Dear President Freedman...

In an open letter, the '53 secretary challenges the College's new emphasis on intellectuals.

In the february issue, you clearly set forth your vision and hopes for Dartmouth. You want to make Dartmouth a more intellectual institution—an objective that appears to have become an end in itself. Therein lies a challenge I'd like to make.

As a leading liberal arts institution, Dartmouth has no higher goal than to select, nurture and develop leaders. Yet there is no mention of this in your article.

Let me hasten to make two points. I'm not the incorrigible dissenter who harps at the College from without. I've been a class agent every year since graduation 30-plus years ago. Six kin went to Dartmouth, including my son and daughter-in-law. I have served on capital campaigns, run a reunion, and currently serve as secretary of my class.

This leads me to my second point. As secretary, I have interviewed more than a hundred classmates for my col- umn. Many have been in leadership positions; a number have earned their doctorates. Tracing classmates who were leaders at Dartmouth a genera- tion ago, I have found that most con- tinue to demonstrate leadership in their professions or communities, or in academia. They are willing to accept responsibility and to commit their time, energy and intellect to public tasks. Checking their college records, I've found that those who led at Dart- mouth and continue to lead today are smart men with a high percentage of graduate degrees in law and business. One could not, however, classify them as "intellectuals." One wonders how many of them would even make the admissions cut today.

Thirty of my classmates have earned doctorates; I've interviewed 20 of them. As students, they achieved the highest academic honors. A great ma- jority of them are now college profes- sors. Considering that they have instructed and influenced a generation of students, their collective imprint is impressive. They most likely fit your vision of "creative loners and daring dreamers."

Nonetheless, the profiles support my intuition that there is no correlation between leadership and intellectual- ism. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest the converse. The pursuit of academic excellence may be so all-con- suming that there is little or no time to assume leadership positions.

You can see why your call for more emphasis on student scholarship trou- bles me.

Dartmouth's selective admissions process reinforces my concern. Grades and board scores are a fairly precise way to measure intellect. Rooting out leadership qualities is a more subjec- tive task. I'm worried that the achieve- ment of intellectualism might be at the expense of leadership.

You may challenge my assumption that Dartmouth's chief obligation is to produce leaders. But my classmates show that we cannot have it both ways; leaders would not be a byprod- uct of a higher-order pursuit of aca- demic excellence.

The Admissions Office, which al- ready faces a herculean task, would likely despair of trying to select poten- tial leaders. The faculty, I suspect, is far more comfortable with the charge of intellectual excellence. Your goal thus sounds readily obtainable. But if the chief end of Dartmouth is to pro- duce tomorrow's leaders, your scholarly vision is unacceptably nar- row.-

"The achievement of intellectualismmight be at the expense of leadership,"says Tom Bloomer. After interviewing ahundred of his classmates, he found nocorrelation between the two qualities.