Seven faculty members with a combined total of 268 years of teaching and research experience at the College, will retire from Dartmouth at the end of this academic year anthropology professors Kirk Endicott and Hoyt Alverson, English professor Brenda Silver, history professors Michael Ermarth and Gene Garthwaite, physics and astronomy professor Jay Lawrence and Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures professor Marsha Swislocki.
Endicott, who's career at the College began in 1982, said his experiences as an undergraduate student at Reed College and his graduate research at Harvard University and Oxford University encouraged him to begin an academic career.
While at the College, he chaired the anthropology department from 1985 to 1987 and again from 2000 to 2003. He also founded the department's New Zealand Foreign Study Program at the University of Auckland.
Endicott said that, during his childhood in Oregon, he developed an interest in how Native Americans "managed to make a living off the land," which later inspired his research. He began researching Native Americans on the Great Plains, but when he met his graduate advisor, a specialist on Southeast Asia, he shifted his focus. He now primarily studies the hunting and gathering population of Malaysia and tropical rainforests.
Endicott said he will miss the interaction with undergraduates after his retirement.
"It's been rewarding to teach really good students, some of whom have become passionate about their research," he said.
After retiring, Endicott plans to spend the next year researching aboriginal art in Australia in conjunction with the Hood Museum of Art.
Alverson, who has taught at the College since 1968, was drawn to Dartmouth by the variety of teaching opportunities it offered, he said. He chaired the anthropology department from 1975 to 1984 and again from 1995 to 1997. Alverson also developed two new anthropology courses, completely rewriting the curriculum for the Introduction to Anthropology class and introducing a seminar called "Study of Human Values Universal and Peculiar."
While at the College, Alverson conducted a study of Dartmouth's admissions statistics and found that the College was recruiting students primarily from suburban areas. He was a proponent of making the College coeducational, though he faced some obstacles, he said.
"The biggest difficulty was that the trustees, certain alumni [and former College President] John Kemeny started to manage the issue of coeducation by proposing an associated school for women," Alverson said. "It was separate but equal' I and a few other [faculty members] were definitely in favor of direct admission of women without quotas."
Alverson plans to author a blog on which he will provide an anthropological perspective on current events and continue his research after leaving the College.
Silver joined the College in 1972, its first year of coeducation. Prior to her teaching career in New Hampshire, Silver majored in English at the University of Pennsylvania and then spent three years in London on a Fullbright Scholarship. Once she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard University for graduate school on a Ford Fellowship, and began teaching at the College directly after graduating with her Ph.D.
"When I graduated from college, I thought about law school and graduate school in English," she said, "I decided my heart really was in literature."
Upon her arrival at the College, Silver joined the Women's Caucus, a group of female administrators and faculty and staff members that was influential in the College's decision to extend the pre-tenure contract to include childcare for women. She also helped start a feminist reading group and founded the women and gender studies program.
After Dartmouth, Silver will begin as an adjunct professor at Trinity College in Dublin in the fall.
Ermarth arrived at the College in 1971 and served as history department chair from 1995 to 2000. He specializes in German intellectual history, though he generally teaches courses on modern European history.
"Michael invites students to think with him rather than thinking for them," history department chair Margaret Darrow said in an encomium she wrote for Ermarth obtained by The Dartmouth.
Ermarth said he felt "privileged" to have taught at the College.
"What I most appreciated about the College was its sustained commitment to an even-handed, cross-fertilizing balance of teaching and scholarship," Ermarth wrote in an email to The Dartmouth. "This balance constitutes a unique equilibrium of energies, ideas, and knowledge an educational synergy in the best sense."
Garthwaite, who has taught at the College since 1968, never intended to be a history professor. Originally an English literature major, he served in the Air Force for several years before joining a yearlong archeological expedition to Iran from 1959 to 1960. This trip sparked his interest in the "social history" of the Middle East.
Garthwaite was one of the founders of Dartmouth's Asian Studies program, now the Asian and Middle Eastern studies program. He chaired the program for 11 years after its inception, served as history department chair from 1992 to 1996 and again in 2001 and has served on "almost all of the major committees in the College," he said.
An expert on the Middle East, Garthwaite said he primarily researches Iran and the larger context of Islamic culture.
"I'm especially interested in how people lived and how they interacted with each other," he said. "Not necessarily the elites, but the total culture."
Lawrence, who has been a professor at the College since 1971, chaired the physics and astronomy department from 2007 to 2010 and chaired the Committee on Organization and Policy four times, most recently in 2005.
The balance between research and teaching attracted Lawrence to the College, he said. Lawrence, who has been a visiting professor and scientist at other colleges and universities 11 times, said that at some other institutions, he "missed the feeling of being part of a community" that he experienced at the College.
Lawrence introduced two new courses to the physics department during his time at the College a graduate course on mini-particle quantum physics and an undergraduate course in quantum computing.
Lawrence, who will divide his time between Chicago and Hanover, said he hopes to continue teaching as a visiting professor.
"I don't really feel that I'm leaving," he said. "I'm looking forward to continuing to be a part of the intellectual life of Dartmouth."
Swislocki, one of the two professors in her department who teaches both Spanish and Portuguese, said she "always knew" she was going to work in academia. She has taught at the College since 1977.
"It's lively," Swislocki said of teaching. "It keeps you in touch with yourself and the world."
Swislocki founded the original Portuguese Language Study Abroad program in Brazil, was department chair for nine years and has directed over 15 FSPs and LSAs. In 2003, she worked with the College library to catalog what is now the Spanish Theater Collection. Swislocki will teach a comparative literature course in the fall and plans to "continue [her] relationship" with the College.
"[The College] gave me an opportunity to do as a job something I really loved," Swislocki said. "What else could you possibly want? It's been such a privilege."
