The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and Operation Moonshooter

As a footnote to the story of the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE in the postwar years, a joint editorial enterprise called Operation Moonshooter deserves to be remembered. Beyond the supplements, syndicated articles, and trustee newsletters it produced, it had two remarkable results that no one dreamed of at the start TheChronicle of Higher Education, the nation's most authoritative and respected news journal devoted to American higher education, and the more recent Education Week, which reports on elementary and secondary-school education.

It all began in 1957, when nine alumni magazine editors, including Dartmouth's, were guests for a day at the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. At luncheon, Editor Ben Hibbs (father of Stephen Hibbs '57) complimented the alumni editors on the jobs they were doing for their own institutions, but he found no attention being paid to "the big picture" of American higher education. The college editors took his criticism to heart, but agreed that no individual magazine had the resources to do the job Hibbs suggested. Why not pull together a consortium of editors from all over the country to produce the "big picture" story that all the participating magazines could print simultaneously?

Work began on a pre-printed supplement, "American Higher Education 1958," which was ready for publication in March 1958. Fourteen editors involved were from the American Alumni Council, Brown, California at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Emory, Harvard Business School, Johns Hopkins, New Hampshire, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Phillips Andover Academy. Then someone had the bright idea of offering the supplement to all alumni magazines, not just the 14 producing it. The astounding result was orders for 1.3-million copies from 153 magazines. Orders for the next year's supplement, "The College Teacher 1959," totaled more than 3 million copies. Operation Moonshooter was big business and changed itself to Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.

Dartmouth had a peculiar role in all this. When the printer wanted payment for the first supplement guaranteed and college treasurers gave a cold reception to the idea, the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, which luckily enjoyed financial autonomy, came forward and assured the printer that his bill would be paid. Dartmouth's editor inevitably got elected treasurer of the operation. He had this job for four years and later, 1967—70, was president and chairman of the board.

In 1966, EPE turned from supplements and articles and put its effort mainly into launching the Chronicle. Foundation grants, notably from the Carnegie Corpo- ration of New York, were a lifesaver in the early, rocky years of the Chronicle, which is now firmly established under the editor- ship of Corbin Gwaltney, original Moon- shooter from Johns Hopkins. In order to preserve its tax-exempt status, EPE had to divest itself of the Chronicle. In 1981, it launched another national publication, Education Week, edited by Ron Wolk, for- mer alumni magazine editor at Brown.