New ideas

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has granted the College $500,000 to launch a series of extended interdisciplinary institutes for the humanities faculty. The Dartmouth Institutes in the Humanities, lasting from ten weeks to a year, will bring together as many as a dozen Dartmouth and imported scholars to study and discuss in depth a single, broad issue.

The program is designed to address the issue of specialization, an area of concern to President Freedman: "The increasing tendency toward specialization," he said in his inaugural address, "has sheltered men and women of broad-ranging imagination behind narrowly-drawn disciplinary bounds, thereby discouraging them from becoming educated in the fullest sense of that worthy term."