Greetings from Hanover!
As 2016 draws to a close, I wanted to write you all with an update about what has been an exciting and historic year for Graduate Studies at Dartmouth.
As I hope you have heard, on July 1 the School of Graduate and Advanced Studies went live. The School, known as GRAD, was the result of many years of hard work and advocacy by the faculty, students, and staff at Dartmouth who care about graduate and postdoctoral education.
I thought some background on the approval process might be of interest to you. In October 2014, Provost Carolyn Dever formed a task force composed of 12 faculty members to investigate and address the many issues that might arise during a transition from an Office of Graduate Studies located in Arts & Sciences to an independent School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. The task force reached out to numerous constituencies to identify potential issues and concerns, and presented a report of recommendations and options to the Provost in June of 2015. After several town-hall meetings during fall 2015 to solicit feedback, Dartmouth’s General Faculty voted to support GRAD on November 16, 2015, and the individual faculties of Thayer, Tuck, Geisel, and Arts & Sciences voted in favor of it shortly thereafter.
On January 27, 2016, with the enthusiastic support of President Hanlon and Provost Dever, the Board of Trustees voted to establish the School of Graduate and Advanced Studies at Dartmouth, creating the College’s first new school in more than 100 years. Their vote marked the final step in the approval process of an idea that faculty members have been suggesting for many years, and demonstrates Dartmouth’s commitment to research and the important role it plays in the education of all its students.
The mission of the school is “to foster postgraduate academic programs of the highest quality, catalyze intellectual discovery, and prepare a diverse community of scholars for global leadership.”
We envision GRAD to be a school for a world defined by rapid change and launch it at a moment when the world’s most pressing challenges transcend individual disciplines. It will enable enterprising young scholars, i.e. graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, to work with leading faculty researchers and utilize state of the art resources to investigate our world in both traditional and new areas of inquiry. Dartmouth’s close-knit community and culture of collaboration make it easier for us to be nimble in an age that demands it, and GRAD is the tangible embodiment of Dartmouth’s scholar-teacher ideal: a unique fusion of a liberal arts college and a research university, creating knowledge and impact not only in traditional fields of study, but especially where fields intersect.
Our approach is to train scholars to look at problems from multiple perspectives and encourage them to work across fields of study. For example, we want our engineers to design things that are not only functional but also beautiful, and who understand economics as well as aesthetics. We seek the type of scholar who trains in genetics, and also appreciates the ethics of such technology and its implications for society. Our students and postdoctoral fellows will be trained deeply in the area of their choice, but also broadly to be effective writers and communicators. They will be thoughtful leaders able move the world forward, taking on challenges for which no solutions currently exist, perhaps in fields of inquiry that have not yet been invented.
I am excited and honored to have been asked to continue in my role of Dean, and look forward to overseeing what Dartmouth’s graduate students and postdoctoral fellows accomplish in the years to come.
All our initiatives and accomplishments, as well as numerous events are described in detail on the GRAD website. I highly recommend checking it out and I hope you will regularly visit it to keep up on all of the news from Dartmouth’s School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.
Finally, I wanted to say thank you, as graduate alumni continue to support graduate student scholarship and research by donating to the School of Graduate and Advanced Studies Alumni Fund. Each year, your contributions fund research grants. This year a number of talented students received the award, enabling them to produce great work. Your continued support is greatly appreciated (especially in this time of great uncertainty with respect to the future of research funding from federal agencies) and I hope you share my excitement to see what our students will achieve during the coming year.
Have a wonderful Holiday Season, and all the best for 2017!
Sincerely,
F. Jon Kull
Dean of the School of Graduate and Advanced Studies
