For Civilized Competence

When John Sloan Dickey, now 48, took over as twelfth president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., he faced what could have been a trying situation. His predecessor, Ernest Martin Hopkins, had been the heart and soul of the college for 29 years, and it seemed almost inevitable that Dickey's first moves would suffer by comparison. As it turned out, they did not. By last week, a decade later, Dartmouth and Dickey had every reason to feel satisfied with each other.

Big (6 ft. 3 in.), genial John Dickey graduated from Dartmouth in 1929, went on to the Harvard Law School and then to the varied sort of career of a typical rising young man. In 1934 he divided his time between private practice and service with the State Department. He became special assistant to Cordell Hull, chairman of the department's Division of World Trade Intelligence. In 1944, when Dartmouth was looking for a new president, Dickey was appointed director of State's Office of Public Affairs. In 1945 he became Dartmouth's president.

Amphibious Existence. For a man who had had so little preparation in education, John Dickey settled easily into what he calls the "amphibious existence" (i.e., half time on campus, half time traveling) of the college president. Usu ally accompanied by his golden retriever Rusty, he strides into his office at 8:30 each morning, is apt to be the last to head for home and family (three daughters) at night. His budget has gone up from $3,000,000 to $7,000,000; his endowment has risen 65% to more than $36,500,000. He has increased scholarship aid to reach nearly a third of the student body (in 1948 it reached only 18%), has started a national enrollment program to make sure that to a greater degree than ever before good students will represent the entire country.

With the acquisition of the polar library of famed Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Dartmouth developed a program of Northern studies that has become a national center for Arctic research. It is also one of the few small (3,006 students) liberal-arts colleges to have a Department of Russian Civilization. But in ten years. Dickey has made a name for himself as more than an able administrator. A practical man with a scholar's tastes, he has earnestly tried to produce alumni who will be men of both thought and action. "I do want," he once said, "this generation of educated men of Dartmouth [to] be 'doers of the word and not hearers only.' "

Applied Liberal Arts. In 1947 he started a compulsory "Great Issues" course for seniors which has been copied in some form on nearly 100 campuses. Students study the major problems of their time, e.g., the Atomic Revolution, modern man's political loyalties, bring to bear on them all that they have learned before. Essentially, says Dickey, this is "applied liberal arts, an effort to give our men a transition between the classroom and adulthood. A man spends four years with a book; after that he is inclined to rely on periodicals and newspapers for his information. There is entirely too little effort in undergraduate experience to relate the liberal arts to what a fellow lives with when out."

In 1951 Dartmouth .started a special foundation named after its ninth president, William Jewett Tucker. Its purpose: to foster the spiritual life of the campus and to help students meet President Tucker's challenge: "Seek, I pray you, moral distinction." Thus, says Dickey, is Dartmouth grappling with liberal education's major twin concerns. "I have no interest," says he, "in seeing the liberal-arts college become too precious for the man who hungers after competence. [But] it is the job of the college to keep competence civilized ... I rate very highly the fact that in the liberal-arts college neither competence nor conscience is taken straight. Rather, it is the human interplay between these two poles of purpose that gives liberal education its orientation to the light and brings to the undergraduate grown a man those liberating and civilizing qualities men never quite define nor ever quite deny."

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