Stuart Lord, the Virginia Rice Kelsey ’61S Dean of the Tucker Foundation and Associate Provost, is please to announce that Richard Crocker has joined our staff as College Chaplain and Associate Dean of the Tucker Foundation. Richard Crocker brings to the position more than 20 years of higher education ministry, teaching and administration.

Crocker served as senior pastor and head of staff at the Central Presbyterian Church in Montclair, N.J. He has served as dean of student life and associate professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he was College Chaplain and a lecturer in religion at Bates College in Lewiston, ME.

Crocker, as College Chaplain, will lead the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life within the Tucker Foundation. He will also direct the United Campus Ministry (UCM) which currently has 27 campus ministers and advisors to student religious organizations, as well as work with students, faculty, administrators and the UCM to nurture religious communities on campus and to develop opportunities for multi-faith dialogue, programs and initiatives.

In his role as Associate Dean of the Tucker Foundation, Crocker will support the organization's mission to further the moral and spiritual work of the College by promoting social justice and civic responsibility while considering and discussing issues of activism and conscience.
Crocker earned his undergraduate and master's degrees at Brown University.
He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and went on to receive his master’s degree in divinity (in pastoral theology and counseling and his doctorate in psychology and counseling at Vanderbilt University.

Initial Thoughts from Hanover
By College Chaplain and Associate Dean Richard Crocker

I am pleased to join the Tucker Foundation staff as College Chaplain and Associate Dean.

For those of you who have not met me, I should say a word about how I have arrived here. I was born and grew up in rural Alabama. Later I went to Brown, Oxford, and Vanderbilt, studying English, theology, and psychology respectively. I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and served a small parish near Memphis. Then I became chaplain at Bates College, Dean at Elizabethtown College, and, most recently, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Montclair, NJ.

My goals as Chaplain are to establish a comfortable and helpful presence on campus, so that persons all across the college will see the chaplaincy as a resource for living. I will facilitate and support the efforts of the United Campus Ministries composed now of approximately 25 separate religious groups. Through efforts such as the recently established Chaplain's Advisory Interfaith Council, I will work to promote interfaith dialogue. I will work to provide occasions for reflection, worship, service, and growth. And I will provide pastoral care to those who seek it.

As a Christian minister, I understand and embrace a particular set of religious convictions. All of us are creatures of particularity; none of us can embody a universal perspective that encompasses all traditions. Because I understand my own particularity, I am committed to helping others explore their own particular traditions of faith. Through support and inquiry, we grow in faith and love. This is my hope and mission.

A Word from the Dean
Unprecedented Growth
Dean Stuart C. Lord

The past year has been a very exciting year for the Tucker Foundation. We have wrapped up our Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration and have hired a new Chaplain to guide and direct the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. We have led cross cultural education and service trips to Siuna, Nicaragua and to Sopotskin, Belarus. We have involved more than 70 percent of the Class of 2004 in the building of a Dartmouth Habitat for Humanity House in the Upper Valley and in other Sophomore Summer of Service Projects. In short, the past twelve months at the Tucker Foundation have featured unprecedented growth in program size, impact, and student involvement. On a daily basis, students come through our doors, eager to become involved. We, in turn, send them out into our surrounding communities, equipped and excited to help and to learn from the local community.

As I have just noted, this year’s growth of the Foundation is unprecedented, which says to me that the Tucker Foundation is succeeding in its mission of educating the hearts and souls, as well as minds, of Dartmouth students. At the same time, however, this new demand for our programs has outstripped our available resources and, as a result of

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