, no condescension toward her youth from the 14 men, 13 alumni ranging in class from 1937 through 1964 and the governor of New Hampshire, and another trailblazer, Sally Frechette, Dartmouth's first woman trustee. "I have felt welcomed with openness and candor so far by the individual trustees I have met," she says. "Each of them has been very willing to listen to my perspective, and I look forward to a close relationship."
Ann Fritz Hackett 76; newest trustee.
WE must have been a somewhat crude lot of boys, judged by present-day standards. Most of us came from small towns, sons of farmers, mechanics, small tradesmen. None of us was wealthy, many knew the necessity of very strict economy. Four years in Hanover did not add much to our knowledge of the amenities of social life. What social life most of us had was found in 'Bed Bug Alley' and other equally primitive dormitories. It was a Spartan life, wholly destitute of'modern conveniences.' But we went there to get an education. Dartmouth gave us the best she had. We found it good." Frank G. Wheatley, class of 1879
