On the heels of his recent appointment as a charter trustee, Class of 1970 alumnus Charles E. Haldeman Jr. and his wife Barbara announced a $10 million gift to the College on Wednesday.
The sum will be used for the development of the Haldeman Center, which will house the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics. In addition to serving as headquarters for these three academic institutes, the Haldeman Center will provide conference space.
The Haldeman Center will be built just north of Baker-Berry Library and adjacent to Kemeny Hall, a mathematics center to be built in 2005. Plans for the building indicate yet another example of the increasingly northern shift of campus development, joining plans for the building of Kemeny Hall, a new dining facility and a new upperclass residential cluster.
"In bringing these three academic programs together under one roof, the Haldemans' gift takes the concept of intellectual collaboration to a new level," College President James Wright said. "The programs will be able to pool resources, share insights and work jointly on common initiatives."
Haldeman is president and chief executive officer of Putnam Investments, a Boston-based mutual fund company, and bestowed this gift in honor of his parents, Charles E. and Betty Jane Haldeman.
"Neither of my parents was able to go to college, for economic reasons," Haldeman said. "But they had hopes, as did so many Americans of that generation, that if they worked hard their children would be able to attend. This gift recognizes what they did for me, and what other parents are doing, even today."
One of the Haldemans' daughters recently graduated from Dartmouth as a member of the Class of 2003, and another will join the College in the fall as a member of the Class of 2008.
