|
To the Dartmouth community:
In response to the needs of college students whose lives have been disrupted by Hurricane Katrina, I have today approved a plan to offer temporary admission to academically qualified undergraduates from the colleges and universities whose operations have been affected.
Because we are still three weeks away from the opening of our fall term on September 21, we hope this will be of particular help to students who need time to assess their options and take action but hope to continue their studies this fall.
The students will be admitted under a temporary expansion of our Special Community Student Program, and we will not impose a limit on the number. We will review the program on a term-by-term basis, and will expect students to return to their home institutions once that is possible.
We will waive the tuition for these students, but they will be admitted with the provision that they pay the regular tuition at their home institutions. We envision that the home institutions will use the tuition funds to help rehabilitate their campuses and to help offset some of the impact on their local employees.
We are not in a position to offer housing on campus, but we will reach out to the community to organize a volunteer effort to help any students admitted under this program to find housing within a reasonable distance of the College.
There are many details of this arrangement yet to be worked out, but I am confident that we will soon be prepared to accept visiting students, and I look forward to welcoming them. We will work with affected institutions, higher education associations, the media, and members of the Dartmouth family to get this information out as widely and quickly as possible. Inquiries about these arrangements may be directed to Julie Bell, Coordinator of Dartmouth's Special Community Student Program at (603) 646-3098 or via email at Julie.Bell@Dartmouth.Edu.
Paul Danos, Dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, has also announced that Tuck will arrange for a limited number of special exchange students to be admitted to the second year of the program. Arrangements for students in Dartmouth's other graduate and professional programs are under consideration.
While we are putting the special admissions program in place, I have asked a range of Dartmouth administrators to find ways we may be able to convey material aid and assistance directly from Dartmouth to the affected areas. We will explore options to grant leave time to faculty and staff members who wish to join with various agencies to assist in hurricane relief efforts in the affected areas. Student interest in participating in relief programs is being coordinated by the Tucker Foundation. I expect more information on these programs to be available next week.
Meanwhile, I encourage members of the Dartmouth community to participate in relief efforts already under way. You can find an online list of links to the web pages of organizations conducting such efforts on this Dartmouth web page.
We are also working to help Dartmouth students, faculty, staff and alumni who have been directly or indirectly affected by the hurricane and its aftermath:
- Members of our community who may feel a need for counseling can find, on the web page mentioned above, information about campus offices that offer such services.
- We have a number of current undergraduates and members of the incoming Class of 2009 who are from the affected areas, and we are working to make sure they know that we can help them with a variety of needs they may have when they arrive back in Hanover for the fall term.
- For alumni and others looking to provide or get information about members of the Dartmouth family who may have been in harm's way, we have established a special "blog" (weblog).
More information on all these efforts will be available in the near future, and we will update our web page on Dartmouth responses to Hurricane Katrina accordingly. Please check that website regularly for additional information.
James Wright
President of Dartmouth College
< Back to Dartmouth responds to Hurricane Katrina
|
