Dartmouth College ( DART-məth) is a private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock and Samson Occom to train Native American Christian missionaries, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.
Following a liberal arts curriculum, Dartmouth provides undergraduate instruction in 40 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs, including 60 majors in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. In addition to the undergraduate faculty of arts and sciences, Dartmouth has four professional and graduate schools: the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, the Tuck School of Business, and the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. The university also has affiliations with the Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. Dartmouth is home to the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, the Hood Museum of Art, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts. With a student enrollment of about 6,700, Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Undergraduate admissions are highly selective with an acceptance rate of 5.3% for the class of 2028, including a 3.8% rate for regular decision applicants.
Situated on a terrace above the Connecticut River, Dartmouth's 269-acre (109 ha) main campus is in the rural Upper Valley region of New England. The university functions on a quarter system, operating year-round on four ten-week academic terms. Dartmouth is known for its undergraduate focus, Greek culture, outdoors activities, and campus traditions. Its 34 varsity sports teams compete intercollegiately in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I. The university has many prominent alumni, including 170 members of the United States Congress, 25 U.S. governors, 8 U.S. Cabinet secretaries, 3 Nobel Prize laureates, 2 U.S. Supreme Court justices, and a U.S. vice president.
History
Dartmouth was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, a Yale graduate and Congregational minister from Windham, Connecticut, who had sought to establish a school to train Native Americans as Christian missionaries. It was one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Wheelock's ostensible inspiration for such an establishment resulted from his relationship with Mohegan Indian Samson Occom. Occom became an ordained minister after studying under Wheelock from 1743 to 1747, and later moved to Long Island to preach to the Montauks.
Wheelock founded Moor's Indian Charity School in 1755. The Charity School proved somewhat successful, but additional funding was necessary to continue school's operations, and Wheelock sought the help of friends to raise money. The first major donation to the school was given by John Phillips in 1762, who went on to found Phillips Exeter Academy. Occom, accompanied by the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker, traveled to England in 1766 to raise money from churches. With these funds, they established a trust to help Wheelock. The head of the trust was a Methodist named William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth.
Although the fund provided Wheelock ample financial support for the Charity School, Wheelock initially had trouble recruiting Indians to the institution, primarily because its location was far from tribal territories. In seeking to expand the school into a college, Wheelock relocated it to Hanover, in the Province of New Hampshire. The move from Connecticut followed a lengthy and sometimes frustrating effort to find resources and secure a charter. The Royal Governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, provided the land upon which Dartmouth would be built and on December 13, 1769, issued a royal charter in the name of King George III establishing the college. That charter created a college "for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes in this land in reading, writing, and all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing and christianizing children of pagans as well as in all liberal arts and sciences and also of English youth and any others". The reference to educating Native American youth was included to connect Dartmouth to the Charity School and enable the use of the Charity School's unspent trust funds. Named for William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth – an important supporter of Eleazar Wheelock's earlier efforts but who, in fact, opposed creation of the college and never donated to it – Dartmouth is the nation's ninth oldest college and the last institution of higher learning established under colonial rule. The college granted its first degrees in 1771.
Given the limited success of the Charity School, however, Wheelock intended his new college as one primarily for whites. Occom, disappointed with Wheelock's departure from the school's original goal of Indian Christianization, went on to form his own community of New England Indians called Brothertown Indians in New York.
In 1819, Dartmouth College was the subject of the historic Dartmouth College case, which challenged New Hampshire's 1816 attempt to amend the college charter to make the school a public university. An institution called Dartmouth University occupied the college buildings and began operating in Hanover in 1817, though the college continued teaching classes in rented rooms nearby. Daniel Webster, an alumnus of the class of 1801, presented the college's case to the Supreme Court, which found the amendment of Dartmouth's charter to be an illegal impairment of a contract by the state and reversed New Hampshire's takeover of the college. Webster concluded his peroration with the famous words: "It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it."
Dartmouth taught its first African-American students in 1775 and 1808. By the end of the Civil War, 20 black men had attended the college or its medical school, and Dartmouth "was recognized in the African-American community as a place where a man of color could go to get educated". One of those first 20 black alumni, Jonathan C. Gibbs, served as Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state of Florida.
In 1866, the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts was incorporated in Hanover, in connection with Dartmouth College. The institution was officially associated with Dartmouth and was directed by Dartmouth's president. The new college was moved to Durham, New Hampshire, in 1891, and later became known as the University of New Hampshire.
Dartmouth emerged onto the national academic stage at the turn of the 20th century. Prior to this period, the college had clung to traditional methods of instruction and was relatively poorly funded. Under President William Jewett Tucker (1893–1909), Dartmouth underwent a major revitalization of facilities, faculty, and the student body, following large endowments such as the $10,000 given by Dartmouth alumnus and law professor John Ordronaux. 20 new structures replaced antiquated buildings, while the student body and faculty both expanded threefold. Tucker is often credited for having "refounded Dartmouth" and bringing it into national prestige.
Presidents Ernest Fox Nichols (1909–16) and Ernest Martin Hopkins (1916–45) continued Tucker's trend of modernization, further improving campus facilities and introducing selective admissions in the 1920s. In 1945, Hopkins was subject to no small amount of controversy, as he openly admitted to Dartmouth's practice of using racial quotas to deny Jews entry into the university. John Sloan Dickey, serving as president from 1945 until 1970, strongly emphasized the liberal arts, particularly public policy and international relations. During World War II, Dartmouth was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a navy commission.
The Dartmouth workshop, which was held in 1956, is widely considered to be the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field.
In 1970, longtime professor of mathematics and computer science John George Kemeny became president of Dartmouth. Kemeny oversaw several major changes at the college. Dartmouth, which had been a men's institution, began admitting women as full-time students and undergraduate degree candidates in 1972 amid much controversy. Lorna C. Hill became the first African-American woman to graduate in the following year, 1973. At about the same time, the college adopted its "Dartmouth Plan" of academic scheduling, permitting the student body to increase in size within the existing facilities.
In 1988, Dartmouth's alma mater song's lyrics changed from "Men of Dartmouth" to "Dear old Dartmouth".
During the 1990s, the college saw a major academic overhaul under President James O. Freedman and a controversial (and ultimately unsuccessful) 1999 initiative to encourage the school's single-sex Greek houses to go coed. The first decade of the 21st century saw the commencement of the $1.5 billion Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience, the largest capital fundraising campaign in the college's history, which surpassed $1 billion in 2008. The mid- and late first decade of the 21st century have also seen extensive campus construction, with the erection of two new housing complexes, full renovation of two dormitories, and a forthcoming dining hall, life sciences center, and visual arts center. In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton selected Dartmouth College as a model of institutional endurance "whose record of endurance has had implications and benefits for all American organizations, both academic and commercial", citing Dartmouth College v. Woodward and Dartmouth's successful self-reinvention in the late 19th century.
Since the election of a number of petition-nominated trustees to the Board of Trustees starting in 2004, the role of alumni in Dartmouth governance has been the subject of ongoing conflict. President James Wright announced his retirement in February 2008 and was replaced by Harvard University professor and physician Jim Yong Kim on July 1, 2009. Kim was succeeded by Philip J. Hanlon in June 2013.
In early August 2019, Dartmouth College agreed to pay nine current and former students a total of $14 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging they were sexually harassed by three former neuroscience professors.
In April 2022, Dartmouth College returned the papers of Samson Occom, who helped Eleazar Wheelock secure the funds for Dartmouth College for what Occom believed would be a school for Native students in Connecticut, to the Mohegan Tribe.
On June 12, 2023 Sian Beilock began her tenure as the first female president of Dartmouth.
In September 2023, Dartmouth convened an event entitled The Future of Mental Health and Wellness, which included the seven living U.S. Surgeons General at the time. In 2024, the college hired a chief wellness office in order to provide increased mental health support on campus and to help students to manage daily stressors.
In April 2024, Dartmouth announced the creation of the Dartmouth Climate Collaboration, pledging $500 million towards the goal of eliminating carbon emissions on campus by 2050. The plan includes the installation of high-capacity heat pumps and a geoexchange system, making it the largest operational change in the college's history.
In May 2024, about 90 students, faculty and community members who were nonviolently protesting the war in Gaza were taken into custody by the New Hampshire State Police. Two student journalists from The Dartmouth reporting on the protest were among the arrested, though their charges were dropped within days. Following the arrests, the New York Times described Dartmouth as having "stood out for its almost instantaneous response to a nonviolent protest."
Academics
Dartmouth, a liberal arts institution, offers a four-year Bachelor of Arts and an ABET-accredited Bachelor of Engineering degree to undergraduate students. The college has 39 academic departments offering 56 major programs, while students are free to design special majors or engage in dual majors. For the graduating class of 2017, the most popular majors were economics, government, computer science, engineering sciences, and history. The Economics Department, whose prominent professors include David Blanchflower, Andrew Samwick, and Diego Comin, among others, also holds the distinction as the top-ranked bachelor's-only economics program in the world. The Government Department similarly includes numerous eminent faculty members, such as Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, and is among Dartmouth's most popular majors. These two departments are known for enforcing a median grade of B+ in most of their courses in order to curb the burgeoning trend of grade inflation at American universities.
In order to graduate, a student must complete 35 total courses, eight to ten of which are typically part of a chosen major program. Other requirements for graduation include the completion of ten "distributive requirements" in a variety of academic fields, proficiency in a foreign language, and completion of a writing class and first-year seminar in writing. Many departments offer honors programs requiring students seeking that distinction to engage in "independent, sustained work", culminating in the production of a thesis. In addition to the courses offered in Hanover, Dartmouth offers 57 different off-campus programs, including Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroad programs, and Exchange Programs.