In a hilariously solemn metaphor. Dartmouth's college anthem boasts that the school breeds men with "the granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains." Dartmouth people darkly suspect that the world pictures their school as an Ivy League training camp for ski bums and football players, dressed in the foul-weather fashions of six-month winters and rarely troubling their granitic heads with studies. Yet these days the Hanover hills are ringing with academic reforms and resounding to the whoops of culture.
Just opened is the Hopkins Center for creative and performing arts, a triple-threat (art, drama, music) complex designed by Lincoln Center Architect Wallace Harrison, with advisers ranging from Conductor Leonard Bernstein to Choreographer Jerome Robbins. Celebrating the occasion, Dartmouth last week served a cultural feast: new music by French Composer Darius Milhaud, a show of paintings by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, the world premiere of Director John Huston's Freud, and the first completed U.S. work of Italian Architect-Engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, which happens to be Dartmouth's new $1,500,000 arched-roof fieldhouse.
Small & Lovable. What makes such a flurry the more notable is Dartmouth's isolation—a headache since 1770, when the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock trudged up from Connecticut with rum, drum and Bible to "civilize and Christianize'' the pagan redskins of New Hampshire. Some 140 miles north of Boston, where Harvard was already 134 years old, the doughty divine built a log-hut school called Dartmouth College after its English angel, the Earl of Dartmouth. Unhappily, the Indians ignored Wheelock. He was forced to import paleface students, who at first took a wry view of his brave motto. Vox Cla-mantis in Deserto (The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness).
The voice nonetheless got heard in 1818, when Alumnus Daniel Webster tearfully told the equally moved U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall:-"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it." In the 29 years prior to 1945, Dartmouth won national status under President Ernest Martin Hopkins (the new center's originator). Yet isolation remained a problem. When Hopkins retired, the faculty was inbred, overage, lacked the metropolitan stimulation of other famed schools. To find girls on weekends, the boys regularly killed themselves speeding down narrow roads to civilization.
Girls & Books. The nearest supply of college girls is still 40 miles away at Colby Junior College. But isolation is rapidly becoming a virtue under President John Sloan Dickey, the reticent alumnus ('29) and Boston lawyer who quit the State Department in 1945 to succeed Hopkins. For modern city kids, the Outing Club offers a 27,000-acre wilderness to romp in. Superlative Baker Memorial Library, with 800,000 volumes in stacks open for browsing, gives many a Dartmouth man his real education. Dickey parlayed the advantages: under him, endowment has more than tripled, to $73 million, book value. In six years, Dartmouth has put up $27.4 million in new construction, including the $7.5 million Hopkins Center.