The College's Board of Trustees, which convened on campus this past weekend for its annual Fall term meeting, discussed the need for more social space on campus with students as part of its program.
In a report presented to the Trustees by the Student Assembly, students stressed the need for additional social spaces on campus.
The Student Assembly report urged the Trustees to act on the College's demonstrated need for more social space at a meeting of the Trustees' Subcommittee on Student Affairs on Thursday.
President James Wright said the Trustees thought the report made "a very good case for the additional need for social, programming space."
The Administration will be looking into a plan for creating more social and residential options in the new few years, he added.
A new facility is "absolutely" a consideration, he said. "Part of providing those sorts of social options is making sure we have more and better space."
The Trustees will respond to whatever recommendations the Administration makes, Wright added.
Student Assembly President Josh Green '00, who attended the subcommittee meeting, said he also thought the Trustees recognized the importance of the social space issue for students.
He said that they "understood that the issue of space affects many aspects of student life."
But the positive response is still not a new Webster Hall, Green added.
He said he hopes the Trustees realize that "we're doing a lot with what we have ... You can't just keep tweaking Collis." But his experience with the Trustees has shown that response time from the Board can be slow, Green said.
"It's not that tomorrow we want to hear that they are going to build another Webster Hall, but I want to get a timeline," Green said.
In addition to discussions on social space at Dartmouth, the Trustees approved Wright's choice of James Larimore, the assistant to the provost at Stanford University, as Dartmouth's next dean of the College.
Although the President formally chooses the dean, Wright said, the decision is still "subject to the Trustees' judgment."
The Board was also given a tour of the new facilities, including Rauner Hall and Kemeny Hall. Some of the Trustees chose to attend Friday's "Speak Out against the Silence" instead of taking the facilities tour.
