The selection of Jim Yong Kim as the College's next president continues what has developed into a pattern within the Wheelock succession. The last five College presidents have cycled between those with prior ties to the College and those with no previous Dartmouth connections, along with those who specialized in academics and those who focused more on student life.
Former College President Ernest Hopkins, a member of the Class of 1901, selected Harvard Law School graduate John Sloan Dickey '29 as his successor in 1945 because the two shared an international perspective, according to history professor emeritus Jere Daniell '55. Dickey, who was the director of the State Department's Office of Public Affairs at the time, assumed the presidency as World War II was coming to a close and the United States faced a new rivalry with the Soviet Union.
Dickey's academic reforms, including the introduction of the foreign study program and the addition of a Russian civilization department, largely reflected this international focus.
Dickey's internationalism continued to the very end of his presidency, marking his final Convocation speech in 1969 during the Vietnam War.
"It is to this end that I now suggest that the time may be at hand when the good cause of ending a war can be best served by many of us once again getting seriously to work on how better to keep the peace in the future," Dickey said in the speech.
Hopkins also selected Dickey because he wanted to make Dartmouth a more academic institution. The College had the lowest percentage of professors with doctorates in the Ivy League at the time.
"Dickey had the guts to resist faculty and insist that Dartmouth was going to compete with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton [Universities], but only at the undergraduate level," Daniell said.
The Board of Trustees selected Princeton-alumnus John Kemeny, who had rebuilt the College's mathematics department as a professor, to succeed Dickey in 1970.
Kemeny's presidency, which gained widespread faculty acclaim, focused on improving the College's academic standing. During his tenure, Kemeny expanded graduate education, initiating, for example, Dartmouth's doctoral program in math.
This emphasis on graduate studies, as well as Kemeny's Jewish-Hungarian heritage, generated controversy among some alumni, Daniell said.
"This is a WASP-ish institution historically," he said.
In electing Kemeny, who co-invented the BASIC computer language, the College's Board of Trustees demonstrated that they it was looking to the future of the College, as computers were just becoming popular.
"He envisioned computers being used by ordinary people, not just the specialists who employed them at the time," The Dartmouth reported in 1981.
Although Kemeny's primary focus was not on reforming social life, he instituted several major changes, including coeducation in 1972 and the implementation of the year-round Dartmouth plan to accommodate the subsequent increase in enrollment.
Kemeny's successor, David McLaughlin '54 Tu '55, came from a business background. The CEO of the Toro Company until his appointment in 1981, McLaughlin, chairman of the College Board of Trustees, was a College insider and considered by many to be a safe choice.
By electing McLaughlin, who was "the big man on campus and an athletic hero" during his Dartmouth education, the trustees demonstrated a nostalgia for the 1950s "Dartmouth man," Daniell said. This ensured that McLaughlin would not live up to expectations, however, because the world had changed following McLaughlin's days as a student, Daniell said.
Unlike Kemeny, McLaughlin focused largely on student life. Dartmouth's endowment also doubled under McLaughlin.
Although McLaughlin vowed to strengthen the College's academic environment in his inauguration speech, members of the faculty criticized him for his lack of academic experience.
"If he has a weakness, it's academics," Kemeny told The Dartmouth in 1981. "He's never chaired a faculty meeting or taught a class."
Academic concerns were addressed with the appointment of James Freedman in 1987. Freedman graduated from Harvard University and Yale Law School before becoming dean at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and later president of the University of Iowa. Freedman, at the time, said he hoped to strengthen intellectualism at the school famous for its inspiration of the movie "Animal House."
"We must strengthen our attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasure may not come from the camaraderie of classmates, but from lonely acts of writing poetry, or mastering the cello, or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus," he said in his inauguration speech.
Freedman achieved parity between the number of male and female students at the College. He also introduced Women's Studies, African and African-American Studies majors to the curriculum. Dartmouth also became the first Ivy League institution to require students to own a computer in 1991.
The Board's selection of current College President James Wright, a Dartmouth professor and former dean of faculty, to succeed Freedman in 1998 represented to many a reaction to Freedman's presidency a return to a focus on student life. Wright's tenure was marked by the controversial Student Life Initiative in 1999, expansion of financial aid and updates to the campus' residential and classroom infrastructure.
