Today marks the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of former College President John Kemeny, a Dartmouth legend whose actions forever changed the College.
Kemeny, the 13th president of the College, took over for John Sloan Dickey in 1970. He resigned as president in 1981 to return to teaching. Kemeny passed away on Dec. 26, 1992.
Under Kemeny's stewardship, the College underwent many of the most momentous changes in its history, including the switch to coeducation, the adoption of the Dartmouth Plan and the renewal of a commitment to international students, affirmative action and the academic and intellectual life of the campus.
"He's someone who I miss. His contributions are many and they certainly continue to be felt. They have not reached closure," Acting College President James Wright said. Wright came to the College as a history professor in 1969.
One of the first non-alumni to serve as president, Kemeny came to Dartmouth as a math professor in 1953. He served as chair of the department for 12 years.
"John Kemeny pushed the fields of mathematics and computing to new heights, just as he raised the stature of Dartmouth during a decade of change in the 1970s," College President James Freedman told The Dartmouth on Jan. 6, 1993.
Kemeny brought the first computer to Dartmouth in 1959. He co-wrote the BASIC computer language with Mathematics Professor Thomas Kurtz in 1964. BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, quickly became the most widely-used computer language in the world.
In a speech marking the 10th anniversary of his presidency, Kemeny told the audience, "My commitment to his College is the same as my commitment to my wife: 'til death do us apart."
Lucretia Martin, who was hired as Kemeny's special assistant on his first day in office, said Kemeny retained his love for learning throughout his presidency.
"He taught one course per year in the math department," Martin said. "He would say, 'Well, that's my recreation, that's what I love, some people love to play golf, I love to teach.'"
Martin said Kemeny was "direct, funny, brilliant and wanted action."
"He loved Dartmouth and he wanted to be president of Dartmouth. He committed those years of his life completely to the Dartmouth presidency," she said.
Kemeny showed his sensitivity in steering the College by cancelling classes on May 5, 1971 -- the day after four students at Kent State University were killed for protesting the United States' "incursion" into Cambodia.
Kemeny's deed prompted the Manchester Union-Leader to run the headline "Dartmouth Picks a Lemon."
But Kemeny did not react to the headline defensively. Instead, at the end of a speech he gave at a student meeting about the shootings, Kemeny produced a box of plastic lemons and threw them at the audience.
"It positively brought the house down," Martin said.
In 1979, Kemeny was also thrust into the national spotlight when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to head a federal commission to investigate the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania.
Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 31, 1926. His family came to the United States in the 1942 to escape the Nazis.
