HALLS OF NAME

BARTLETT TOWER Worried about the College's direction, a group of alumni, some with ties to a Politically influential newspaper, wage a proxy battle on campus to assert control. Sound familiar? It happened in 1881, when Samuel Colcord Bartlett was Dartmouth's eighth president.

Bartlett, class of 1836 and an ordained Calvinist minister, landed back in Hanover in 1877 with ecclesiastic aims. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, College attitudes had changed sharply, and a scientific—not theological—education was what students and teachers wanted.

After Bartlett appointed a church friend to fill an empty Greek professorship, 16 of 23 faculty members asked him to step down. Alumni dissent followed, led by Charles Ransom Miller, class of 1872, a New York Times editorial writer.

Trustees voted to keep Bartlett, though the next year he did resign. He had tripled the endowment, boosted faculty by 40 percent, built Rollins Chapel—and planned a tower atop a small ledge in the College Park, where he often walked with his son, Samuel Bartlett, class of 1887 It would take until 1895 to complete the narrow, 71-foot-high cylindrical structure, which looms like a medieval battlement; successive classes would carve their year numbers in capstones along its western flank.

For Bartlett the son, speaking at the tower's 1915 dedication, father and tower were a metaphor for one another. "For here it stands, a granite character, protected by a courage of iron," he said, "and revealing withal to those who mounted to the intimacy of his viewpoint, an outlook gracious and for- bearing."