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Dartmouth Launches Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience
November 13, 2004
HANOVER, NH – To advance leading-edge teaching and scholarship, enhance residential and campus life, and honor its commitment to making education accessible, Dartmouth College announced today the largest fund-raising effort in its history, during a campaign launch event in New York. With a $1.3 billion goal, the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience is seeking investment in dozens of initiatives across the institution - for the undergraduate college, its graduate programs in the arts and sciences, and three professional schools of business, engineering, and medicine.
The College had aimed to raise more than one-third of this goal during the nucleus phase of the campaign. As of November 13, the beginning of the campaign's public phase, $457.5 million, or 35 percent of the goal, had been pledged, exceeding the nucleus phase objective.
The College will direct funding to four key areas: the academic enterprise ($736 million), residential and campus life ($187 million), financial aid ($146 million), and annual support for the student experience ($244 million). Priorities within these areas were identified through a strategic planning process that culminated in a plan presented by President James Wright in 2002. He said the need for new investment is driven by Dartmouth's commitment to offering the finest student learning experience anywhere.
"This campaign will help keep a Dartmouth education accessible to students from all backgrounds," President Wright added. "It will also enable us to enhance academic programs and provide additional support for teaching and scholarship. For Dartmouth to address the needs of its students and the broader society, we must dedicate ourselves to constantly strengthening the learning environment so that we prepare our students for a lifetime of learning in a world of change."
Dartmouth's strengths include an unusually successful partnership of teaching and scholarship and a high level of student satisfaction with the quality of instruction, access to faculty, and courses available in their fields. Dartmouth also has the highest level of student involvement in foreign study programs of any school in the Ivy League. On average, 60 percent of Dartmouth seniors have had at least one term of study outside the United States. All students are admitted to Dartmouth need-blind - that is, based upon their talents, achievements, and potential, without regard to their ability to finance their educations.
Because of its relatively small size and the close proximity of its three professional schools - the Tuck School of Business, the Thayer School of Engineering, and the Dartmouth Medical School (and its partner, the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center) - Dartmouth enjoys a rare level of interdisciplinary activity. Faculty and students easily cross disciplinary boundaries to collaborate and engage in pioneering work.
The College's intimate scale helps foster this engagement, as well as the collaboration between disciplines, which is essential to solving some of society's - and the world's - more complex problems. The campaign will raise the capital needed to support these efforts.
Campaign funds will support new academic facilities for the mathematics department, three of the College's academic centers (the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Ethics Institute, and the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities), life sciences, engineering, and the arts. New facilities for residential and campus life include residence halls for about 500 students, some of whom currently live off-campus because of a shortage of on-campus housing; much-needed space for an expanded fitness center; a dining commons; and an intercollegiate soccer facility.
Dartmouth's commitment to meeting the financial needs of all its students will be strengthened through the campaign, enabling the College to remain one of the few institutions of higher learning that admits students through a need-blind admissions process and meets 100 percent of each student's demonstrated need.
Annual giving will also be a priority for investment. Dartmouth depends on these current-use funds to support academic programs and the student experience, which are not fully funded by tuition and endowment income. Because tuition covers only a portion of the cost of a Dartmouth education, virtually every student benefits from the philanthropy of current and prior generations of Dartmouth supporters.
William H. Neukom, Class of 1964 and chair of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, said, "The campaign is a direct investment in preparing Dartmouth students to engage with a diverse world and to do work that makes a difference in classrooms, labs, studios, clinics, and boardrooms, from local communities to international arenas, in virtually all disciplines."
President Wright and Neukom, who heads the Seattle law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis and served as the lead counsel for Microsoft Corporation, credited the campaign's early success to the generosity of the College's alumni, parents, and friends; the leadership of Russ Carson, Class of 1965, who co-chaired the early phase of the campaign; and the work of the Campaign Executive Committee, currently co-chaired by R. Bradford Evans, Class of 1964, and Peter M. Fahey, Class of 1968 and Thayer School Class of 1970. Evans is a managing director of Morgan Stanley and Fahey is a retired limited partner of Goldman Sachs.
"The Dartmouth experience lived for us and lives today because previous generations made investments that resulted in a singular living and learning environment that attracts exceptionally talented young people," Evans and Fahey said in a joint statement. "We must maintain and enhance that experience for future generations."
Contact: Roland Adams, 603-646-3661