Dartmouth College

• 1. Introduction

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  Dartmouth College sits on a terrace above the Connecticut River in Hanover, New Hampshire, surrounded by some 200 American elms that survived the Dutch elm disease that felled trees across the continent. It is the smallest university in the Ivy League, with a student enrollment of about 6,700. And yet the acceptance rate for the class of 2028 stood at just 5.3 percent, with regular decision applicants facing an even steeper 3.8 percent. How did a school founded in 1769 to educate Native American missionaries become one of the most selective research universities in the world? Why does it still call itself a college when it houses four graduate and professional schools? And why does its motto, chosen by its founder, translate as "a voice crying out in the wilderness"? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. Wheelock's Wilderness Gambit

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  Eleazar Wheelock was a Yale-educated Congregational minister from Windham, Connecticut, and the driving force behind Dartmouth's founding. His early interest in Native American education grew directly from his relationship with Samson Occom, a Mohegan who studied under Wheelock from 1743 to 1747 and later became an ordained minister preaching to the Montauks on Long Island. Wheelock founded Moor's Indian Charity School in 1755, and the first major donation to that school came from John Phillips in 1762, who would later found Phillips Exeter Academy.

  Occom and the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker traveled to England in 1766 to raise funds from churches, and those donations supported a trust headed by William Legge, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. When Wheelock sought a royal charter for a new college, he relocated north to Hanover in the Province of New Hampshire. The Royal Governor John Wentworth provided the land, and on the 13th of December 1769, issued a royal charter in the name of King George III. The charter's language described a college "for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes in this land" as well as "English youth and any others".

  The naming of the college after Lord Dartmouth carried a quiet irony. Dartmouth opposed the creation of the college and never donated to it. Meanwhile, Occom grew increasingly disappointed when he saw that Wheelock intended his new institution primarily for white students. Occom eventually left to form his own community of New England Indians, the Brothertown Indians, in New York. The college granted its first degrees in 1771.

• 3. A Contract the State Could Not Break

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  In 1816, the New Hampshire legislature tried to amend Dartmouth's royal charter and convert the private college into a public university. A rival institution called Dartmouth University moved into the college's buildings in 1817 and began operating in Hanover. Dartmouth's trustees refused to concede, continuing to hold classes in rented rooms nearby.

  Daniel Webster, a graduate of the class of 1801, argued the college's case before the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled that New Hampshire's attempted amendment constituted an illegal impairment of a contract, reversed the state's takeover, and affirmed the private character of the college. Webster concluded his argument with words that became one of the most quoted passages in American legal history: "It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it."

  The case, known as Dartmouth College v. Woodward, set a precedent affecting the legal standing of private corporations across the United States. When Booz Allen Hamilton in 2004 selected Dartmouth as a model of institutional endurance, the firm cited that ruling specifically, calling Dartmouth's survival an event with "implications and benefits for all American organizations, both academic and commercial".

• 4. Refounding and Reinvention

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  For most of the 19th century, Dartmouth clung to traditional instruction methods and remained relatively poorly funded. The transformation came under President William Jewett Tucker, who served from 1893 to 1909. Tucker presided over a major revitalization supported by donations that included a $10,000 gift from alumnus and law professor John Ordronaux. Twenty new structures replaced older buildings, and the student body and faculty each expanded threefold. Tucker is often credited with having "refounded Dartmouth" and propelled it into national prominence.

  The presidents who followed continued that trajectory. Ernest Martin Hopkins served from 1916 to 1945 and introduced selective admissions in the 1920s. By 1945, however, Hopkins was embroiled in controversy after openly acknowledging that the college used racial quotas to limit Jewish enrollment. His successor, John Sloan Dickey, who served until 1970, shifted the college's emphasis sharply toward the liberal arts, public policy, and international relations.

  The Dartmouth Workshop of 1956 illustrated another dimension of the college's influence: it is widely considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as an academic field. Faculty members were also central to developing the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and the programming languages Dartmouth BASIC and Dartmouth ALGOL 30, contributions that shaped computing long after the workshop ended.

• 5. Native Americans, Coeducation, and Contested Identity

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  Dartmouth graduated only 19 Native Americans during its first two centuries of operation. In 1970, under President John George Kemeny, a mathematician and computer scientist, the college established new academic and social programs dedicated to increasing Native American enrollment. Since then, Dartmouth has graduated over 700 Native American students from more than 200 different tribes, more than the other seven Ivy League universities combined.

  Kemeny also oversaw the admission of women as full-time undergraduate students beginning in 1972, a change that arrived amid significant controversy. At roughly the same time, the college introduced its "Dartmouth Plan" of academic scheduling, a quarter-based system designed to increase enrollment without expanding campus accommodations. The D-Plan was described at the time as "a way to put 4,000 students into 3,000 beds". It was modified in the 1980s to address social and academic continuity problems.

  The college's alma mater song shifted with the times. Richard Hovey's "Men of Dartmouth" had been the official song since 1926, but in 1988 the lyrics were updated and the song was retitled to "Dear old Dartmouth". An earlier tension around identity involved the unofficial team nickname "the Indians", which sports journalists had used since the 1920s. In 1974, the trustees declared use of the Indian symbol in any form inconsistent with the college's academic and institutional objectives, particularly its commitment to Native American education. Efforts by some alumni and the conservative student newspaper to restore the symbol have not succeeded.

  In April 2022, the college returned the papers of Samson Occom to the Mohegan Tribe, more than 250 years after Occom's fundraising tour of England helped make the college possible.

• 6. The Campus and Its Traditions

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  Dartmouth's 269-acre main campus centers on a five-acre Green cleared of pine trees in 1771. The largest private landowner in the town of Hanover, the college also owns 4,500 acres of Mount Moosilauke in the White Mountains and a 27,000-acre tract in northern New Hampshire called the Second College Grant. Its total landholdings and facilities were estimated to be worth $434 million.

  Most campus buildings follow a Georgian colonial architectural style, from Wentworth and Thornton Halls of the 1820s to dormitories completed in 2006. The Baker-Berry Library's 200-foot tower anchors the northern side of the Green. The Hopkins Center for the Arts, opened in 1962, was designed by architect Wallace Harrison, who later created the facade of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. The Hood Museum of Art, connected to the Hopkins Center, is described as arguably North America's oldest museum in continuous operation.

  Campus traditions run deep. Winter Carnival began in 1911, organized by the Dartmouth Outing Club to promote winter sports, and became the oldest such celebration in the United States. First-Year Trips, a four-day student-run orientation for incoming freshmen begun in 1935, drew participation from over 96% of the freshman class in 2011; each trip concludes at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. The Dartmouth Outing Club itself is the nation's largest and oldest collegiate outdoors club. Tubestock, an unofficial river-floating tradition begun in 1986, was ended by town ordinance in 2006 and replaced by the college-supported Fieldstock, which features a barbecue, live music, and chariot races around the Green.

• 7. Alumni Who Shaped the World

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  Nelson A. Rockefeller graduated cum laude from Dartmouth with a degree in economics in 1930 and went on to serve as both the 49th Governor of New York and the 41st Vice President of the United States. Daniel Webster argued Dartmouth's landmark Supreme Court case and later became one of Massachusetts's most celebrated statesmen.

  Among those listed in the source who shaped American letters: Robert Frost attended Dartmouth but did not graduate, yet remains the only person to have received two honorary degrees from the college, and won four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in his lifetime. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, was a member of the class of 1925. Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, graduated in 1924. Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey's Anatomy, and David Benioff, co-creator of Game of Thrones, are also graduates.

  In science, Dartmouth has produced three Nobel laureates earning four separate prizes: Owen Chamberlain in Physics in 1959, George Davis Snell in Physiology or Medicine in 1980, and K. Barry Sharpless in Chemistry in both 2001 and 2022. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine approved in 2021 was based on findings that originated in a Dartmouth science laboratory. In 2017, engineering professor Eric Fossum received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for his work on imaging sensor technology.

  On the 12th of June 2023, Sian Beilock became the first female president in the college's history, taking office more than 250 years after Eleazar Wheelock chartered the institution in the New Hampshire wilderness.