Looking Inward

One "opportunity" that President Freedman listed for looking into Dartmouth's future is a self-study report recently completed by three on campus committees.

As part of the College's ten-year accreditation, the committees studied the intellectual environment, graduate programs, and diversity. All three groups called for Dartmouth to slough off its small-college image, and each urged that students be challenged more. "Dartmouth's greatest need is not the need to attract a different kind of student," the intellectualism committee maintained, "but rather to realize more of the intellectual potential that its current students have."

The committee proposed requiring all students to work on an independent project in their major. "The liberal arts deals with the unknown," explains the chairman, Dean Greg Prince. "Student research does that."

The intellectual environment committee also called for an activity fee that would allow all students to attend events at the Hopkins Center free of charge, and the establishment of additional "academic affinity" groups within the dorms. Models already in place are the Kade German Center and the Asian Studies Center.

Still, the committees on intellectual environment and diversity argued that unless social life on campus improves, academics will suffer. Areas targeted for reform were the Greek system and freshman orientation. The intellectualism committee urged that trips be held after classes start and that Boston museums be used as a destination along with the New England wilderness.

Although faculty members composed most of the committees, not all professors accept the report's tenets. Some have criticized the methods the committees used in surveying students and faculty, and the conclusions have come under fire from some constituencies.

This is exactly what should happen, says Bruce Pipes, dean of graduate studies and chair of the committee that examined graduate programs. "This isn't policy," he notes. "The report has been distributed to get up a conversation on the ways Dartmouth could stand improvement."

Serenading Dartmouth's past, the DOC croons at Moosilauke. Two recent studies criticized freshman trips.