James Freedman, Former Dartmouth President, Dies at 70
on March 21, 2006

From the obituary:

When Dartmouth recruited him, in 1987, he became the first president of the college since 1822 not to have been a student or faculty member there. His mission, he wrote in ''Idealism and Liberal Education,'' was to shore up the intellectual reputation of a college known for being ''inhospitable to women, fraternity-oriented, unintellectual, ultraconservative and especially congenial for 'jocks.' ''

In his inaugural address, he declared his intention to make Dartmouth more attractive to students who took pleasure in ''the lonely acts of writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus.''

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Coincidentally, I met Johs's sister Holly, a Dartmouth graduate, earlier this month, and she complained emphatically about the anti-intellectualism and the congeniality to jocks of Dartmouth.