Dartmouth seniors are not the only ones to say goodbye to Hanover after this year's Commencement, as four professors are retiring and others are moving to new settings.
Karl Furstenberg is retiring after spending 17 years as the College's dean of admissions and financial aid. In an interview with The Dartmouth, he said that he has decided to retire now because of the current strength of the College's admissions and financial aid departments.
During his tenure, Furstenberg oversaw the expansion of Dartmouth's applicant pool from 7,930 applicants in 1990, when he began serving as dean, to 14,176 applicants in 2007. He also worked to increase Dartmouth's scholarship assistance to $55 million and has helped to increase the student body's minority and international representation.
Multidisciplinary historian Professor Leo Spitzer's presence at Dartmouth also will come to an end after this year. During his 40 years at the College, he held a variety of positions. In addition to chairing and teaching classes in the history department, he served as the chair of the Jewish studies department, was a founding member and co-chairman of the women and gender studies department and was heavily involved in shaping the African and African American studies department.
Spitzer has also researched and published works focusing on refugeehood, historical memory and representations of the Holocaust in video and film and emancipation, exclusion and domination in Latin America, Africa and Central Europe.
"My main relationship, my home base, was Dartmouth, and my interests have always been very multidisciplinary," Spitzer said. "I just decided at some point that I wanted to step aside and let the younger generation step in."
Upon retiring, Spitzer plans to continue researching and writing while living in his homes in New York and Vermont.
Italian Professor Giuseppe Cavatorta -- or "Beppe" as he prefers to be called -- will leave Dartmouth this fall for the University of Arizona after teaching in Hanover for six years. Students in the Italian department will remember him for his collection of Guinness T-shirts and the smoking breaks he took during class, as well as for the unique atmosphere he and his wife, Professor Anna Minardi, created in the Italian department.
"He and Anna are really a couple as a presence," Patricia Lambert '08 said in an interview with The Dartmouth in April. "And it's been really great having that dynamic added to interactions with them -- it creates a sort of make-shift family feeling."
The College will also officially say goodbye to two professors who have been on pre-retirement leave since they stopped teaching during the last academic year.
Peter Saccio, the Leon D. Black Professor of Shakespearean Studies in the College's English department, has been teaching Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama since he arrived at Dartmouth in 1966. His courses were always among the most popular at the College, often to the point of oversubscription.
After this year, students will also be without Professor Richard "Dick" Birnie of the earth sciences department and his class on remote sensing. Outside of the classroom, Birnie studied geochemistry and sedimentary petrology, using satellite remote sensing, global positioning systems and image processing to study geologic and environmental applications.
"Dick is one of my favorite professors at Dartmouth -- one of the only ones who I have met who truly adheres to the idea that he is at Dartmouth to teach and help students," a member of the Class of 2005 wrote about Birnie for Student Assembly's online course review. "This attitude is apparent both in his teaching and in his interactions with students."
Professor of government David Becker is also retiring. During his time at Dartmouth, Becker researched law, democracy, and business in Latin America in addition to teaching. He received his bachelor of science and masters degrees in physics at Columbia University, after which he studied political science at University of California Los Angeles where he earned a masters and a doctorate degree.
