The Trembling Hope

"Our challenge is to bring outstanding students into contact with the finest scholar-teachers in the world."

CLEARLY IT IS SOMETHING more than the beautiful campus, the snowy winters, or the New Hampshire granite that enables the College years to make such a deep and lasting impression on Dartmouth men and women. No doubt this impression is in part the result of Dartmouth's unique character and its intimate size and scale. But most important, perhaps, in the making of that indelible impression on students is what happens here the people met and the associations made that form both die stuff of collegiate memory and the foundation of a and committed life.

Of paramount importance, as we embark upon the capital campaign, is the preservation of the College's unique place in private higher education: an excellent undergraduate program, small enough to ensure the intimacy of a classic liberal-arts college, with instruction provided by faculty members committed to undergraduate teaching, yet one large enough to provide faculty depth and curricular breadth, of a kind typically found only at research universities.

Our challenge is to bring outstanding students into contact with the finest scholar-teachers in the world. That challenge requires us to commit ourselves to seeking ways to spark vital relationships between faculty and students in a time when across our entire society, people are less personal in their connections, one with another. It means committing ourselves to providing the resources necessary to bring to Dartmouth's faculty scholar-teachers who are that rare and wonderful paradox—teachers who have continued to learn, scholars who have new knowledge to impart (even to those at the very forefront of their fields).

Dartmouth's will to excel requires a commitment to sustaining a faculty of sufficient depth and breadth to open up to our students the diverse worlds of modern knowledge. It means sustaining a student/faculty ratio that is low enough to facilitate the close contact from which intellectual epiphanies so often reveal themselves.

It means providing faculty members and students with the sophisticated laboratories of modern science; with academic facilities where faculty can work and meet with their students and colleagues; and with a library that enables students and faculty to discover what is already known and to inquire into what is still unknown.

It means standing by our commitment to make a Dartmouth education accessible to the most talented, ambitious, and idealistic students, in the nation and the world, without regard to their financial circumstances.

That is how we must face forward in order to ensure that future generations feel the power of Dartmouth's will to excel and have cause to love Dartmouth as she has been loved for so long. That, indeed, is what the Campaign to Excel is all about.

Today Dartmouth stands as one of the preeminent institutions of higher education in the United States. It is strong because it has, from its founding, pursued excellence—and done so with a healthy combination of unfailing loyalty and unblinking self-criticism. The Campaign to Excel seeks to continue that tradition into the next century.

Let me share with you the words of one of Dartmouth's most outstanding presidents: "Within the past year the phrase has become current amongst us the new Dartmouth. I interpret the phrase to express our decision and our enthusiasm in the work to which we are called in the readjustment and development of Dartmouth. The chiefest factor in the new will be the old... We build upon strong and wide foundations. More than this, the very resources with which we at least begin to build represent the earnings of a past generation, not of our own—the accumulations which have been waiting in trust for our use."

The speaker was William Jewett Tucker, and the occasion was his inaugural address, 99 years ago, on June 28,1893. And yet, his remarks remain powerfully apposite today Inevitably, Mr. Tucker's "new Dartmouth" becomes the old Dartmouth of today, and with time our Dartmouth of today will become the old Dartmouth of tomorrow—as a living, ever-evolving institution, in an ever-changing world, continues to recreate itself in its own image.

As we approach the beginning of the third millennium, Dartmouth College is stronger than it ever has been. It is offered now the remarkable opportunity to continue the worthy tradition of Dartmouth's past. In my inaugural address I quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote, "I have always thought that not place nor power nor popularity makes the success that one desires, but the trembling hope that one has come near to an ideal."

And so we inaugurate this capital campaign for Dartmouth, with the will to excel and with the trembling hope that in the years ahead we shall approach even closer to the ideal of liberal education.

This essay was adapted from an address onNovember 15 in New York City to inaugurateDartmouth's capital campaign.