Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dartmouth College was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, a Yale-educated Congregational minister from Windham, Connecticut. It received its royal charter on the 13th of December 1769 from New Hampshire Governor John Wentworth, acting in the name of King George III, making it the ninth-oldest college in the United States.
Dartmouth retains the name "Dartmouth College" for historical and nostalgic reasons rooted in the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward Supreme Court case. Despite housing four graduate and professional schools, the institution deliberately uses "College" in its name to emphasize its commitment to undergraduate education.
The Dartmouth College case arose in 1819 after New Hampshire's 1816 attempt to amend the college's charter and convert it into a public university. Daniel Webster, a Dartmouth alumnus from the class of 1801, argued the college's case before the Supreme Court, which ruled the state's amendment an illegal impairment of a contract. The decision set a precedent protecting private corporations across the United States.
The Dartmouth Workshop, held in 1956, is widely considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as an academic field. Dartmouth faculty members were also central to developing the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, Dartmouth BASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30.
Dartmouth College is among the most selective universities in the United States. For the class of 2028, the overall acceptance rate was 5.3%, with regular decision applicants facing a 3.8% acceptance rate. The Princeton Review gave Dartmouth an admissions selectivity rating of 99 out of 99 in its 2024 edition.
Although the college graduated only 19 Native Americans during its first 200 years, Dartmouth established dedicated Native American academic and social programs in 1970. Since then, it has graduated over 700 Native American students from more than 200 different tribes, more than the other seven Ivy League universities combined. In April 2022, the college returned the papers of Samson Occom, the Mohegan who helped fundraise for the college's founding, to the Mohegan Tribe.