Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. Incorporated as "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. In addition to its undergraduate liberal arts program, Dartmouth has medical, engineering, and business schools, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences. With a total enrollment of 5,848, Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League.

www.dartmouth.edu

Established in 1769 by Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock with funds largely raised by the efforts of Native American preacher Samson Occom, the College's initial mission was to acculturate and Christianize the Native Americans. After a long period of financial and political struggles, Dartmouth emerged from relative obscurity in the early twentieth century. In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton selected Dartmouth College as a model of institutional endurance "whose record of endurance has had implications and benefits for all American organizations, both academic and commercial," citing Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and Dartmouth's successful self-reinvention in the late 1800s. Dartmouth alumni, from Daniel Webster to the many donors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been famously involved in their college.

Dartmouth is located on a rural 269-acre (1.1 km²) campus in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire. Given the College's isolated location, participation in athletics and the school's Greek system is high. Dartmouth's 34 varsity sports teams compete in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I. Students are also well-known for preserving a variety of strong campus traditions.

History

Dartmouth was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, a Puritan minister from Connecticut, who sought to establish a school to train Native Americans as missionaries. Wheelock's ostensible inspiration for such an establishment largely resulted from his relationship with Mohegan Indian Samson Occom. Occom became an ordained minister after studying under Wheelock's tutelage from 1743 to 1747 and later moved to Long Island to preach to the Montauks.

Wheelock instituted Moor's Indian Charity School in 1755. The Charity School proved somewhat successful, but additional funding was necessary to continue school’s operations. To this end, Wheelock sought the help of friends to raise money. Occom, accompanied by Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker, traveled to England in 1766 to raise money in the dissenting churches of that nation. With the funds, they established a trust to help Wheelock.

Although the fund provided Wheelock ample financial support for the Charity School, Wheelock had trouble recruiting Indians to the institution—primarily because its location was far from tribal territories. Receiving the best land offer from New Hampshire, Wheelock approached the Royal Governor of the Province of New Hampshire John Wentworth for a charter. Wentworth, acting in the name King George III of the United Kingdom, granted Dartmouth a royal charter on December 13, 1769, establishing the final colonial college and naming the institution after his English friend, William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. Dartmouth's purpose, according to the original charter, was to provide for the Christianization, instruction, and education of "youth of the Indian Tribes in this land [...] and also of English youth and any others." Given the failure of the Charity School, however, Wheelock intended his new College as one primarily for whites.

During the 1990s, the College saw a major academic overhaul under President James O. Freedman and a controversial (and ultimately unsuccessful) 1999 initiative to encourage the school's single-sex Greek houses to go coed. The 2000s saw the commencement of the $1.3 billion Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience, the largest capital fundraising campaign in the College's history, which as of January 2008 has surpassed $1 billion and is on schedule to be completed before 2010. The mid- and late 2000s have also seen extensive campus construction, with the erection of two new housing complexes, full renovation of two dormitories, and a forthcoming dining hall, life sciences center, and visual arts center.

Since the election of a number of petition elections to the Board of Trustees starting in 2004, the role of alumni in Dartmouth governance has been the subject of ongoing ideological conflict. Current president James Wright announced his retirement in February 2008, to be replaced by Harvard University professor and physician Jim Yong Kim on July 1, 2009.

Campus

Dartmouth College is situated in the rural town of Hanover, New Hampshire, located in the Upper Valley along the Connecticut River in New England. Its 269 acre (1.1 km²) campus is centered around a five-acre (two-hectare) "Green", a former field of pine trees cleared by the College in 1771. Dartmouth is the largest private landowner of the town of Hanover, and its total landholdings and facilities are worth an estimated $434 million. In addition to its campus in Hanover, Dartmouth owns 4,500 acres (18.2 km²) of Mount Moosilauke in the White Mountains Region and a 27,000 acre (109 km²) tract of land in northern New Hampshire known as the Second College Grant.

Admission and reputation

Dartmouth describes itself as "highly selective," ranked as the fifteenth "toughest to get into" school by The Princeton Review in 2007, and classified as "most selective" by U.S. News & World Report. For the class of 2012, 16,536 students applied for approximately 1,100 places, and only 13.2% of applicants were admitted. 93.4% of admitted students were ranked in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. 38.5% of admitted students were valedictorians and 11.3% were salutatorians. The mean SAT scores of admitted students by section were 726 for verbal, 731 for math, and 726 for writing.

In 2007, Dartmouth was ranked eleventh among undergraduate programs at national universities by U.S. News & World Report. However, since Dartmouth is ranked in a category for national research universities, some have questioned the fairness of the ranking given the College's emphasis on undergraduate education. Dartmouth ranks number seven in the Wall Street Journal's ranking of top feeder schools. The 2006 Carnegie Foundation classification listed Dartmouth as the only majority-undergraduate, arts-and-sciences focused institution in the country that also had some graduate coexistence and very high research activity.

Dartmouth meets 100% of students' demonstrated financial need in order to attend the College, and currently admits all students, including internationals, on a need-blind basis. Beginning in the 2008–2009 academic year, Dartmouth instituted a new financial aid policy extending need-blind admission to international students and replaced all student loans with scholarships and grants. Students from families with a combined annual income of less than $75,000 are not charged any tuition.

Academic facilities

The College's creative and performing arts facility is the Hopkins Center for the Arts ("the Hop"). Opened in 1962, the Hop houses the College's drama, music, film, and studio arts departments, as well as a woodshop, pottery studio, and jewelry studio which are open for use by students and faculty. The building was designed by the famed architect Wallace Harrison, who would later design the similar-looking façade of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center. Its facilities include two theaters and one 900-seat auditorium. The Hop is also the location of all student mailboxes and the Courtyard Café dining facility. The Hop is connected to the Hood Museum of Art, arguably North America's oldest museum in continuous operation, and the Loew Auditorium, where films are screened.

In addition to its nineteen graduate programs in the arts and sciences, Dartmouth is home to three separate graduate schools. Dartmouth Medical School is located in a complex on the north side of campus and includes laboratories, classrooms, offices, and a biomedical library. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, located several miles to the south in Lebanon, New Hampshire, contains a 396-bed teaching hospital for the Medical School. The Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business are both located at the end of Tuck Mall, west of the center of campus and near the Connecticut River. The Thayer School presently comprises two buildings;Tuck has six academic and administrative buildings, as well as several common areas. The two graduate schools share a library, the Feldberg Business & Engineering Library.

Library

Dartmouth's nine libraries are all part of the collective Dartmouth College Library, which comprises 2.48 million volumes and 6 million total resources, including videos, maps, sound recordings, and photographs. Its specialized libraries include the Biomedical Libraries, Evans Map Room, Feldberg Business & Engineering Library, Jones Media Center, Kresge Physical Sciences Library, Paddock Music Library, Rauner Special Collections Library, and Sherman Art Library. Baker-Berry Library is the main library at Dartmouth, comprising Baker Memorial Library (opened 1928) and Berry Library (opened 2000). Located on the northern side of the Green, Baker's 200-foot (61 m) tower is an iconic symbol of the College.

Academic Departments

*Interdisciplinary academic programs

African and African American Studies*, Anthropology, Art History, Asian American studies*,
Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, Asian and Middle-Eastern Studies*,
Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Classics, Comparative Literature*, Computer Science,
Earth Sciences, Economics, Education, Engineering Sciences,
English, Environmental Studies*, Film and Media Studies, French and Italian,
Geography, German Studies, Government, History, Humanities 1 & 2, Human Biology,
Jewish Studies*, Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies*, Linguistics and Cognitive Science*, Mathematics, Mathematics and Social Sciences*, Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
Music, Native American Studies*, Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy,
Psychological and Brain Sciences, Religion, Russian, Sociology, Spanish and Portuguese,
Studio Art, Theater, Women's and Gender Studies*, Writing Program.

Dartmouth College was ranked 54th in the 2008 THES-QS world university ranking