Fellowship created
Starting next fall the College will offer a fellowship for Latino doctoral candidates who want to complete their dissertaions at Dartmouth. The program is modeled after the College's Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship program for African American students and the Native American fellowship that began last year, said Dean of Graduate Studies Richard Birnie, who chairs the selection committee. The Marshall Fellowships and the Native American and Latino programs provide minority doctoral candidates, who are in the last year of their research, with financial and academic support while they finish their dissertation. "The new fellowship programs for Native American and Latino scholars were created because the problem of minority recruitment is not limited to African Americans," Birnie said. College President James Freedman established the Marshall Fellowship in 1991 to increase the number of minority students within the academic "pipeline," Birnie said. The Marshall Fellowship provides funding each year to sponsor two African-American students, who are chosen from about 20 applicants, Birnie said. Like the Native American fellowship, the new Latino fellowship will sponsor one scholar each year. The fellows receive office space, a stipend of $25,000 and a $2,500 research grant, Birnie said. Kenneth James, a current Marshall Fellow, is here completing the Ph.D.