Letter from the Dean May 2018

Dear Families,

Dartmouth’s mission is to prepare the most promising students for a lifetime of learning and responsible leadership. We continuously strive for improvement in how we fulfill that mission through Dartmouth’s diverse community.

Our liberal arts curriculum provides students with strong academic preparation. We also know that social and emotional intelligence, curiosity, and empathy are fundamental to responsible leadership in any endeavor. Dartmouth students develop these capacities by engaging in multiple communities and projects both in and beyond the classroom.

We are expanding opportunities to nurture these qualities in many ways - through independent research, social impact and service, entrepreneurship, experiential learning and internships supported by the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), Undergraduate Advising and Research, the Center for Professional Development, the Center for Social Impact and the Tucker Center for Spiritual and Ethical Life. Together with the Rockefeller Center, the Tuck School of Business, DCAL and a coalition of many campus partners, we will offer a full four-year co-curriculum in leadership development. When fully realized, this new curriculum will be available to every Dartmouth undergraduate regardless of their personal, intellectual, or pre-professional fields of interest.

We are on a path to transform residential life in order to deepen the connections among how students live, learn, and lead at Dartmouth. That involves the new House communities, whose purpose is to increase intellectual engagement across all groups at Dartmouth, to strengthen community, and to build continuity in the residential experience. It involves providing more mental health clinicians to respond to increasing student demand, and to engage in more suicide prevention outreach programming. It involves enhancing our support for first-generation and low-income students, and removing financial and other barriers to their full participation in the Dartmouth Experience. And it involves planning for a new residence hall, to provide swing space that will enable us to renovate the rest of the residential portfolio.

We are deeply committed to supporting your students and advancing these important initiatives. Improving how our students live, learn and lead at Dartmouth sets the stage for them to do great things. We have an exciting future ahead.

With very best wishes,

Rebecca Biron

Dean of the College