Lin-Yi Ho of the class of 1911 wrote an article for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that he titled "Impressions of Undergraduate Life at Dartmouth."¹ Ho cited a strain of egalitarianism he called "Dartmouth democracy" as a key aspect of College life, a trait that outside observers apparently knew well. The only aspect of Dartmouth that Ho saw as more prominent was the intense spirit of the College's students and alumni. Many others in the College joined Ho in singling out these two characteristics, democracy and spirit, and many saw the two aspects as being in danger as well. For Dartmouth at the turn of the century was reforming itself and beginning to take on the trappings of a university. The ideas of democracy and spirit took on a sort of talismanic power and came to represent the cherished collegiate ideal to a school that feared the transformation it was undergoing.²

Democracy and spirit became manifest in built form. The very buildings that Charles Alonzo Rich (1854-1943) (Fig. 1) designed to house the new needs of this emerging university themselves became the sites of a last stand. Rich designed two dozen buildings between 1893 and 1914 (Fig. 2), including a modern replacement for the eighteenth-century Dartmouth Hall (Fig. 3), a large Alumni Gymnasium (Fig. 4), the new Heating Plant (Fig. 5) and the Parkhurst Administration Building (Fig. 6).³ These buildings represent the attempt of an architect and his patron to preserve collegiate values in order to weave the university easily into the College, an attempt that turns out to have been fraught with complexity.

President William Jewett Tucker (1839-1926) (Fig. 7) drove the change at the College, beginning almost from the moment the College Trustees elected him in 1893. Students and alumni would see Dartmouth after Tucker not as a college that the president had merely altered but as one that he had completely refounded. Many would call the place "The New Dartmouth." Ernest Fox Nichols (1869-1924) (Fig. 8) took over after Tucker stepped down in 1909 and continued his predecessor's reforms. Nichols, a research scientist, would involve himself even more personally in the building campaign and steer the College further in the direction of the university until he resigned in 1916. These were years that made Dartmouth practically unrecognizable to observers who had seen it in the nineteenth century.

Presidents previous to Tucker had naturally made significant changes in the institution they inherited. Samuel Colcord Bartlett (1817-1898) was Tucker's immediate precursor and had enlarged the school, seeing four buildings rise during his years in office between 1877 and 1892. Those buildings, the first significant campus additions in decades, were Bartlett Hall, the Wheelock Hotel, Rollins Chapel and the Wilson Hall library (Fig. 9). But bitter disputes with alumni and many at the College hampered Bartlett's administration. He was also a traditionalist, a literary man not interested in modern languages or science and certainly not interested in general reform.⁴ That Tucker would change the place so much and so quickly only confirms the sense that Bartlett was holding back a necessary evolution.

When President Tucker took over he could not have been more different from Bartlett, at least among Congregational educators. A look at Tucker himself helps explain his penchant for reform. Tucker was a Dartmouth graduate of 1861 and came to the presidency from a professorship at the Andover Theological Seminary. Andover was then an institution with strong links to Dartmouth, supplying more than 40% of Dartmouth's professorate in the 1860s.⁵ But unlike the Congregational old guard, Tucker saw his religion as one in need of reform. Theologians needed to interest themselves in evolutionary science, critique the Bible from an historical point of view, and study modern social relations.⁶ Tucker and a few colleagues earnestly promoted their views in their outspoken publication, the Andover Review . Even though Tucker gave traditional roots to the philosophy of "Progressive Orthodoxy" he promoted, his work ignited controversy.⁷ In 1886 a pair of judges tried Tucker and five of his compatriots as heretics, as holders of unorthodox beliefs that were against the intent of the founders of the Seminary.⁸ Though the Massachusetts Supreme Court eventually dismissed the case, the "Andover Trial" dragged on for eight years.⁹

Tucker brought his progressive zeal to Dartmouth and found the ground fertile for reform. Following the lead of other expanding schools, Tucker helped establish organized academic departments among the old disciplines where they had not existed before. A new bureaucracy of secretaries, deans, committees and an Inspector of Buildings and Grounds came into existence at the College.¹⁰ Dartmouth continued to expand its constituency into a national one, bringing in more students from the Midwest in particular, as well as those from business- and working-class families.¹¹ The New Hampshire Legislature also began lending support to the College, appropriating between $5,000 to $20,000 each year, beginning in 1893. The College named a 1908 dormitory that Rich designed New Hampshire Hall partly for this reason (Fig. 10).¹²

The possibility of elective courses also opened up thanks to Tucker's efforts, giving students some freedom to study different subjects where a few rigid requirements had earlier constrained them. The controlling environment of the old college began to shift to one that favored inquiry and scholarship, and electives helped place an emphasis on the individuality of the student. Harvard President Charles W. Eliot had pioneered electives beginning in the 1870s, and his own transformation of Harvard into a university rested in large part on the power of the elective system.¹³

A new curriculum arrived to offer students more choices. By 1899 the faculty had grown from nineteen to forty-four and managed to offer two times the content of the classes available just six years earlier.¹⁴ Modern science, which had invigorated new universities across the country, became available at Dartmouth when the Chandler School of Science and the Arts stopped merely associating with the College and merged into it in 1892.¹⁵ Dartmouth then began to offer the B.S. degree along the traditional A.B. Some of the growth took advantage of the three main buildings the College inherited in 1892 from the departing New Hampshire College (Fig. 11).¹⁶ Demand for up-to-date scientific facilities was great, however, and the College built the Wilder Physical Laboratory to Rich's design in 1898 (Fig. 12).

Dartmouth even took the lead in one particular branch of graduate education when it created the Tuck School in 1900. The nation's first graduate school of business reflects the personal interest of Mr. Edward Tuck (1842-1938), a college roommate of President Tucker who had made a fortune in banking and was now American consul in Paris.¹⁷ The College already possessed a Medical School (1797) (Fig. 13) and the Thayer School of Engineering (1867), giving it considerable breadth beyond the undergraduate education that had been the role of traditional colleges. The new business school also needed a building, and Tuck gave the money to build Tuck Hall facing the Green in 1902-5 (Fig. 14).¹⁸

Along with this broadening and specialization taking place in the curriculum, the College also grew phenomenally in size during the Tucker period. The first fall of Tucker's administration saw 120 new students enter where only 52 had enrolled the year before, and this trend continued. By 1899 the total undergraduate enrollment had risen to 627 where it had measured only 315 in 1892; in 1902 the total undergraduate enrollment reached 791.¹⁹ In 1906 alone, Dartmouth's enrollment leapt 14% to stand at 1065 students, which was the most rapid gain in New England that year and "almost wholly due to the enthusiasm of its alumni and the power of its big president," as the Boston Evening Transcript put it.²⁰ The College committed itself to housing all of the students it could, and Charles Rich designed twelve new dormitories and remodeled several old houses into more dormitory space.²¹

All of these changes occurred at many other schools when they did at Dartmouth, part of a trend that historians term the "university movement."²² Beginning after the Civil War and accelerating in the 1890s, many American colleges abandoned collegiate models that had come from England in favor of some aspects of the German tradition of pure research. New schools that emphasized graduate study started up, including Clark University, Stanford University and the University of Chicago in the four years leading up to 1892.²³ Where small, sectarian colleges had formerly studied the classics one now found universities where scholars expanded the boundaries of knowledge.²⁴

Some of Dartmouth's fellow Colonial colleges took part in the movement. The College of New Jersey underwent what alumni called the "Revolution of '96" and emerged as Princeton University. To express the change from small college to new university, Princeton simultaneously embarked on a campaign of collegiate Gothic buildings, beginning with William A. Potter's Pyne Library of 1896 and Cope & Stewardson's Blair Hall of 1897 (Fig. 15). Princeton President Woodrow Wilson described the new buildings by saying, "we have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton." Ralph Adams Cram became supervising architect of the campus in 1907 and held the position until 1929, ensuring that the architecture continued to follow the styles of Oxford and Cambridge.²⁵ Columbia College took an even more radical step: it not only transformed itself into a university in 1896 but had Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White design an altogether new campus (Figs. 16, 17). Columbia University occupied its new Classical buildings in 1897.²⁶

For administrators at Dartmouth, the idea that the school could fall under the rubric of a traditional college was beginning to seem less appropriate. Though changing the name of the institution as Princeton and Columbia had done was out of the question, President Tucker allowed that Dartmouth could fit into the novel classification of "large college."²⁷ Despite the school's clear participation in the university movement, however, the whole body of students and alumni asserted adamantly that Dartmouth was not a university, for reasons that will become apparent.

The institutional growth that Tucker oversaw presented certain problems. The practical worries of housing and infrastructure were one difficulty, but Tucker and his administration were also concerned about something larger, a loss of identity. Dartmouth was highly conscious of its identity at this time, which was emphatically that of a college. The traditional motto dating to the school's beginnings had been Vox clamantis in deserto, "a lone voice crying in the wilderness." During the late nineteenth century the College added a sort of unofficial motto. It came from what many supposed was Daniel Webster's impassioned argument before Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1819 Dartmouth College Case: "It is sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it." In the Case the College was suing to retrieve its seal and charter from Dartmouth University, a school into which the New Hampshire Legislature had almost succeeded in transforming it. The Supreme Court overturned the lower courts' decisions, however, and the College returned from the abyss after hanging on in rented and borrowed buildings for two years. Later Webster's words would only reinforce the attachment that the institution felt to the idea of the little college.

The sense of college was a favorite topic of reminiscence among older alumni. The custom of "wooding up," in which an audience stomped its feet on a wooden floor to signal its approval, was a memory that many cherished.²⁸ In a sort of premature nostalgia, current students wrote poems about such practices before they had even graduated. Students also wrote of fetching water from the well, or visiting the outhouse behind Dartmouth Hall, or teaching in village schools in the winters, or the camaraderie that arose in a country college of a few hundred men. In the memories of alumni, the Church of Christ was still large enough to hold the Commencement ceremonies as it had done since 1795.

But Dartmouth's collegiate culture was not set in stone, as anyone who observed the great expansion knew. Charles Rich and the administrators with whom he worked followed a certain strategy in preserving this culture even as they created what amounted to a new campus. The new would not overwhelm the old in some sudden shift; instead the transition would be as gradual and sensitive as Rich could make it. Rich in effect slipped the university into the college, and he did so by designing his buildings with collegiate values in mind. Two values in particular stand out: "Dartmouth democracy" and "the Dartmouth spirit." Looking at these two values and how Rich's buildings reflected them (or did not) in particular ways will help explain how Dartmouth College made its transition to a university.