College President Jim Yong Kim and Harvard University professor Paul Farmer fellow PIH co-founders joined Dahl to deliver the traditional "first lecture" to the incoming Class of 2013, billed as a discussion of the students' summer reading assignment, Tracy Kidder's 2004 best-seller "Mountains Beyond Mountains."
Dahl, at the end of the event, hinted that efforts are underway to explore a partnership between PIH and Dartmouth.
The discussion among the three panelists which touched on a wide range of topics, including leadership and social justice was marked by friendly banter and playful jibing. Farmer, in a recurring joke, deadpanned that he was worried his informal comments would reach a larger audience.
At the organization's outset, PIH's founders did not have specific long-term goals, Dahl said, but rather tackled each problem by being optimistic and seeking to cooperate with one another.
"We weren't tripped up by thinking about all the things that can go wrong," she said. "We put our heads together and we moved forward."
Farmer said that he, Kim and Dahl were "prepared to become friends," although they met by chance and have different interests, because they shared a desire to address global health issues.
Farmer urged the students in attendance to "find people who will push you and are not afraid of failure."
"The reason we talk about our undergraduate years is that's how we got on the trajectory we're on today," he said. "You learn things in college and you meet people who are going to be involved in the rest of your lives."
During the panel's discussion of leadership, Kim said that he believes all good leaders know how to be good followers and have experience working as a member of a team - a lesson Kim
said he learned during his time as an adviser to the director general of the World Health Organization
"Some of the key positions I have held were being a good number two and number three, knowing how to be of service to the director of an organization," Kim said.
The value of cooperation extends beyond interpersonal relationships to the way organizations should cooperate to tackle the world's problems, the panelists said.
Farmer described how former U.S. President Bill Clinton recently asked him to find out how many non-governmental organizations are working in Haiti. Farmer said that there are about 8,000 groups currently active, too many to be coordinate a coherent aid effort.
"We're not saying there's an easy answer, but every thing that you care about is multidisciplinary," Kim said. "You need inspiration from Shakespeare, methodologies from medical anthropology. It's important not to reduce anything to a single factor. You need to resist that temptation."
