Third in a series of articles about James O. Freedman.
It was a tense moment on the second floor of Parkhurst. A meeting between the College President and a member of the Board of Trustees had been interrupted.
Outside on the Green hundreds of students were protesting the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King. College President James Freedman had stood at the rally and for 45 minutes listening to speaker after speaker criticize the student body and the College administration for not taking a strong enough stand against racism.
One woman at the rally called a statement Freedman had issued condemning the verdict "ambiguous political refuse."
Appropriately or ironically, Freedman left the rally to meet with Dr. Stanford Roman, the Trustee chair of the Committee on Diversity and Community at Dartmouth.
After interrupting the meeting, several students accompanied Freedman back outside. Called to the podium the President said, "We are seeing that there is the problem that we are two nations. We must heal the rift. What we want is to demonstrate our commitments to make this one nation, not two."
Challenged by a student in the crowd who said the College had not reacted strongly enough to the King verdict, Freedman said, "I think it's as clear as it can be that Dartmouth College denounces racism."
In an interview later Freedman said he was surprised by the anger directed at him and the criticism of his statement.
In his initial statement, printed in The Dartmouth the morning before the rally, Freedman wrote, "The brutal beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of the police officers involved in that beating are sources of anger and despair. These events, and the lawless riots that followed, make us fear for the future of race relations in our nation. They challenge our idealism, test our faith, and strain our resolve. When significant numbers of our citizens believe that they cannot find justice within the legal system, or safety and law behind a policeman's badge ... then anger and frustration are inevitable."
A legal scholar for most of his adult life, Freedman had reasons of his own to be frustrated by an American justice system that so many people said had failed. Still, his administration was under attack.
"I certainly meant it to be a strong statement," he said in the interview after the rally. "I'm doing the best I can."
It was not the first time that a Dartmouth president coping with tense race relations would feel like the best effort simply was not enough. At a memorial service for former President John Kemeny this winter, Professor of Native American Studies Michael Dorris recalled going to the president's house and finding Kemeny in tears, wondering how he could assure Native American students that he understood their concerns.
When Freedman took his place in Parkhurst six years ago, the College had a conservative white male image that seemed set in stone in minds across the nation.
In a 1989 opinion column in The New York Times, John Casey, an English professor at the University of Virginia said that in the early 1960s Dartmouth ranked "in the middle of the Ivy League academically but near the bottom in 'intellectualism' and 'diversity,' if diversity is taken to mean a student body with a broad range of backgrounds and talents."
In the column Casey argued that this stereotype still existed when Freedman came to the College in 1987.
Since his inauguration, Freedman has chiseled away at the College's "old-boy network" reputation, implementing admissions programs to attract a more diverse applicant pool and delivering speeches to promote his own liberal views.
At the time, Freedman said it was a battle for the soul of the institution. The battle has taken its toll, with Freedman repeatedly under personal attack by The Dartmouth Review, the off-campus conservative weekly which has denounced his diversification efforts.
Not even 25 years ago, the College was all-male and in 1986, the first year for which the Admissions office has accurate records, included only 10.6 percent minority students. Now, Freedman boasts that there are more women and minority students than ever before.
But today the College still enrolls the lowest percentage of minorities in the Ivy League.
Academic programs designed to improve life for women and minorities, such as the Women in Science Project and the E.E. Just Fellowship program are noted by Freedman as some of his proudest achievements.
Freedman And The Dartmouth Review
Freedman's history of confrontation with The Review traces back to his first spring at the College when the paper attacked a black professor and Review staffers verbally assaulted the professor in front of his class.
The Review had attacked jazz scholar William Cole's music course as a "gut." Freedman responded by giving a speech on the steps of Parkhurst in which he called the attacks on Cole "self-evidently false and wrongheaded."
In the speech Freedman lashed out at The Review, calling the paper's actions "mean-spirited, cruel and ugly," the now famous words which The Review mocks each week in its masthead.
"It was an instance of defending a faculty member," Freedman said in a recent interview. "I don't think you can permit unfair attacks on faculty to go unresponded to."
The Cole incident began a bitter verbal and written war between Freedman and the paper.
Current Review Editor Oron Strauss '95 said the paper's problems with the president stem from his general attitude toward Dartmouth, rather than any specific event.
"The Review had high hopes for President Freedman," Strauss said. "But from the beginning it was clear that the path on which he is taking Dartmouth is not in the direction we want Dartmouth to go."
"His ideal is Harvard," Strauss said. "Ours is not."
With a laugh, Freedman, who graduated from Harvard in 1957, dismissed as ridiculous assertions that he is trying to "Harvardize" the College. He said his goal is "to make Dartmouth the best Dartmouth it can be."
The battle between the President and the paper got personal in November 1988 when a Review cartoon showed Freedman, who is Jewish, dressed as Hitler. The previous issue included an article called "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann," an alteration of a Nazi slogan.
Despite everything, Freedman said he believes in The Review's right to free speech and has expressed displeasure with students who have confiscated The Review from dormitories.
Freedman is "not against the Review, but against a way of behaving toward people," College Spokesman Alex Huppe said.
The Struggle For Diversity
By supporting a more active recruitment program at the College, Freedman said he hopes to dispel the negative impressions that deter many prospective students from applying to Dartmouth.
"Still there are a lot of people in this country, adults, educators, with real negative images that it's a bad place for women and minorities, that it's dominated by fraternities and conservatives," Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg said. "I think we're making real progress in general perception."
The College now offers financial aid to help fly needy applicants to Hanover to experience Dartmouth before they make a final enrollment decision.
"The most important need we face is to insure that Dartmouth is open to students from every economic background," Freedman said. "We've made real advances in diversity and have begun to tell the world that its prior perceptions about Dartmouth just aren't true."
Since Freedman's first year, the percentage of minorities represented in the student body has climbed from 19 percent to 24 percent, Furstenberg said.
"Jim Freedman is on target," Furstenberg said. "The nation is changing. If Dartmouth is truly a national school, it should reflect the nature of the American population."
Professors also praise the efforts. "We'd been advocating for many years more active recruiting" of minority, specifically Latino, students, Spanish Professor Diana Taylor said. "Basically under Freedman that happened."
"Once you get far more minority students here, as is the case of Latinos, and also of African Americans and Native Americans, you start getting programs like Mellon," Taylor said. The Mellon Foundation Scholarship was developed during Freedman's administration to fund projects of minority students who are applying to graduate schools.
Freedman said he wants the College to take a leading role in promoting diversity in higher education. "Dartmouth looks like it's at the head of the parade, not just politically, but in moral judgments as well," he said.
For example, Freedman said Dartmouth is the only Ivy League school to take a stand on the military's ban on homosexuals. In September 1991, the Board of Trustees pledged to cancel the Reserve Officer Training Corps program if the ban was not ended.
Gay Life At Dartmouth
Concrete efforts to enhance gay life on campus come mostly from the students, not the administration, members of Dartmouth's gay and lesbian community say.
Freedman defended the administration's hands-off approach to making gay life easier at Dartmouth as a way of getting students more involved in the issues.
"If it gets addressed by the students it's addressed much more effectively," he said. "The most healthy thing to me so far is that the students are addressing the issue" of how to deal with discrimination and acceptance of gays and lesbians on campus.
Professor Annelise Orleck said she did not have many problems with the administration's attention to gay and lesbian issues. Although she maintained that homophobia and intolerance toward gay students still abound on campus, she said she agreed that it is mostly up to students to handle the problems that arise.
Under the Freedman administration, faculty have also worked towards the implementation of a course in gay and lesbian studies, but have been unable to receive funding for the past two years.
Women's groups on campus recently faced a similar struggle. The first course in Women's Studies was not offered until 1979 and just last fall students were finally granted the right to major in the Women's Studies Program.
Coeducation
Women make up about 47 percent of the Class of 1997, the highest percentage yet and a number it has taken the College years to reach.
"The administration has supported the development of such programs as the Women in Science Project and the Women's Resource Center as well the development of a major in Women's Studies," Women's Resource Center Director Mary Childers said.
Although Freedman came to the College 15 years after coeducation, he has still had to deal with gender issues. At the Board of Trustees meeting this April, one Trustee told a group of students over breakfast that he thinks many of the social problems at Dartmouth stem from the fact that more than 20 years later, the school is still adjusting to coeducation.
"Much more effort would have to be given to women students to reverse some of the effects of Dartmouth being a traditionally male institution," Childers said.
Freedman said when he first came to Dartmouth, women only accounted for 38 percent of the student body.
Childers said it is not enough to just increase the numbers. "I do not think most women students graduate from Dartmouth as well prepared as do students from some other schools to participate in the public world," she said.
Mary Pavone, who directs the Women in Science project said Freedman's support encouraged donations to support the project that have helped increase participation.
Currently the program provides paid internships to 72 female undergraduates in various science departments, up from 20 two years ago, Pavone said.
Carol Muller, associate dean of the Thayer School of Engineering and one of the founders of WISP, said Freedman's support of the project has shown he "wants Dartmouth to be a place that fully educates women as well as men and minority as well as majority students."
During his first six years, Freedman has been the subject of much criticism by alumni who want to maintain the Dartmouth of yesteryear.
But Huppe said the ideas the President supported were far more important than the donations the College might have received from various disgruntled alumni.
Freedman received a flood of negative letters at the beginning of his administration, but he said the numbers tapered off soon after the initial shock of a liberal president leading Dartmouth wore off.
He said he thought alumni had come to respect him over the years. "They might say 'Well, Freedman is not our type of guy and doesn't share our values' but they are happy the reputation of the school has increased," he said.
Overall, however, Freedman has received enormous support from educators and politicians world-wide. Whenever a college or university presidency opens up, his name is usually among the first mentioned.
"Part of my definition of what it means to be a president is to speak about values and aspirations and try to provide intellectual leadership," Freedman said. "The goal is to say to people, 'Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what I believe. Here are my values.'"
