President-elect James Wright is not just someone with a Dartmouth connection -- he is an insider from the James Freedman administration.
His career in the upper echelons of the College's administration bookends Freedman's presidency.
Weeks after the April 1987 announcement that Freedman would replace David T. McLaughlin, the ad hoc committee on residential life, chaired by Wright, issued its findings, which came to be known as the "Wright Report."
Among the controversial report's recommendations was a proposal to construct a new student center. In 1989, the College decided to renovate College Hall and the Collis Center.
That same year, Freedman appointed Wright to the first of two consecutive terms he served as dean of the faculty.
As dean of the faculty, Wright gave up teaching to devote his time towards fundraising activities.
He also chaired the committee which developed the distributive requirements now in place for students at the College.
When the curriculum, including the interdisciplinary requirement, could not be instituted for the Class of 1997 due to a lack of money for the new programs, Wright spearheaded fundraising to make the curriculum available to the Class of 1998.
Establishment of the distributive requirements was a fundamental achievement in Freedman's drive to intellectualize the College during his tenure as presidency.
In the last year and a half of Freedman's presidency, Wright took on more responsibility, filling in as acting provost and dean of the faculty at the same time.
The end of his term as provost will coincide with the end of the Freedman era and the beginning of the Wright presidency.
He took over as permanent provost to oversee the searches for deans of the Thayer Engineering School and Dartmouth Medical School.
John Baldwin will take over leadership of DMS in June and the Thayer search is nearing completion.
While the undergraduate administration of Dartmouth will have many openings when Wright takes over, the graduate schools will have leadership, much of which Wright had a hand in picking.
In addition, Wright has a lot of support from the College's faculty -- after he announced his plans to resign as provost, close to 60 percent of the faculty signed a petition supporting his appointment to a full term in the position.
Wright has said that he wants to teach classes while he is president -- a move which could help reverse the perception many students have that the current president is often inaccessible.
Wright said in an interview yesterday he had planned to re-evaluate the classes he teaches after finishing his term as provost, so that he will most likely not teach classes until Fall term 1999.
Still, he clearly looks forward to a good deal of interaction with students during his presidency.
Wright's extensive experience in the College's administration alleviates many concerns about the impending departures of many other administrators.
The fact that he served as provost makes the impending hole in that Parkhurst office less troublesome, though he cannot be expected to fulfill both the president and provost's duties for a long period of time.
More importantly, however, his 29 years of experience at Dartmouth will make the transition period much shorter.
Although Wright's College will have a lot of administrators in temporary positions after his inauguration, he will most likely already have working relationships with many of them, so a lame-duck period can be avoided.
He will only be moving down the hall from his current Parkhurst office, and he has lived in the area since 1969. He has experience running the College from his days as acting president and provost. And he will spend his three-month period as president-elect at Dartmouth, so he can jump into the presidency feet first after his inauguration, if not sooner.
Wright's appointment as president helps fill in many of the holes in the administration that could have made the next year a rocky one for the College.
Wright still has a lot of positions to fill, but the vacancies will not be as much of a problem for him as they would have been to an outsider.