International Man of Character: The Tenure of John Sloan Dickey

By Charles S. Dameron | Sunday, November 16, 2008

He was the only president of Dartmouth ever to assist in building the Winter Carnival sculpture. Regularly spotted with an unlit cigarette in his mouth after he gave up smoking, he was often asked if he needed a light. He always responded that he just liked playing with cigarettes. He was the man who described himself not as a “president,” but just “the man on this job.”

By all accounts, John Sloan Dickey was highly regarded by students, faculty and alumni both for his good humor and humility. But what set him apart was the true magnitude of his accomplishments as president of the College. “The man on this job” brought to Hanover a zeal for tailoring education to public service and international engagement. Under his stewardship, Dartmouth vaulted to its place as one of America’s most renowned undergraduate institutions.

But, most significantly, Dickey identified and emphasized the mission of the academy as both an intellectual and moral one. The goal of a liberal arts (or, as he insisted, liberating arts) education was not merely to make the student smarter—the student was meant to become a better human being. Dickey was committed, above all else, to graduating men from Dartmouth who possessed not only the relevant technical skills, but who had also internalized the vital first principles of conscience that would inform every department and all curricula.

And that led into the second critical component of his presidency: he realized that Dartmouth’s small size made it possible to create a common character and academic experience among its students. His tenure as president was relentlessly devoted to creating such a community—and to that end, he accomplished a great deal, from developing the celebrated Great Issues course, to establishing the Tucker Foundation, to overseeing the construction of the Hopkins Center. But his largest goals and achievements weren’t tangible: he aimed to make Dartmouth a tight-knit, intellectually fervent, and nationally prominent college with an unmistakable sense of purpose.

Wonder Boy: An Undergrad at Dartmouth

Dickey’s own undergraduate days at Dartmouth were marked by a definite sense of purpose, too. He had grown up in deeply rural Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. As the son of a manager at the local woven-wire factory, he was the first in his family to go to college. Even though he towered at six-foot-three, his lack of coordination had turned him into a football manager, where every year he watched a few chosen recruits matriculate at schools like Yale and Penn.

Dickey, inspired by their example, applied to Dartmouth on something of a lark and was accepted. By his account, he was one of just a half-dozen from his graduating class to attend college. Whatever preparations high school had given Dickey for Dartmouth, he was ready for the place. He ended up graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship. All that time in the library not only gained him admission to Harvard Law School, but also facilitated a romance with a Baker librarian, Christina Gillespie, whom he married three years after he graduated from Dartmouth in 1929.

In his recollection of college, Dickey noted two particular experiences that would come to shape his perception of the place and would guide his policies as president less than twenty years later. The first was his freshman English class, where he recalled walking “back and forth across the campus with men from class…this was one of the great features of the Dartmouth education in those days which stayed with me. The common experience of having had the same subject. I never forgot it, and it was part of the experience that went into the Great Issues [class] when I came back on the job in ’45.”

The second came with his presidency of the Theta Chi house, when during his senior year a controversy arose over whether or not his fraternity would pledge a Jewish student. Years later, Dickey recalled his surprise: “I hesitate to say how naïve I had been about the racial/religious prejudices that were operating on campus. I knew nothing about them, hadn’t thought about them.”

After standing up for the pledge, Dickey asked just what was wrong with pledging a Jew, and his brothers pulled out a copy of the Theta Chi charter, which explicitly prohibited Jews. After it was firmly established that the pledge was Jewish, Theta Chi turned him down. That ugly rearing of prejudice nagged at Dickey for a long time.

Nearly fifty years later, in 1975, Dickey would tell an interviewer, “What I should have done, as I look back on it, probably, was get out. But this wasn’t being done in those days; it never occurred to me…from that day on I decided that one of these days I was going to have something to say about this, and I did. And that’s a fairly large part of the story of my first few years [as president].”

One of Dickey’s first actions as president of the College would be to instruct the admission office not to consider race or religion in its selection process. It would not be until 1954 that students voted to ban Greek discrimination.

Public Life: From D.C. to Hanover

Before he remade Dartmouth, however, Dickey took an active role in government. His association in the Roosevelt administration with such figures as Dean Acheson and Cordell Hull would later prove an invaluable resource to the College. During Dickey’s Washington D.C. days, he floated around Foggy Bottom, working to help pass free-trade legislation on behalf of the State Department. He then compiled a blacklist of companies dealing with the Axis powers, and finally ended up as the first director of the State Department’s Public Affairs Office, where he was instrumental in drumming up domestic support for the United Nations Charter.

His tenure at Dartmouth did not prevent him from engaging in public life, either. In his years as president of the College, he served as the vice chairman of President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, acted as a consultant to the government on disarmament, and served on the board of the Brookings Institution.

But when Dickey came to Dartmouth in November 1945, he brought with him much more than a reservoir of establishment connections; he brought a definite vision for what the mission of the College should be, a vision that was formed by his own Dartmouth undergraduate experience and by a brief teaching stint at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he had formed a broad philosophy on higher education.

The Dartmouth College biography of Dickey, by Charles Widmayer, recounts Dickey’s 1952 Convocation speech. Its theme was “The Business of Being a Gentleman,” which “has a deep and direct bearing on whether you ever become a liberally educated man,” according to Dickey. Widmayer summarizes: “He was talking about manners, he added, not in any foppish way, but in the sense of self-discipline, concern for others, and sensitivity, all of which are part of ‘the ancient tribute—a gentleman and a scholar.’” This was, as it were, the Dickey Doctrine, and his commitment to the gentleman-scholar ideal would course through the major actions of his presidency.

The Great Issues Course

The first of those actions, his advocacy of the Great Issues course for seniors, was launched in 1947, almost immediately after his inauguration as president. In pushing for the Great Issues program, Dickey was certainly inspired by the unity of purpose and learning he had experienced in his freshman year at Dartmouth, but also by what he saw as a lack of consciousness of world affairs among college students generally.

“Today our seniors leave college without public purpose, or as Dr. [William J. Tucker, ninth president of the College] used to call it, ‘public-mindedness.’ They lack that sense of intellectual unity which in part at least is aroused simply through the common study of live issues,” said Dickey.

The course featured Monday evening lectures from distinguished visitors, who would stay for Tuesday morning discussions. Every Thursday, seniors would receive a preparation briefing from a member of the Dartmouth faculty in advance of the next week’s visiting lecturer. The first year’s themes, or focuses, were Modern Man’s Political Loyalties, The Scientific Revolution and the Radical Fact of Atomic Energy, International Aspects of World Peace, American Aspects of World Peace, and What Values for Modern Man?

Daily reading of The New York Times or the New York Herald-Tribune was required, as was, in that first year, reading the Declaration of Independence, the Charter of the United Nations, and the Communist Manifesto. It was not a token course, and its compulsory nature and rigorous standards bothered many seniors who would have preferred to be freer of obligations in their last year. But it won Dartmouth plaudits from other academics, and put Dartmouth on the national stage in a new way. And, despite the grumbling from some quarters, surveys years later showed that a majority of students who had taken Great Issues ranked it as one of the most valuable parts of their Dartmouth experiences.

Dickey felt similarly: in the oral history of his life, he called Great Issues “the single most valuable initial experience that I had on the job because it required me to work at formulating my views about the purpose of the institution [and] about the implementation of that purpose.”

But it did three other things for him, which he believed were of great benefit to the Dartmouth community. Because he actually took the lead in instructing the Great Issues course, “it also brought me in touch with the total student body in a way that I could not have been in touch with through teaching a normal class. It brought me in touch with faculty.”

Finally, because he was developing the roster of visiting lecturers, “it involved my keeping in touch with people at the top level of government, in the foundations, and throughout the American community. This was something that Dartmouth needed and will always, I suppose, need to a little larger degree than an institution located in Boston or New York or one of the great metropolitan centers.”

Men of Character and Conscience

A few years later, in 1951, Dickey would oversee the founding of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation, in honor of the former president by that name, who would prove to be a remote mentor for Dickey throughout his presidency. Ever fond of the use of the word ‘conscience’ to refer to moral and spiritual qualities, Dickey may have been borrowing that terminology from Tucker.

Widmayer, Dickey’s biographer, writes that “President Dickey admitted that a good deal of his own thinking about moral purpose in liberal education came from his exposure to Dr. Tucker’s writings.” Writing for an April 1955 cover article in the Atlantic Monthly, Dickey meditated on “Conscience and the Undergraduate,” in which he directly quoted Tucker, and elaborated on Tucker’s theme by inserting his own call to purpose for the liberal arts.

“I suggest that the American liberal arts college,” Dickey wrote, “can find a significant, even unique mission in the duality of its historic purpose: to see men made whole in both competence and conscience.” Dickey goes on to note that any institution of learning, by its very nature, will naturally and fairly easily incline to graduating men of competence. That, to Dickey, was not the mark of a great institution: “To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding sense of moral direction to guide the use of that power is bad education.” Dartmouth College, Dickey decided, would not be in the business of providing a bad education.

Founding Tucker, Seeking The Good

In Dickey’s mind, the Tucker Foundation was established with the express purpose of providing that education of conscience. In a 1960 address at Oberlin College, he spoke frankly about the societal changes that motivated his passion for moral education. The central dilemma, he believed, was a decline of religion’s place in the academy.

“The dispersed and reduced position of formal religion in secular higher education is the most conspicuous and probably the most powerful negative factor in the progressive weakening we are witnessing in the college’s sense of a dual purpose. This negative factor is paralleled on the positive side by the rise of a philosophy of pluralism and relativism that while nurturing the imperatives of specialized scholarship has so far proved a thin and acid soil for any new growth of institutional purpose.”

Anticipating this seemingly inevitable decline of the church’s presence in college life, Dickey hoped to provide a secularized moral focus for Dartmouth in the form of the Tucker Foundation. By recasting the liberal arts imperative of a dual purpose in a non-Christian way, Dickey hoped that the dual purpose could be preserved.

In this effort, Dickey met with plenty of skepticism, as he would later recall: “The more I talked with faculty here and elsewhere, there was either a combativeness about these elements of man’s relationship to the universe as perceived in institutions of higher education…Or, there was a more benign attitude that, well, this is a valid aspect of human concern, but it has no place in higher education, that it was something that had to be left to the churches, it had to be left to the family; it simply had no validity as an element of purpose or concern, institutional concern, in higher education.”

Dickey emphatically rejected the hands-off, relativistic approach which he had the displeasure of encountering in the academy. And so he threw himself energetically into the establishment and preservation of the Tucker Foundation. Widmayer’s biography says, “It was Mr. Dickey more than anyone else who had the idea of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation to promote the moral and spiritual growth of Dartmouth undergraduates. Nothing could have been closer to what President Tucker hoped to do while he was head of the College, and nothing could have had a purpose in which Mr. Dickey believed more completely.”

Today, the Tucker Foundation identifies as its mission “to educate Dartmouth students to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens in the global community through service, character development, and spiritual exploration.” But after the end of his presidency, Dickey recalled a simpler, clearer directive for the Foundation that had been provided to him by Beardsley Ruml, a trustee who worked closely with him on creating the Foundation.

According to Dickey: “He said, ‘We’ve just got to keep it broad. But we must come back to it that there is a duty, there is a choice before men. And that this College has made a choice to be committed to the good rather than the evil.’ He said, ‘Don’t say anything more than that…Men will still understand that fifty years from now as they understood it for two thousand years before.’”

A President to Remember and to Emulate

John Dickey accomplished much in furthering the education of competent young men at Dartmouth—he oversaw huge capital campaigns that upgraded both Dartmouth’s physical facilities and its faculty; he used his personal experience outside of academia to bring the world to Dartmouth, and to apply the undergraduate education to practical uses for America and the world; and he professionalized Dartmouth’s then-neglected Medical School and Thayer School. But to him, those were merely baseline accomplishments. He believed any college could accomplish the training of competence. Dartmouth would not be excellent because it had the largest endowment or the greatest number of internationally distinguished professors. Neither its buildings nor its place in the Ivy League would set it apart. All of those things were and are good, and Dickey secured them, but they did not amount to excellence.

What made him proud, what made him and his Dartmouth unique and excellent, was the idea that the liberal arts could serve a greater moral purpose, and could turn out men and women of character and conscience. Dickey saw, as few in his time or ours saw, that only such a mission could give coherence to education.

His Atlantic Monthly article included this quote from President Tucker, as relevant to our time as it was to Dickey’s and to Tucker’s: “Seek, I pray you, moral distinction. Be not content with the commonplace in character any more than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.”

International Man of Character: The Tenure of John Sloan Dickey

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