Arctic Studies

The hardy seed of the nation's first northern studies program was planted at Dartmouth in 1929, when explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson began making regular visits to lecture on his Arctic expeditions. His talks of Eskimo life and the possibility of subsistence on the Beaufort Sea ice drew crowds of 1,200 people at a time. In the early fifties, President John Sloan Dickey '29 invited Stefansson to become Arctic expert-in-residence. The explorer brought his library and artifacts with him. They were a boon for the professors anthro-pologists, botanists, geologists, engineers who were already engaged in their own Arctic research. Northern studies caught on. In the sixties, anthropology Professor Elmer Harp's examination of Eskimo prehistory pulled in more research money than any other department in the College.

When the army was looking for a home for its Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Dickey used the Stefansson library and the bevy of northern researchers as enticements to set up shop in Hanover.

Finally, in 1989 the College established the Institute of Arctic Studies. Director Oran Young is taking up where Stefansson left off, reviving Stefansson's journal and rekindling emphasis on the region's environmental, social, and economic challenges. "Between the mid-1980s and today, the idea of expanding international cooperation in the Arctic has come into its own," says Young.