For the first time in two years, this term's Montgomery Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, is in residence at the Montgomery House for the entire term.
The last Montgomery Fellow to stay at the College for an entire term was Wilma Mankiller in Winter term 1996. She was twice elected to the office of principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Assistant Provost Barbara Gerstner, who is the Montgomery Endowment's executive director, said the endowment likes its fellows to reside on campus for an entire term, but it is often difficult for people involved in their work to give up a 10-week period.
Montgomery Fellows in the past two years have stayed as few as three days, like French film director Bertrand Tavernier and Al Hunt, the executive Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and Company, who each were in residence for three days during the spring of 1996.
Dartmouth did not host a Montgomery Fellow at all during the summer of 1996.
Gerstner previously told The Dartmouth she thinks full-term fellows are beneficial to students, but are more difficult to arrange. She said some prospective fellows have agreed to come to the College, before they find out their schedules are full a few months later.
Other obstacles can prevent the College from seeing Montgomery Fellows serve full terms.
Ernest Gellner, a famed anthropologist, was scheduled to stay at the Montgomery House all through Spring term, but he died of a heart attack before the term started.
Staying for the entire term allows Montgomery Fellows the chance to teach entire courses, such as one Wilson is teaching on play writing.
His prolonged stay has also allowed for more projects and lectures.
A series of six lectures are also being given on his work, and, in conjunction with his presence on campus, a Black Theater Summit will convene Ashland between Mar. 2 and 7.
The Summit will feature 40 of the nation's most important black theater contributors, including playwright Ntozake Shange and Ricardo Khan, artistic director and co-founder of New Jersey's Crossroads Theatre.
The Summit stems from a speech Wilson gave in June 1996, "The Ground on Which I Stand," which criticized casting black actors in roles written for white performers.
Drama Professor Victor Walker is also teaching a class this term on Wilson's work.
Gerstner said Wilson will continue to conduct special topic seminars until the end of the term.
Wilson came to Dartmouth, in part, because he is friends with Walker.
"We were very lucky that [Wilson] is a personal friend with Victor Walker, and he encouraged him to accept our invitation," Gerstner previously told The Dartmouth.
Past Montgomery Fellows with shorter visits have only been able to guest lecture in classes or deliver a few speeches.
According to Gerstner, other colleges have found out about the Montgomery Fellow program and have begun imitating it by hosting guest professors.
"But offering professorships for maybe a week or so is not the same," she said.
The fellows who have come to the College in the recent past, however, have only been able to stay for a few weeks at the most.
The Montgomery Fellowship for the Fall term of 1996 was split between Joseph Sax, a consultant to the Department of the Interior who visited the College for four days in 1996 and George Woodwell '50, founder and director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, who visited the College for 11 days.
The winter term was divided between three Montgomery Fellows, who each stayed just 11 days -- molecular biologist Lynn Margulis, biologist Stuart Kauffman '61 and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and honorary Dartmouth graduate David Halberstam.
John Fletcher, a professor of religion and biomedical ethics and the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia could only visit the College for a few weeks last summer.
This past fall, Montgomery Fellow Lord Roy Jenkins of Hillhead, a member of Britain's House of Lords and the chancellor of Oxford University, visited the College for just a weekend. He was followed by international peace activist Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who stayed at the College for a few weeks.
Gerstner said the fellows have a considerable amount of freedom in choosing how to interact with the student body once they arrive on campus.
The Montgomery House on Rope Ferry Road is an incentive for fellows to come to the College, Gerstner said.
The Montgomery Fellowship brings "people of various disciplines, people with stories to tell, information to relay that wouldn't come from a scholar or professor" to the College, Gerstner said.
The fellows have to be willing to schedule events and talk with students, she said.
But rather than staying in faculty apartments or living at the Hanover Inn for extensive periods of time, the fellows can wake up every morning overlooking Occum Pond.
"It's a wonderful place for the fellows to stay and live and bring their families," Gerstner said.
The Montgomery Fellows are selected and contacted by a committee chaired by the Provost. The Dean of the Faculty, the Dean of the College, a Trustee and donors sit on the committee as well as several faculty members and alumni, she said.
The committee aims to select people who are prominent in their field -- "it doesn't matter which one," Gerstner said.
The Montgomery Fellowship was established in 1977 by Kenneth Montgomery '25 and his wife Harle.
Because of its large endowment, Gerstner said "[the fellowship] could go on forever. The program is pretty much guaranteed to be funded for many, many years."
