Internationally renowned History Professor Martin Sherwin, director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, will leave the College at the end of August to become a professor at Tufts University.
"I regret his decision to do that," said Provost Lee Bollinger, who announced Sherwin's decision in a letter. "I think Marty has really brought a liveliness to the Dickey Center that will be hard to replace."
"I want to take special notice of his remarkable performance in bringing to Dartmouth students and faculty a rich and provocative panoply of academic programming related to international matters," Bollinger wrote.
Sherwin has been the center's director since July 1993 and has helped bring up such prominent speakers as Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Sherwin could not be reached for comment yesterday. Assistant Director of the Dickey Center Margot de l'Etoile declined to comment.
Bollinger said he plans to form a committee this summer to search for a new director for the Dickey Center. He said the College may have an interim director until a new director is chosen.
Sherwin has recently been in the news because of his involvement in the proposed Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The exhibit was supposed to educate people about the detonation of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the beginnings of the nuclear era.
Sherwin argues that veteran groups and Congress pressured the Smithsonian to cancel the project early this year because of "blatant censorship." Those opposed to the exhibit claim it was anti-American.
Before teaching at Dartmouth, Sherwin was a history professor at Tufts and was the founding director of Tuft's Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center.
At Tufts, he founded the Global Classroom Project, which uses television satellite technology to link university students in Moscow and the United States.
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1959, Sherwin served in the U.S. Navy for four years and went on to teach American history and foreign policy at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967.
In 1971, he received his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles.
During the next 10 years Sherwin worked at Cornell University as a research associate and lecturer and at Princeton University, where he taught U.S. history and international relations in the history department and the Woodrow Wilson School.
Sherwin taught with Dartmouth's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program during Summer terms in the 1970s and taught interdisciplinary courses at the College from 1980 until 1989.
