Keeper of the Times
When the obituary of the College's former provost Leonard Rieser '44 appeared in TheNew York Timeslast December the headline read, "Opponent of Arsenal He Helped to Create. Indeed, Dr. Rieser had been a physicist with the Manhattan Project. Yet for many Americans he was known only as the keeper of the so-called "Doomsday Clock " Photographs like the one below appeared in countless journals, newspapers, and magazines as a way of dramatizing the threat of nuclear war.
At Dartmouth, while Presidents Dickey, Kemeny, and McLaughlin were the focus of the national media, Rieser worked in the background as the number two man. For more than a quarter-century he helped transform presidential visions into budgets, programs, and buildings Under his watch Dartmouth went from a traditional male-only college to a year-round coeducational institution at a time when the College was being buffeted by the winds of change. Rieser was involved with the earliest efforts to diversify the campus by enrolling more minorities and Native Americans—a goal that expanded the College's curriculum. Yet as the College s chief academic officer he recommended that course offerings be reduced by ten percent. And when students prevented Professor William Shockley from presenting a paper on the genetic differences between races, it was Rieser who issued a statement that deended free speech and was critical of students protesters. To understand Rieser's views on Dartmouth one should start with the bookhe coauthored with Sanford Brown, Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth: From Surveyors' Chains to the Pressure of Light. In the preface of the book that is arguably the best intellectual history of Dartmouth are these words: "Science is being blamed for many of society's ills and the teaching of science is being discouraged and downgraded I his book is a reminder of what happens to the educational process when scholarship is discouraged and the search for new knowledge is unsupported." Rieser's obituary appears on page 89.
Rieser counted the minutes to nuclear midnight on the Doomsday Clock.
