Greening of Dartmouth

As Dartmouth began its 203rd year with a convocation in Webster Hall, President John George Kemeny professed himself ready to "risk chaos by moving forward with new ideas." Dartmouth's most striking new idea was already a reality: the college's first 252 coeds. In their honor, Kemeny asked the students to refrain from singing the traditional Men of Dartmouth ("Men of Dartmouth,/ give a rouse, for the college on the hill..."). Instead, they sang a verse of Dartmouth Undying ("Remember/ the splendor and fullness of her days..."). But then from students in the gallery came a touch of chaos, a faint chant of "Men of Dartmouth, give a rouse..."

So died, with a failing gurgle of protest, one of the Ivy League's oldest and least-mourned traditions: Dartmouth was the last of the eight schools to go coed. The reform came through the efforts of a man who is himself something of a novelty among Ivy League presidents, a computer expert and science-fiction buff who still speaks English with a thick Hungarian accent. As the chaos of rival songs faded away, John Kemeny just smiled: bringing women to Dartmouth had been one of his chief goals since he took over as president two years ago. "Dartmouth was incomplete without women," he says. "The environment without them was unnatural, and therefore education was handicapped."

Lemons. Once the alumni's diehard prejudices had been overcome, the college's chief problem was to find a way to admit women without cutting its male enrollment, since Dartmouth could not afford to increase its physical plant. Kemeny's solution was typically pragmatic: he is adding a summer term, which will allow the school to enroll 800 women students over the next four years at a cost of only $2,000,000, mostly for renovation of dorms, expanding the gym, and adding 25 teachers to the present 275-member faculty. Under the new system, only the freshman year is traditional, fall to spring. After that, Dartmouth now requires simply that a student attend at least one summer term; he can take his other seven ten-week terms at any time he wishes, either at Dartmouth itself or at 27 other study centers in the U.S. and abroad.

In the course of restructuring Dartmouth--while keeping his budgets balanced--Kemeny has brought a new and more approachable style to his office. He frequently works in a collarless sports shirt; he teaches a freshman calculus course; and he sets aside time every week for students to come in without any appointment and talk. When the superconservative Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader called the new president a "lemon" (because he canceled classes during the Kent State upheaval) Kemeny good-naturedly tossed out lemons at a subsequent mass meeting of students, many of whom were wearing polo shirts painted with bright yellow lemons. Kemeny can also be blunt. A delegation of professors once protested against his bringing his wife Jean to faculty meetings. "Go to hell," he told them. Soon afterward the meetings were thrown open to all the wives, students and university employees.

Before being chosen as president on the retirement of John Sloan Dickey, a master builder who had quintupled Dartmouth's endowment to $114 million, Kemeny was widely regarded as a near genius in the field of computers and math. Now 46, he is the son of a grain dealer from Budapest who fled Nazi anti-Semitism to settle in New York in 1940. A star student in advanced math and philosophy at Princeton, Kemeny was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project, and later became Albert Einstein's assistant. In 1953, when he was 27 and a teacher of logic at Princeton, Dartmouth asked him to head its math department. He soon recruited one of the best college math faculties in the country.

At the same time, Kemeny crusaded for the then-radical idea that every student should learn to use a computer. He helped to invent a simplified language for communicating with computers (called BASIC); he pioneered in the development of time snaring, a method by which many people can use a computer simultaneously. The computer even became his chief form of relaxation. In the small hours of the morning, after what is often a 20-hour workday, Kemeny frequently plays simulated games of chess, poker and football on a computer console in the study of his home. For Dartmouth's football coaches, he created a computer system to help keep track of scouting data.

When students register at Dartmouth, they receive ID numbers and code words to enable them to dial into the college's computer from any of the 200 terminals on the campus. By the time they leave, about 90% of Dartmouth's 3,455 undergraduates will know how to operate and even program a computer. Some never progress beyond playing simulated games of football or chess, but more than half take courses on how to use computers in scientific and behavioral research. "I want the computer to become as familiar as the library," says Kemeny.

Until Dartmouth has made the full transition to coeducation and year-round operation, Kemeny is not planning anything drastic. "Dartmouth," he says, "is larger than most small colleges and does not have the big universities' problem of tending to splinter into unrelated pieces. I want to keep it that way." But he does have an immodest ambition: "That in ten years Dartmouth will have the best undergraduate-education program in America."

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