Correction appended
Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center will launch a series of leadership initiatives this fall after receiving a $5.6-million donation in June from Fritz Corrigan '64 and his family.
The center will offer a new set of curricular and co-curricular programs designed to enhance students' leadership experience, centering on a management and leadership development program and the public policy minor, Rockefeller Center Director Andrew Samwick said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
The minor, first developed during government professor Linda Fowler's tenure as the center's director, did not previously offer specific courses in leadership, Samwick said.
"We had not, to date, made the study of leadership a part of the curriculum," Samwick said, adding that such study is not something that happens in an "intentional way in a liberal arts education."
The new leadership sequence in the minor will include three pillars comprising a "foundations" class, a class in institutional leadership and a class on leadership in civil society.
The classes will not be restricted by class year or have prerequisites, such that any student can enroll, according to Rockefeller Center Associate Director Ronald Shaiko, who is in charge of the center's curricular offerings.
"We want to expose as many students as possible to this process," he said.
The center plans to launch the civil society class during Spring term 2010 and the foundations class in Fall 2010, followed by the institutional leadership class in Winter 2011, Shaiko said.
Other departments may also begin offering classes in leadership, Shaiko said.
"It would be very rare in the other classes I've taught at Dartmouth, in my discipline, to pause and think about leadership," Samwick, who is also an economics professor, said. "We have to sell this idea."
The economics department, for example, could eventually begin teaching a course like "leadership and evolution in economic organizations," Samwick said.
"We would like this core of classes to make it easier to sponsor courses where leadership is a unifying factor," he said.
The management and leadership development program was designed to expand upon previous session-based leadership experiences like the seniors-only Rockefeller Leadership Fellows Program, according to Sadhana Hall, an associate director at the Rockefeller Center.
The program will be restricted to 32 invited members of the Class of 2010 in its first session this Fall term, but will then be open to all upperclassmen, she said.
Nine sessions will be offered each Fall, Winter and Spring term by the program in skills ranging from networking to ethics in leadership.
Hall added that continuity is important, both within the management and leadership Program, and between each facet of the Rockefeller Center.
"The message that we are hoping to share with students is very consistent across [the programs]," she said.
The Director's Leadership Venture Fund, another proposed new initiative, may be used to take advantage of pedagogical advances in leadership education and to identity opportunities to "integrate leadership development more fully across campus," according to the Rockfeller Center's "Statement of Principles for Leadership Development."
Shaiko said that the center, "without being boastful, probably [does] more than any other organization on campus" in offering students resources for leadership development.
The funds made available by the Corrigan donation were important in expanding the center's reach, Samwick said.
"We probably wouldn't have been able to roll [the initiatives] out so quickly," he said. "It would have taken years [without the donation]."
