Thayer’s Sesquicentennial

Thayer’s Sesquicentennial

CAMPUS

notes from around the green

ANNIVERSARIES

Thayer School of Engineering has embarked on a yearlong 150th anniversary party. Events will include an alumni weekend in May, when former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt’78 will make keynote addresses. That month also includes a concert that will feature unconventional musical instruments designed and built by eight Thayer students during a four-day course last December.

“Our anniversary gives us a chance to remind everyone that we were founded by a Dartmouth graduate who was the father of engineering education in the United States, that we have approached engineering as a collaborative enterprise with the liberal arts from the start, and that in the past half century we have been nationally recognized pioneers in experiential learning,” says Thayer dean Joseph Helble.

Brig. Gen. Sylvanus Thayer, class of 1807, provided money to get the school under way in 1867. A veteran of the War of 1812 and longtime superintendent of West Point, he worked with the school’s first dean—Robert Fletcher—to implement a curriculum derived from what was taught at the military academy. The new school opened in 1871 with one teacher, three students and five rooms located in Wentworth, Reed and Thornton halls.

Today the school has 56 faculty members. The class of 2016 consisted of 117 undergraduate students, 52 percent of whom were women, making Thayer the first engineering school in the country to graduate a majority female class. Ten years ago, women made up just more than 20 percent of the undergraduate class at Thayer. “The world needs engineers,” says Helble. “And the world needs more engineers who approach problems from different perspectives even more.” To that end, Helble and his team have articulated a vision for the school’s next 150 years. Priorities include doubling the number of students and faculty, expanding its Ph.D. innovation program, constructing a new state-of-the-art building to be shared by engineering and computer science, and facilitating more interdisciplinary interactions. “It’s exciting to contemplate what lies ahead for us and for Dartmouth students as we plan a collaborative future with computer science at the start of the era of the Internet of Things,” says Helble.

“Once, a letter we had written, trying to locate an alumnus, was returned to us marked, ‘You are not on our accredited list of correspondents,’and the letter was from a state penitentiary!”

-ALUMNI RECORDER CHARLOTTE E. FORD IN “YOU’RE A V.I.P. TO THE A.R.O.,” FROM THE JANUARY 1949 ISSUE OF DAM

PRESIDENTIAL COMPENSATION

Big Bucks in the Ivy League

Amy Gutmann University of Pennsylvania $2,962,708 Lee C. Bollinger Columbia University $2,447,032 David J. Skorton Cornell University $1,618,328 Peter Salovey Yale University $977,219 Drew Gilpin Faust Harvard University $969,830 Phil Hanlon Dartmouth College $940,889 Christopher Eisgruber Princeton University $875,925 Christina Hull Paxson Brown University $739,681 Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, all data is for calendar year 2014

BAD NEWS

$112 million

Net operating loss posted by the College for fiscal year 2016

YOU’RE HIRED!

24

New faculty added for the current academic year