Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/04/10/how_dartmouth_changes.php

How Dartmouth Changes

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

I entered Dartmouth in 1947 and stayed for two years. The only professor who meant much to me – and he remains a part of my mind – was a Christian existentialist and refugee from Hitler named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Our text was his book The Christian Future: or, The Modern Mind Outrun.

That was a pretty aggressive title. But on existential grounds, he shook my innate philosophical naturalism. Naturalism may be true, but it is inadequate to living an actual life.

Professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

One of his teachings had to do with the unknowableness of the future, which is constantly being created by choices we make and what we do.

“Gentlemen,” he would say, “Dartmouth in 1847 was not the Dartmouth of 1947. Men who could not see the future were making changes then that would re-create the College you see but they would not. The College of Ernest Martin Hopkins was no longer the College of President Tucker.”

If those observations seem commonplace, they are not. They were one of the foundations of his version of existentialism. That is, empiricism is the foundation of science. But what can be measured and tested is already past.

We live life forward, with faith in what is unknowable. “Gentlemen,” he would say, and this hit home, “even a man who believes in nothing needs a girl who believes in him.”

I had come to Dartmouth from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which, though a public school, required an entrance exam. It was 85 percent Jewish and it seemed to me most of the students had their eyes on Harvard and usually its medical school. The intellectual culture was intense and exhilarating. The faculty to day would be university professors, but most were Jewish too, and excluded from the desirable. During the 1930s Harry Levin had trouble getting tenure at Harvard, so did Lionel Trilling at Columbia, because they were Jews.

I have to say that as a freshman at Dartmouth I experienced a kind of decompression, Rosenstock was the only professor who commanded my attention. I was unaware that a new president John Sloan Dickey was working hard to improve the Dartmouth faculty.

So I left, and worked as a junior editor at a now defunct publisher in New York. I had read Mark Van Doren’s first-rate Shakespeare at Dartmouth, Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination came out in 1950. So I detoured and entered Columbia College.

To make a long story short, I graduated from Columbia, went into Naval Intelligence for almost four years (Korean War), and the first day I was back at Columbia to begin my PhD was offered a post in the English Department.

I published regularly, and as the result of that and most immediately of the book I published in 1961, The Political Writers of Eighteenth-Century England (Knopf), I received an attractive offer from Dartmouth in 1962.

The Dartmouth I returned to in the fall of 1963 was not the College I had left after two years. John Sloane Dickey was still president. And his project of building a modern and more professional faculty had been successful, but that is an unending job. The competition for the best professors is intense.

Dickey’s successor John Kemeny changed the College too. He helped create a distinguished Mathematics Department, pioneered computerization, and made Dartmouth co-ed.

All of these changes have been positive. Dartmouth, in fact, is a small university. With the new Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, its Medical School should be in the top rank. The DHMC was the contribution of President David McLaughlin.

Dartmouth today has been astonishingly transformed from the College I entered in the fall of 1947. It is different, but also the same in the most important ways.

In 1947 the core of the Ivy League was Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Today you have to say Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth.

I can hear Rosenstock-Huessy saying, “Gentlemen, Dartmouth in 1847 was not the Dartmouth of 1947...”

Stuyvesant has changed too. It is now mostly Asian. I notice that Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes and Teacher Man spent his teaching career in the Stuyvesant English Department. So things haven’t slid much.

But where have all the Jews gone, now that Stuyvesant is mostly Asian? What about Harvard? What about medical school? Are the Jews settling for William and Mary? Rollins? Say it ain’t so.