Out of the Woods

In a hilariously solemn metaphor. Dartmouth's college anthem boasts that the school breeds men with "the granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains." Dartmouth people darkly suspect that the world pictures their school as an Ivy League training camp for ski bums and football players, dressed in the foul-weather fashions of six-month winters and rarely troubling their granitic heads with studies. Yet these days the Hanover hills are ringing with academic reforms and resounding to the whoops of culture.

Just opened is the Hopkins Center for creative and performing arts, a triple-threat (art, drama, music) complex designed by Lincoln Center Architect Wallace Harrison, with advisers ranging from Conductor Leonard Bernstein to Choreographer Jerome Robbins. Celebrating the occasion, Dartmouth last week served a cultural feast: new music by French Composer Darius Milhaud, a show of paintings by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, the world premiere of Director John Huston's Freud, and the first completed U.S. work of Italian Architect-Engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, which happens to be Dartmouth's new $1,500,000 arched-roof fieldhouse.

Small & Lovable. What makes such a flurry the more notable is Dartmouth's isolation--a headache since 1770, when the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock trudged up from Connecticut with rum, drum and Bible to "civilize and Christianize'' the pagan redskins of New Hampshire. Some 140 miles north of Boston, where Harvard was already 134 years old, the doughty divine built a log-hut school called Dartmouth College after its English angel, the Earl of Dartmouth. Unhappily, the Indians ignored Wheelock. He was forced to import paleface students, who at first took a wry view of his brave motto. Vox Cla-mantis in Deserto (The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness).

The voice nonetheless got heard in 1818, when Alumnus Daniel Webster tearfully told the equally moved U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall:-"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it." In the 29 years prior to 1945, Dartmouth won national status under President Ernest Martin Hopkins (the new center's originator). Yet isolation remained a problem. When Hopkins retired, the faculty was inbred, overage, lacked the metropolitan stimulation of other famed schools. To find girls on weekends, the boys regularly killed themselves speeding down narrow roads to civilization.

Girls & Books. The nearest supply of college girls is still 40 miles away at Colby Junior College. But isolation is rapidly becoming a virtue under President John Sloan Dickey, the reticent alumnus ('29) and Boston lawyer who quit the State Department in 1945 to succeed Hopkins. For modern city kids, the Outing Club offers a 27,000-acre wilderness to romp in. Superlative Baker Memorial Library, with 800,000 volumes in stacks open for browsing, gives many a Dartmouth man his real education. Dickey parlayed the advantages: under him, endowment has more than tripled, to $73 million, book value. In six years, Dartmouth has put up $27.4 million in new construction, including the $7.5 million Hopkins Center.

One result of such affluence is that 40% of Dartmouth's 3,060 undergraduates now get scholarship aid (average grant: $1,200) toward the minimum $2,800 cost. Another is a rebuilt faculty, 60% new since 1952, with salaries as high as $18,000 a year. It also boasts such compelling young scholars as Mathematician John Kemeny, 36, who graduated from Princeton in 1947 with the highest grades seen there in 20 years, came to Dartmouth as a full professor at 27. In creating the best college math department in the country, Kemeny has also produced such fascinating courses for non-majors that 95% of Dartmouth freshmen now take math voluntarily.

Coherent College. A champion of "liberating" education. President Dickey has tried hard to blend liberal arts with the specialization that now drives 73% of Dartmouth men on to graduate school. In 1947, he launched a compulsory "Great Issues" course for seniors, which each week brings in poets, politicians or philosophers to discuss everything from God to "overkill." The same idea keeps Dartmouth from becoming a full-fledged university. It has three graduate schools: business administration, engineering, and the third oldest (1797) U.S. medical school. But all stay deliberately small (total enrollment: 342) on the ground, says Dickey, that Dartmouth must keep the unifying spirit of a residential college and not become a "boardinghouse for specialists."

As a result. Dartmouth expands graduate work only where it is especially qualified to fill a vacuum. Mathematician Kemeny. for example, has started a unique doctoral program aimed at creating college teachers of his "new math." The medical school offers only two years of study and then sends most of its students on to fill the vacancies created by flunk-outs at Harvard's four-year school. The Dartmouth medical school has recently doubled enrollment to 96, is raising $10 million, will soon offer a Ph.D. in molecular biology.

Three-Three Schedule. Dartmouth's most dazzling innovations are for undergraduates, who now come from all 50 states and 30 foreign countries, are 75% public school products, and generally fit Admissions Director Edward Chamberlain Jr.'s edict: "It's not how well-rounded they are; it's the length of their radii we're interested in.'' To stretch radii, Dartmouth has pioneered a "three-three" schedule--a three-term academic year with only three courses per term. Since the goal is to probe subjects more deeply, the work is a lot harder. Also required: heavy reading and "original commentaries" of at least 900 words on authors from Plato to Sartre.

Old faculty hands complain that three-three is mere academic automation that "pushes the kids too hard." Faculty Dean Arthur Jensen disagrees, says that "this system has sparked the whole academic tone of Dartmouth." As for students, movie attendance is down 35% and book circulation at Baker Library is up 55%. Next on John Dickey's agenda is the logical extension of three-three: a summer session beginning in 1963 that may well put Dartmouth on a year-round basis and allow a B.A. to be earned in three years. At the summer session Dartmouth will also take its first women undergraduates, but President Dickey will restrict enrollment to men for the rest of the year.

Dartmouth still stresses football enough to be this year's leader in the Ivy League, still puts on its Winter Carnival, the nation's coldest and wildest college weekend. But doused in Hopkins Center culture and prodded to more "self-education" than ever, Dartmouth men are fast finding that winter in Hanover can be the intellectual joy of a lifetime.

* Who in 1819 overruled the state legislature's attempt to take over Dartmouth as a public university.

The landmark decision 1) guaranteed the rights of U.S. private colleges, and 2) gave the sanctity of contract to corporate charters, a key event in the history of U.S. business.

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