Alumni Council Report
With class representatives attending for the first time, a restructured Dartmouth Alumni Council held its 145 th meeting in Hanover in early December. Some 140 present and past members and spouses were in town for the three-day program.
Among its actions, the Council set $9-7 million and 68 percent alumni participation as goals for the 1983 Alumni Fund. In 1982 the Fund raised $9-023 million and had 65.6 percent participation, highest in the nation among leading independent colleges and universities. The Council also approved the nomination of Norman E. McCulloch Jr. '5O for a second five-year term as Alumni Trustee, as reported in more detail in this issue.
Joel B. Portugal '5B presided over the December meeting, which heard reports from the Council's standing committees, its two undergraduate members, and some top College officials, including the provost, the vice president for development and alumni affairs, the dean of the faculty, the dean of admissions and financial aid, and the director of athletics. Richard D. Hill '41, chairman of the Board of Trustees, spoke in place of President McLaughlin, who was then recuperating from a mild heart attack and is now recovered. In addition to a normal agenda, the Council devoted considerable time to questions posed by the resignation of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE editor and took steps to bring about a clarification of Magazine policy and editorial authority.
Preliminary to' the first full Council session, committee meetings filled most of Thursday afternoon and evening, with time out for a buffet supper. In his remarks at the buffet, Council President Portugal reported on the formative stage of a special committee appointed to study the College's entire alumni relations program. The committee is headed by Presidentelect Peter C. Schwartz '6O. Such a study is needed, Portugal said, by the changed configuration of the alumni body: 38,000 men, 2,000 women, 850 blacks, 8,800 alumni over 60, 10,800 under 30, and 3,600 residing far away in California. The Council has a key role to play, he added, in bringing about a better informed alumni body.
Council members spent Friday morning at the Dartmouth Medical School, hearing about the curriculum and witnessing three lecture-demonstrations given by faculty and graduate students in the biomedical sciences. Then, at its afternoon meeting, the Council gave attention first to a report about the ALUMNI MAGAZINE situation, presented by Russell W. Brace '56, chairman of the Communications Committee, which had held a long session the night before. Brace briefly reviewed the history of the Magazine, which has had special ties to the Class Secretaries Association from the very beginning and has always enjoyed a high degree of independence in reporting College affairs to the alumni and in providing an open medium for alumni response. The committee expressed the conviction that this long tradition is still intact. The 1980 promulgation of the Magazine's present masthead statement, it said, and recently the placing of the Magazine under the general oversight of the new director of communications in Parkhurst Hall were seen by some as a takeover of the Magazine and an impairment of its editorial freedom.
"It is my belief," Brace told the Council, "that the president really intended at that time and continues to want the editor to be better informed of policies emanating from the president's office, and that it was not an attempt to bridle, harass, muzzle or dictate editorial policy and thereby limit independence. It was, in fact, an effort to improve communications for the benefit of Dartmouth and its alumni. Too much distance had come between the editor and the senior officers of the College."
The report concluded with the opinion that there had been fault on both sides for the lack of continuing communication that contributed to the disagreement between editor and administration. Looking to the future, it recommended that the Council with approval of the president of the College name an ad hoc committee to study the purpose, organization and reporting functions of the Magazine; the relevancy of the 1980 guidelines approved by the Trustee committee on alumni and public affairs; and the best methods for insuring the Magazine's continued editorial independence.
The committee, which was asked to report in 90 days, is headed by Robert A. Danziger '56. Other members are Richard J. Blum '53, Robert H. Conn '61, Mark P. Harty '73, Jonathan Moore '54, Dero A. Saunders '35, William H. Scherman '34, Josiah Stevenson IV '57, and Jonathan Strong 56. Blum, Conn and Harty represent the Class Secretaries Association, and Saunders and Scherman are from the Magazine's advisory board.
From Magazine matters the Council turned to the status of the Dartmouth Plan study, which should arrive at some definite recommendations by spring. Dean Penner described the two plans now before the faculty an 11-term, 33-course, no summer plan and a 12-term, 35-course, summer term plan and stated that there is growing belief that this calendar study must be meshed with the ongoing study on student life. Professor David Kastan, former chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Life, was present to supplement Dean Penner's remarks. It was disclosed that a new ad hoc committee, headed by P. Bruce Pipes, associate professor of physics, has been formed to pull together all previous calendar, curriculum, and student life studies and to make recommendations.
Another faculty speaker was Roger D. Masters, professor of government and John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professor, who described his "Alumni in the Colexperiment scheduled for February 2-8. Six alumni couples will be invited to join two undergraduate courses, taught by Masters and David Kastan, associate professor of English. Professor Kastan was academic director of the 1982 Alumni College on "The Renaissance."
At the Council's dinner that evening, Dartmouth Alumni Awards were presented to Edward M. Scheu Jr. '46 and Robert D. Kilmarx '5O, whose citations appear with their class columns. Talks were given by Football Coach Joe Yukica and Provost Agnar Pytte, who was meeting with the Alumni Council for the first time.
The weekend closed with Saturday morning's session, at which Vice President Winship reported on the Campaign for Dartmouth and predicted correctly that $200 million would be passed by December 31. Trustee Chairman Hill also spoke of the campaign, stressing the strength it has added to endowment, faculty compensation, and financial aid. He reviewed plant development, particularly the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences and the Hood Museum of Art, and saw the replacing of the College's antiquated heating plant as necessary in the near future. Today's undergraduates, he concluded, are the best to be found anywhere, and their concern for students to come after them is a guarantee of the continued excellence of the College.
The class representatives who attended the Council meeting were the first under the new membership plan which calls for one member from each of the 12 reunion classes to be elected annually to serve for a three-year term. Twelve more class representatives will be elected this coming June and another 12 in June 1984. With all 36 class representatives active, the Alumni Council will have a total membership of 86, compared with 61 members before the Council was restructured last year.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, with flushing red nose, was the centerpiece of Hopkins Center'sChristmas display. Rudolph since 1956 had been a Christmas attraction in front of the Evanston,Illinois, home of the late Robert L. May '26, who wrote the original Rudolph story for MontgomeryWard and later was given the copyright. Rudolph now resides in Hanover as the gift of the Mayfamily and the class of 1926.
Council President Joel B. Portugal '58
