Friday, Feb. 07, 1964
School for Alumni
The best test of a college is whether its alumni continue to have a taste for learning--the very word alumnus comes from the Latin alere, to nourish. Toward this end, college reunions are more and more becoming occasions to heft brains rather than bottles. Now Dartmouth has capped the trend by announcing a full-scale Alumni College to run for two weeks next August.
"This is not a missionary effort," says President John Sloan Dickey. "This is for people who have been reading already, but want somebody to discuss their reading with." Alumni College will welcome wives as well as men, charging about $250 per couple for tuition, dormitory housing, and food--"everything except the golf course."
Chaired by Diplomat Ellis O. Briggs ('21), Alumni College will start classes at 8 a.m. for lectures and seminars in four areas--Science and Human Values, Current Economic Problems, Literature and Contemporary Affairs, and the Scientific Age: Dream and Reality. The faculty includes four Dartmouth professors in fields from physics to philosophy. Preparatory reading includes the Book of Job, Thoreau's Walden, Shakespeare's As You Like It, Golding's Lord of the Flies. On the evening agenda: plays, concerts, seminars in international affairs. In short, Dartmouth aims at what most U.S. colleges only dream of: "a sustained, serious intellectual relationship with its alumni."
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