Dartmouth president to speak at Bates convocation

Distinguished legal scholar and author James O. Freedman, president of Dartmouth College, will deliver the keynote address during convocation at Bates College on Wednesday, Sept. 3.

The 4 p.m. event, to be held outdoors on the Coram Library quadrangle, marks the official beginning of the 143rd new academic year at the liberal arts institution. The college expects approximately 1,630 undergraduates for the 1997 fall semester, including an estimated 435 new students.

Freedman’s talk is titled The Future of Liberal Learning. Bates President Donald W. Harward; Martha Crunkleton, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty; and Liam D. Clarke, a senior from Grand Rapids, Minn., and president of the student-run Representative Assembly, will also speak.

The author of the recently published Idealism and Liberal Education (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Freedman is the recipient of the 1997 Frederick W. Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the 1991 William O. Douglas First Amendment Freedom Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

A native of Manchester, N.H., Freedman received his bachelor’s degree, cum laude, from Harvard College in 1957 and his LL.B, cum laude, from Yale Law School in 1962. His father, Louis A. Freedman, was a 1920 Bates graduate.

After serving as law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, Freedman practiced law with the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison before joining the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty in 1964. He became university ombudsman in 1973, associate provost in 1978 and dean of the law school in 1979. In 1982, he was appointed president of the University of Iowa, where he served until 1987 when he assumed the 15th presidency of Dartmouth.

Freedman’s primary teaching and scholarly interests have been administrative law and higher education. Freedman is the author of Crisis and Legitimacy: The Administrative Process and American Government (Cambridge University Press,1978), as well as many articles and reviews in scholaraly journals.

After the ceremony, some 1,800 persons are expected to attend an all- college picnic followed by “Sunset on the Quad,” featuring desserts and music. In the event of rain, convocation will be held in the Clifton Daggett Gray Athletic Building.

In spite of growing competition among colleges for a shrinking pool of students, Bates College, ranked among the top 20 national liberal arts colleges by a recent U.S. News and World Report, continues to attract an increasing number of candidates. Nearly 3,800 high school students applied for a place in the college’s class of 2001 which features students from 35 states and 14 countries. Scholastically, 36 percent of the class ranked within the top five percent of their high school graduating class, the highest percentage since institutional data became available in 1981.