As James Oliver Freedman humbly accepted the original copy of the College Charter -- and with it, the presidency of Dartmouth College -- on July 19, 1987 in front of thousands on Baker Lawn, the College was in the midst of what some would call a "malaise."
The school with the work hard-party hard past was lagging a bit behind some of its Ivy League counterparts, and the outgoing College president, David T. McLaughlin, had somehow managed to alienate all three major Dartmouth constituencies -- the faculty, the students and the alumni body -- with indecisiveness and weak leadership.
So it was to many a skeptical ear that Freedman laid forth his bold statement to the Dartmouth community that "liberal education is the very soul of Dartmouth College," and only through liberal education could "students seek the infinitely precious affirmation of their most authentic selves."
Freedman's presidency, which he announced yesterday is ending after Commencement next June, will be remembered for many things -- his clashes with The Dartmouth Review, his presiding over the most prodigious fundraising campaign in College history, his courageous battle with cancer.
But when the history of the Freedman years is written, the first page will no doubt tell of how the "shy, quiet scholar" who had no previous ties to Dartmouth was successful in restoring it to a level of intellectualism and excellence that it had somehow temporarily lost.
The outsider
In an interview last night, Freedman conceded that it was his greatest hope that he would be remembered for making Dartmouth a stronger college, for bringing in a stronger student body and faculty, and most of all for "making it a more intellectually stimulating institution."
But when he first arrived in Hanover, it was far from certain he would be able to convince people to come along for the ride.
The student body was scarred from the McLaughlin presidency, trained to believe that the administration would be unresponsive to their concerns and unable to act decisively.
Particularly fresh in their memory was McLaughlin's failure in 1986 to order shanties -- erected on the Green to protest the College's investment in South Africa -- to be taken down in a timely fashion. The problem was compounded when McLaughlin was slow in dealing with a group of students who ended up destroying the shanties with sledgehammers.
Perhaps even more odious to members of the College's alumni body was the fact that Freedman was neither a graduate nor a member of the faculty, making him the first College president in 155 years with no previous ties to Dartmouth.
Freedman joined Bennett Tyler (1822-1828) and College founder Eleazer Wheelock (1769-1779) as the only presidents in the College's history with no prior Dartmouth connections.
Thus, he was not the prototypical "Dartmouth man" in the way that John Sloan Dickey was, and by his own admission, he was an "unknown commodity" before he moved into the house at the end of Webster Avenue in 1987.
But despite these handicaps, the self-described "first true outsider in the Dartmouth family since 1822" was charged with reuniting the College, bringing the alumni, students and faculty together once again.
The theme he used as a common bond to appeal to all of them was intellectualism, and the College's need to elevate its academic character.
The challenge
The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural address, charging the Dartmouth community to join him in placing the College closer to "the ideal of maintaining and enhancing the intellectual distinction of this commonwealth of liberal learning."
He continued, adding what has become a mantra for his friends and foes alike: "We must strengthen out attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasures may come not from the camaraderie of classmates but from the lonely acts of writing poetry, or mastering the cello, or solving mathematical riddles, or translating Catullus."
In his first few months, Freedman quickly developed a reputation, at least among the student body, as a "hands-off" president. Students were often heard clamoring about his lack of visibility on campus, and hardly a student would report seeing him walk across the Green or inside Baker Library.
Perhaps some resented the fact that Freedman was less engaging than some of his predecessors.
But Freedman's style was just different than those who came before him -- especially John Sloan Dickey and John G. Kemeny, giants in the history of the College. It was simply unfair to harken back to the legendary days when Dickey walked out of Parkhurst Hall, down Main Street, and helped Hanover residents shovel snow off of the streets, and to expect Freedman to do the same thing.
Freedman was, on the other hand, a fierce champion of free speech, an intellectual of the highest level, and a scholar the likes of which Dartmouth had not seen in a long time.
And no one could ever question Freedman's love of learning -- or say he failed to apply it to Dartmouth. He was, in short, a "shy, quiet scholar" who went about the business of transforming Dartmouth into the elite school it is today.
Raising intellectualism
To the end of elevating Dartmouth intellectually, Freedman embarked on a mission to increase the diversity of the student body, improve the faculty, and provide more work opportunities for undergraduates to do independent work.
He spearheaded a drive to overhaul the arts and sciences curriculum, and the revised curriculum devised in 1993 -- the first change in 70 years -- scrapped the old core curriculum in favor of one that mandated students take classes in a wider variety of fields. The new curriculum represented a "coherent vision of liberal education" according to Freedman.
Freedman also put the recruitment of a more diverse student body at the top of his agenda, and an examination of how the student body has evolved during his 10 years reveals his smashing success in that area.
The class of 1991, which matriculated during Freedman's first year, was composed of 19 percent minority students and 38 percent females. This year's freshman class, the 2001s, is 29 percent minority and 49 percent female.
And Freedman's presidency has also seen the creation of several programs that give students more opportunities to work one-on-one with professors, including the Presidential Scholars Program, the Women in Science Project, and the Mellon Minority Academic Career Fellowship Program. Furthermore, the new curriculum, implemented for the Class of 1998, affords more opportunities for students to write senior honors theses and to do independent study projects.
The efforts to recruit stronger, more diverse faculty has resulted in Dartmouth boasting the highest percentage of tenured female faculty in the Ivy League.
The drive toward intellectual excellence has not been lost on the faculty, either. While professors regularly abandoned McLaughlin in droves -- more than three-quarters of the faculty criticized the president in 1985 for a lack of intellectual leadership and mediocre defense of liberal arts -- Freedman was embraced by Dartmouth's faculty, who saw him as one of their own.
Tired of McLaughlin's "corporate style" of leadership, which saw him run Dartmouth like a business instead of an institute of higher education, Freedman's academic credentials and love of learning were like a breath of fresh air to the faculty.
English Professor Peter Saccio, whose teaching career dates back to the Dickey years, spoke for many other faculty members, saying last night Freedman "has been an excellent intellectual leader of this College. He has spoken out for liberal arts in a way that very few college presidents do these days."
Other accomplishments
Besides the increased academic standards and reputation of the school that have been the hallmark of the Freedman presidency, these years have seen many other major accomplishments.
Freedman will also go down as the most prolific fund-raiser in Dartmouth history. He inherited an endowment of more than $520 million, and he has doubled that figure to more than $1.1 billion at the end of Fiscal Year 1996.
The crowning fundraising achievement of the Freedman years was the wildly successful Will to Excel Capital Campaign, which raised more than $568 million. Midway through the Will to Excel, Freedman and others realized that the campaign would far exceed the original goal of $425 million, and the goal was raised to $500 million. Even that number was surpassed.
It was under Freedman that Dartmouth finally achieved gender parity in its student body, no small feat given the campus was not co-educated until 1972. In the past few years, the College has repeatedly been recognized for its superior compliance with Title IX, and Dartmouth is universally recognized as one of the best places for female athletes.
Freedman's presidency also saw the "modernization" of the campus -- most notably, when in 1991 the College became the first Ivy League school and among the first college or universities in the country to require incoming students to own a computer.
And there have been great physical improvements to the campus during the Freedman years as well. Burke Laboratory, Sudikoff Laboratory, Byrne Dining Hall, and the Collis Student Center all went up during the last 10 years. Freedman will also carry the distinction of being the president that started the Baker-Berry Library expansion project, which will dominate the new Dartmouth campus of the 21st century.
Clashes and controversies
The Freedman administration has not been without its controversies. Perhaps Freedman's harshest critic has been The Dartmouth Review, the conservative off-campus weekly newspaper.
Criticism of a Dartmouth president by The Review was nothing new -- since its founding in 1980 it had sparred with Presidents John G. Kemeny and McLaughlin. But neither Kemeny nor McLaughlin had felt compelled to respond to The Review as forcefully as Freedman did in 1988.
Angered by the actions of four members of The Review, who had allegedly harassed a music professor, Freedman called a special meeting of the faculty, at which he decried the newspaper's "personal attacks upon members of the community," which he said were responsible for "poisoning the intellectual environment of our campus."
He likened Review members to "ideological provocateurs posing as journalists" and called their actions "irresponsible, mean-spirited, cruel and ugly."
It was, as one local publication said, a "gloves off" attack on The Review.
But it was in 1990 that The Review and Freedman had their most famous clash.
The Review masthead contained a quote from Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in its Oct. 1, 1990 edition, the eve of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. Immediately the editors claimed an internal saboteur was responsible for replacing the standard Theodore Roosevelt quote in The Review credo with one from Hitler, but few accepted the explanation.
Freedman, for one, released a statement that delivered his second vitriolic attack on The Review in three years: "For 10 years The Dartmouth Review has consistently attacked blacks because they are black, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews. Now in an act of immoral cowardice that extends that reprehensible pattern, it relies upon Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' on the day of Yom Kippur."
A few days later, at the "Rally Against Hate" on the Green, Freedman again blasted The Review.
The battle
Freedman's clashes with The Review seemed rather insignificant when it was revealed in May 1994 that Freedman was battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a treatable form of cancer. The diagnosis followed the removal of a testicular tumor.
Known as a "shy, quiet scholar" who normally keeps to himself, Freedman surprised many when he candidly discussed his illness at the 1994 Commencement ceremonies.
"Hearing a physician say the dread word 'cancer' has an uncanny capacity to concentrate the mind," he told the crowd of 3,500 on Baker Lawn. "That is what liberal education does, too. When the ground seems to shift beneath us, liberal education provides perspective, enabling us to see life steadily and see it whole. It has taken an illness to remind me, in my middle age, of that lesson."
Freedman underwent six months of chemotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital to treat the disease, and continued to recuperate during his six month sabbatical, which the Trustees had granted him even before it was known he had cancer.
When he returned in July, 1995, the cancer was in remission. Freedman, in an interview with The Dartmouth this past summer, said the experience reminded him of his mortality. "Now you think more about how you want to spend your time," he said.
Just over two months ago, he celebrated his 10th anniversary as president of Dartmouth College, by far the longest recent tenure of an Ivy League president.
But, as he promised the Trustees when he accepted the job, he never intended to hold the position for more than 10 years.
Freedman admitted yesterday that, like any college president, he had regrets and things he would have done differently, but he declined to mention any, instead jokingly saying he hopes to rectify some of his mistakes because "I still have a year left."
Following a one-year sabbatical after Freedman steps down this summer, he intends to do more reading and writing, and eventually "take up some new chores" down the line -- specifically, joining the Dartmouth faculty to teach.
As for his successor, whenever he or she is named, Freedman had the following advice: "Bring oodles of patience with you."
Freedman graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1957 and cum laude from Yale Law School in 1962. After serving as a law clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, he taught law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for 18 years and served as dean of the school from 1979 to 1982. He was president of the University of Iowa from 1982 until 1987.
