Dartmouth’s graduate schools will not be left out of the College’s recently-announced $3 billion capital campaign, “The Call to Lead.” The campaign includes specific fundraising goals for Dartmouth’s graduate and professional schools that will provide financial support for their programs and initiatives. The Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business and announced goals of $250 million for each of their campaigns. Before the campaign’s public launch, Geisel had already collected over $100 million and Tuck had collected over $132 million. The newly-named Frank J. Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies set a campaign goal of $50 million and received a donation of an undisclosed amount from Frank J. Guarini ’46, according to
The Guarini School will use the funds for graduate student fellowships, while Geisel intends to reduce student debt and further develop its program. Tuck intends to support scholarships, renovate buildings and improve pre- and post-MBA programs, and Thayer will expand its engineering and computer science faculty and construct a new facility.
The Guarini School oversees the curricular requirements of 35 graduate and doctoral programs and provides academic and professional support to more than 1,000 graduate students, doctoral candidates and post-doctoral scholars, according to Kull.
Kull said that the Guarini School will use the funds it collects to support graduate student fellowships because obtaining external funding has become more difficult for graduate students.
“Our goal is to have the first two years of every graduate student fellowship paid for by Dartmouth resources,” Kull said. “Currently we do not have that, so this [capital campaign will] get us closer to [this goal].”
According to Kull, the Guarini School does not currently plan to expand its administrative services or staff. Ultimately, he said he hopes the Guarini School will gain a reputation for excellence in graduate-level research and providing students with skill-building opportunities that will help them become leaders in their fields.
“I can almost see a customized graduate education [model],” Kull said. “Let’s say a graduate student wants to do entrepreneurial work … we can connect [them] with people from [the to-be-constructed Magnuson Family Center for Entrepreneurship], Tuck and Thayer.”
Geisel’s capital campaign, entitled “Interaction: The Campaign for Dartmouth Medicine,” focuses on three missions: educating “complete physicians,” pursuing “bold ideas” and “transforming healthcare.” According to a Geisel press release, educating “complete physicians” entails promoting innovation, enhancing the school’s curriculum and providing students with increased scholarship opportunities. To pursue “bold ideas,” Geisel intends to bolster research in health and disease. The third mission — “transforming healthcare” — entails working with the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice to create solutions that improve the efficiency of the healthcare system as a whole. The three missions were selected to strengthen Geisel’s major areas of focus, according to Geisel dean Duane Compton.
“We are looking to augment the medical education program by investing in student scholarships to help reduce debt loads and [create] some endowed professorships, for example,” Compton said. “[The second priority] — pursuing bold ideas — is really about discovering new knowledge in human biology to help create new and more effective therapeutic strategies, and the third [priority], transforming health care, supports faculty and educational programs at The Dartmouth Institute … trying to find the most effective and efficient way to deliver healthcare to patients.”
Tuck’s capital campaign, titled “The Tuck Difference: The Campaign for Tomorrow’s Wise Leaders,” aims to support student scholarships with $40 million, fund faculty research with $40 million, finance renovations of the Murdough Center and Byrne Hall Dining with $40 million and strengthen pre-MBA and post-MBA programs with $50 million. An additional $60 million will support the Tuck Annual Giving campaign, while another $20 million will be allocated for other strategic priorities.
Tuck dean Matthew Slaughter said that the strategic priorities component will provide him and other Tuck leaders the opportunity to make particular investments at his discretion.
“Looking at the resources that we have today and at our overall financial model, we built off from each of those important priorities of investment … to arrive at the $250 million figure,” Slaughter said.
Since the construction of the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society will require current occupants to vacate the Murdough Center, Tuck plans to redesign the building to serve as a collaborative space that houses Tuck programs and resources for MBA students, according to Slaughter.
“[The Murdough Center] is at the heart of our collection of buildings,” Slaughter said. “Our plan currently is to have our Tuck centers located in [the Murdough Center] because they provide pathways to learning and application and career services to our students.”
Slaughter noted that the capital campaign will also support programs that provide additional resources to MBA students, such as the Next Step program, which helps military veterans and professional athletes enrolled in the MBA program learn additional fundamental business skills during their transition to the business world.
Thayer’s target investment of $250 million will support three major goals: academic integration, faculty growth and facility expansion. The first goal — academic integration — will focus on cultivating closer ties between the operations of engineering and computer science departments. The second goal — faculty growth — seeks to expand engineering faculty from 35 to 70 members and computer science faculty from 18 to 27 members. The third goal — facility expansion — involves constructing a building that will house Thayer’s current facilities, the computer science department and the College’s entrepreneurial, digital design and electron microscope centers.
Last week, the College organized three events to support the launch of the campaign in Hanover, New York City, New York and San Francisco, California. According to Kull, the College plans to organize similar events in other cities across the country to communicate to alumni the goals of the campaign.
“We all have a common goal to make Dartmouth the best at what it does,” Kull said. “For me, especially as an alumni, it’s exciting to see how people are stepping up to help every aspect of Dartmouth, from the graduate and professional schools to renovating Dartmouth Hall.”
