The Opportunity for Leadership at Dartmouth
Dartmouth College has forged a singular identity, consistent in its history and rare in the modern academy. Located in rural New Hampshire, it is a small, student-centered, undergraduate and graduate College, with three leading professional schools — of business, engineering and medicine. It is fundamentally known for its commitment to excellence in undergraduate education, but Dartmouth awards degrees through the doctorate in 17 graduate programs and the professional schools, most of them in the sciences, and attracted $183.3 million in sponsored research funding in FY 2007. Dartmouth is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a “research university with very high research activity” and, as such, is consistently ranked among the world’s greatest academic institutions. Yet in size, temperament, warmth and abiding commitment to teaching, it remains the College.
The College’s size and setting confer an intimacy that it uses to its advantage. With 4,200 undergraduates and 1,700 graduate students, Dartmouth attends to community, fostering powerful and enduring bonds. Faculty and students share mutually high expectations. Ninety-nine percent of Dartmouth classes are taught by professors, not teaching assistants. Great faculty come to Dartmouth because they choose to teach as well as pursue scholarship. Upon completing their time at Dartmouth, 98 percent of students were happy with the accessibility of their professors. With its students, it is intensely selective, and faculty members report that one of the principal attractions of the College is the quality of its student body.
At Dartmouth, undergraduates as well as graduate students are full partners in discovery as well as learning. As many as 60 percent of all undergraduates conduct independent study with the one-on-one supervision of a faculty member. Many have the opportunity to present their findings at scientific meetings and coauthor papers with faculty. Students are strongly encouraged to explore “Dartmouth in the world,” through the 48 off-campus programs, exceptionally strong foreign language teaching and the policy hub at the Dickey Center for International Understanding. About 60 percent of the undergraduate student body takes at least one term abroad. Leadership formation in the classroom, library and laboratory are complemented by an unmatched array of opportunities elsewhere in the Dartmouth community. Nearly four of five students play in one of Dartmouth’s 34 varsity sports or take part in intramural athletics. The Dartmouth Outing Club has 1,500 members, the largest in the country. The range of clubs and activities, most especially in the arts, exceeds all normal expectation.
The student-faculty partnerships are complemented by the peer relationships among members of a diverse student body. Both are central to the College’s mission and ethos, and are supported by its policies and investments. The resulting connectedness at Dartmouth engenders fierce loyalty among students. Freshman to sophomore retention is 98 percent and the six-year graduation rate is 94 percent, numbers that place it in the top half dozen of all educational institutions in the United States. In academic year 2008, 92 percent of the senior class contributed to the Senior Class gift to the College. Their gratitude endures. Forty-seven percent of Dartmouth’s alumni contributed to the College in FY 2008, a slight drop from the 50 percent average of recent years. In the Ivy League, it is a record rivaled only by Princeton. A $1.3 billion capital campaign is on track. Last year’s development effort raised a record $168 million, proportionately, one of the very strongest campaigns in America.
The loyalty and generosity of Dartmouth alumni have fueled an unprecedented level of investment in Dartmouth facilities and faculty during the presidency of Dr. James Wright. Over the span of a decade, the College more than doubled its endowment and annual fund contributions. It put over $1 billion into the ground in the greatest building boom Dartmouth has seen since the late 19th and early 20th century. The endowment grew to $3.66 billion, the fourth highest in the Ivy League on a per student basis. The student faculty ratio went from 10-to-1 to 8-to-1 as the College consistently grew the size of the faculty and raised faculty pay to be competitive with its peers.
Dartmouth has achieved success consistently and intentionally. The College lives its mission by embracing the tensions of the modern academy. It manages the potential conflicts between research and teaching, between graduate and undergraduate, between the Faculty of Arts and Science and the professional schools. It draws creative energy from the tension lines.
The Dartmouth community and the Dartmouth Board of Trustees are clear. They have been and remain committed to the whole. They have the ambition to provide “the finest undergraduate education in the world,” and simultaneously to attract and fully support the faculty who, in partnership with students – graduate and undergraduate alike – will “define their fields.” The College will not yield on either front. It has built an extraordinary opportunity to lead: Dartmouth has the capacity, the culture and the confidence to confront the challenges faced by higher education and to define academic excellence for the 21st century.
The next President of Dartmouth will build on a rich tradition and an impressive trajectory. Through the generations, Dartmouth recruited and educated leaders and it preached intellect, virtue and courage. Even as it has retained its commitment to teaching, to building character and to personal transformation, the College has placed new importance on the task of personal learning by fostering partnerships between students and faculty for research and independent study; intuitively understanding that the future belongs to leaders who are inspired, creative and unafraid. The College seeks a leader who will appreciate its legacy, discern its destiny and guide its singular vision.
