Degrees Of Honor
1771
No honorary degrees are granted. The governor of New Hampshire is the honored guest. He brings some food for the occasion: an ox for a barbecue on the Green. The College, for its part, provides a barrel of rum.
1773
Eighteen people, including founder Eleazar Wheelock's son Ralph, are awarded honorary degrees. At the same time, six seniors receive diplomas.
1838
Ralph Waldo Emerson asks the senior class, "Why should you renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, a house and a barn?"
1909
Horace Fletcher 1870, the Dartmouth dropout who invented the first fad diet, is recognized by the College as an "expounder of the laws of health."
1953
Graduation is moved from the Bema to the Baker lawn so that the Secret Service can provide better security for visiting President Dwight Eisenhower. Thus begins a new tradition.
1975
Robert James Keeshan becomes an honorary doctor of humane letters. For the next two decades, students insist that Captain Kangaroo attended Dartmouth.
1983
Paul Volker summons his wisdom as a leading economist and Federal Reserve Board chairman to tell graduates that "life out there is no bed of roses."
1991
Children's author Maurice Sendak easily wins the most applause over fellow honorees I.M. Pei, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elizabeth Dole.
Arthur Fiedler's fondnessfor fire trucks pumpedsome circumstance into astaid Commencement.
