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One result of such affluence is that 40% of Dartmouth's 3,060 undergraduates now get scholarship aid (average grant: $1,200) toward the minimum $2,800 cost. Another is a rebuilt faculty, 60% new since 1952, with salaries as high as $18,000 a year. It also boasts such compelling young scholars as Mathematician John Kemeny, 36, who graduated from Princeton in 1947 with the highest grades seen there in 20 years, came to Dartmouth as a full professor at 27. In creating the best college math department in the country, Kemeny has also produced such fascinating courses for non-majors that 95% of Dartmouth freshmen now take math voluntarily.
Coherent College. A champion of "liberating" education. President Dickey has tried hard to blend liberal arts with the specialization that now drives 73% of Dartmouth men on to graduate school. In 1947, he launched a compulsory "Great Issues" course for seniors, which each week brings in poets, politicians or philosophers to discuss everything from God to "overkill." The same idea keeps Dartmouth from becoming a full-fledged university. It has three graduate schools: business administration, engineering, and the third oldest (1797) U.S. medical school. But all stay deliberately small (total enrollment: 342) on the ground, says Dickey, that Dartmouth must keep the unifying spirit of a residential college and not become a "boardinghouse for specialists."
As a result. Dartmouth expands graduate work only where it is especially qualified to fill a vacuum. Mathematician Kemeny. for example, has started a unique doctoral program aimed at creating college teachers of his "new math." The medical school offers only two years of study and then sends most of its students on to fill the vacancies created by flunk-outs at Harvard's four-year school. The Dartmouth medical school has recently doubled enrollment to 96, is raising $10 million, will soon offer a Ph.D. in molecular biology.
Three-Three Schedule. Dartmouth's most dazzling innovations are for undergraduates, who now come from all 50 states and 30 foreign countries, are 75% public school products, and generally fit Admissions Director Edward Chamberlain Jr.'s edict: "It's not how well-rounded they are; it's the length of their radii we're interested in.'' To stretch radii, Dartmouth has pioneered a "three-three" schedule—a three-term academic year with only three courses per term. Since the goal is to probe subjects more deeply, the work is a lot harder. Also required: heavy reading and "original commentaries" of at least 900 words on authors from Plato to Sartre.
Old faculty hands complain that three-three is mere academic automation that "pushes the kids too hard." Faculty Dean Arthur Jensen disagrees, says that "this system has sparked the whole academic tone of Dartmouth." As for students, movie attendance is down 35% and book circulation at Baker Library is up 55%. Next on John Dickey's agenda is the logical extension of three-three: a summer session beginning in 1963 that may well put Dartmouth on a year-round basis and allow a B.A. to be earned in three years. At the summer session Dartmouth will also take its first women undergraduates, but President Dickey will restrict enrollment to men for the rest of the year.