A "rich experience" in Hanover

Last spring, as Robert Barry '56 was finishing up his tour of duty as United States ambassador to Bulgaria, he was planning on using his upcoming sabbatical to do some research in New York. Those plans changed, however, when Barry came across an Alumni Magazine article in which Robert Conn '61 raved about a term he had spent in Hanover as a visiting scholar. As Barry put it, "I read the article and it sounded too good to pass up." So, after a letter to President McLaughlin and a meeting with the director of the Dickey Endowment, Leonard Rieser, Barry changed gears and accepted an offer to become the first resident fellow of the John Sloan Dickey Endowment for International Understanding.

For Barry, the return to the Hanover Plain provides not only an opportunity to enjoy the area that the skier and out doorsman in him has "always loved," but also a chance to reacquaint himself with his alma mater. "I think the place is a much better college than it was when I was here. . . . The addition of coeducation is the most important factor that has made it a more attractive and normal place to have an education." What he has enjoyed most, Barry noted, is the wide range of activities taking place on campus. In a single week he said he had coffee with Senator Paul Tsongas '62, met with New Hampshire Governor John Sununu and the Governor's Council, saw the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra perform, and talked with 25 visiting United Nations interns. These events "would not have happened in a year while I was going here, and this was all within a week," Barry remarked.

"The issues that get alumni most excited," Barry added, "are trivial matters: 'Do we or do we not have an Indian as the College symbol? Should The Dartmouth Review be allowed to use the name Dartmouth?' They don't really tell you much about what's going on here. . . .

The richness of the experience people are having here in contrast to what it was 30 years ago, to me, is remarkable. That is what this place is all about, not those 'Mickey Mouse' issues that seem to surface every once and a while."

Barry, in his role as a resident fellow, is spending the 1984-85 academic year at Dartmouth lecturing as well as doing some research and reading of his own. He said he is planning an "arms control workshop" for winter term that will utilize outside speakers. His goal is not to advocate a position but rather to teach the participants "to think about the building blocks of arms control ... to bridge the [knowledge] gap between experts and the public."

Barry said he is also very interested in working with students in organizing programs on foreign affairs; he has already worked with the World Affairs Council on a foreign affairs journal and has spoken in a number of classes. Barry, who has mixed numerous domestic diplomatic assignments with State Department tours in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, also expects to provide students who are interested in foreign affairs, "either as a career or as an academic subject, . . . the opportunity to talk to someone who's been there."

During his diplomatic career, Barry has worked on American "policy towards Poland" and "our responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan." In the process he has become fluent in Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian and has learned "enough French to get by." Still, Barry believes that the life of a diplomat is not for everyone. "I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who wasn't interested in it to start with. . . . The foreign service requires that you live in a very special environment. . . dislocate your family, move all the time . . . [adapt to] new languages and new cultures." He added, "The foreign service is not just another career. It's got to be a consuming passion."

The goal behind the Dickey Endowment is not to turn out a rash of diplomats, but rather, as Barry put it, "to broaden the horizon of Dartmouth students by exposing them to more in the way of foreign policy issues and how they relate to the United States." Barry attended Dartmouth during the presidency of John Sloan Dickey and said it is fitting that the endowment bears President Dickey's name. "I think it's very appropriate because he was so concerned with foreign affairs. I think it was partly the influence of Dickey that caused so many of us to go into the field."

Barry recalls his entry in a class yearbook prepared for his 25th reunion. "I have devoted the last 20-plus years to trying to improve mutual understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union (but I haven't been successful) he had written in 1981. This statement, Barry said, provides a natural goal for his residency: "To make people understand something of the nature of the Soviet Union and the problem of our communication, in the hopes that someone coming through now will be more successful than I was."

Robert Barry '56 came from negotiating the diplomatic circuit in eastern Europe to spend ayear negotiating the campus pathways and the local ski trails. The former ambassador toBulgaria and a self-professed lover of the outdoors, Barry, pictured here in his office inRockefeller Center, is spending a year at Dartmouth as a fellow of the Dickey Endowmentfor International Understanding.

Most people who know Hanover only through snowy pictures of Winter Carnival think it is colder up here than it really is. From Freshman Year 1962-63, Dartmouth College