Dartmouth pres. to retire in 2009

Wright, 68, will retire after 11 years as Dartmouth’s 16th president. He began his career at Dartmouth in 1969 as a history professor and later served as dean of the faculty, provost and acting president before assuming the presidency in August 1998.

“It has been an extraordinary experience that I shall always cherish, and a true privilege about which I feel a proud sense of humility,” Wright wrote in a letter to the Dartmouth community. “As much as I enjoy serving Dartmouth in my current role, I believe that every institution can benefit from periodic new leadership and fresh ideas,” he wrote.

Discussion of Wright’s retirement began last fall, and Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees will begin its search for a successor at its March meeting. Board chairman Ed Haldeman said the process will include input from Dartmouth faculty, students and alumni. Candidates will be considered from within and outside the college, he added. Wright’s replacement will be the fourth new Ivy League president appointed in the last five years.

In his tenure as president, Wright has overseen campus construction totaling over $1 billion, the expansion of the endowment to $3.75 billion and the doubling of annual fundraising.

His departure next summer will coincide with the end of the college’s $1.3 billion capital campaign. Ongoing projects started during Wright’s tenure include the construction of a new dining hall, visual arts center and life sciences center.

In a letter to the Dartmouth community, Haldeman commended Wright for his efforts to strengthen Dartmouth’s financial foundation and significantly lower the student-faculty ratio.

“Jim has been a tireless advocate for Dartmouth,” he said. “Jim’s passion and vision have helped Dartmouth build on its rich and unique heritage to remain the pre-eminent undergraduate liberal arts college in the country.”

Since Wright began his term as Dartmouth president, the college’s applicant pool has grown by 60 percent and undergraduate financial aid has increased by more than 250 percent. Almost half of the undergraduate student body now receives financial assistance.

In 1999, toward the beginning of Wright’s term, the administration unveiled the “student life initiative,” which included a proposal to end fraternities and sororities on campus, an integral part of the Dartmouth social scene. Alumni response to the plan was overwhelmingly negative, and ultimately opposition from current and former students was enough to stop the initiative.

Wright was instrumental in calming controversy on campus in late 2006 when the Dartmouth Review, an independent student publication, published a caricature of an American Indian waving a scalp under the headline “The Natives Are Getting Restless.”

Wright called on students to build a more inclusive community as 500 faculty members, students and administrators took part in an anti-hate rally. Dartmouth has the highest number of Native-American students in the Ivy League, according to the college’s website.

Also in 2006, though, Wright faced criticism from Dartmouth’s conservative alumni base. In March of that year, Dartmouth alumnus Todd Zywicki told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the college’s administrators are often “disconnected from the real world.” He added that alumni were frustrated with the “overwhelmingly liberal” orthodoxy of the college.

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“Alumni feel that they are treated as checkbooks, rather than being valued for their views about their alma maters,” Zywicki said. Subsequently, campaigning for the seats on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees reserved for alumni was fierce.

Zywicki now serves as a Dartmouth trustee and declined to comment for this story.

In spite of the criticism he received from some of the candidates, Wright told the Chronicle in 2006 that he had good relations with all of the new trustees.

Haldeman told The Dartmouth, the college’s student newspaper, that the controversy over governance issues did not affect Wright’s decision to step down. Members of Dartmouth’s Office of Public Affairs declined an interview but reiterated that changes in the board’s governance structure had no bearing on Wright’s retirement.

A former marine, Wright conceived and helped raise funds for an American Council of Education program to provide college counseling for veterans. He has worked with members of Congress to extend the GI Bill and regularly visits military hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area to encourage personnel wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan to continue their education.

After retiring, Wright plans to devote himself further to his academic field of American political history. He will also spend more time on his work helping wounded veterans attend college.