Since 1819, Daniel Webster's famous assessment of our school has captivated generation after generation of Dartmouth students: "It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." These words have remained more fundamental to Dartmouth's identity than perhaps almost anything else from the College's long history.
In recent years, however, there has been an increasingly large faction of alumni who believe that we should forgo that part of our past and abandon the "small college" identity that has defined this school for so long. They have complained that Dartmouth is already the outlier in the Ivy League in many ways. The smallest and by far the most isolated Ivy, the College has almost as much in common with liberal arts colleges like Williams and Amherst as it does with large research universities like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Some argue that we need bigger graduate schools and more research funding to remain competitive in higher education. Essentially, they believe that we should turn our college into "Dartmouth University," perhaps modeled after our larger peer in Cambridge, Mass. But they are wrong.
We are not Harvard, we shouldn't be Harvard and, frankly, we couldn't be Harvard even if we wanted to be. Harvard's identity centers on being the biggest and the best at everything. Its medical, business and law schools are all among the best in the nation. Its faculty includes 44 Nobel laureates, and its $32-billion endowment exceeds the GDP of Panama. By contrast, Dartmouth has to be more selective with its focus. We have a few world-class graduate schools, but our endowment is only a 10th the size of Havard's.
Striving to be Harvard is both naive and unnecessary. Admittedly, high school seniors all over the world make college decisions that are significantly affected by rankings and reputation, which are in turn influenced by research funding, professor prominence and graduate school prestige. Some might point out that Dartmouth could bolster its reputation and attract better students by supporting more research and hiring more prestigious professors, even without forgoing its historical focus on undergraduates.
Dartmouth, however, doesn't need to depend on heavy research to attract top students and maintain its reputation. Most of my friends came here because of the College's strong emphasis on undergraduate teaching. Dartmouth has much in common with both top liberal arts schools and the rest of the Ivy League, providing our school with a uniquely advantageous position. As an Ivy League school, we have the benefit of greater worldwide name recognition as well as an endowment and research opportunities that dwarf what traditional liberal arts colleges can offer. Compared to our fellow Ivies, we have a clear-cut advantage in terms of undergraduate teaching that comes without the cutthroat competitive attitude that notoriously plagues schools like Princeton and Cornell.
By walking that line, Dartmouth can bill itself as a unique hybrid of a small college and a university, combining some of the best aspects of each. Dartmouth boasts great professors and research opportunities that might be less common at a smaller school and avoid the competitive, entitled attitude that one might find at another Ivy.
Even assuming for a minute that more research funding would bring better students to Dartmouth, we need to ask whether or not these students would be worth the cost of compromising our traditions. There has been a place in the Ancient Eight for a small, undergraduate-focused college on a hill since Dartmouth's founding, just as there has been a place for each of the other Ivies. Neither we nor our fellow Ivies need to redefine our identities to fit a perceived ideal.
