John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College

Featuring never before published excerpts from his unfinished autobiography, this book explores the career of John G. Kemeny, mathematician, educator, and president of Dartmouth College. Nelson presents a portrait of Kemeny’s presidential leadership during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, exemplifying his resolute commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, learning, human understanding, equity, and justice. Through this discussion of Kemeny’s life, Nelson identifies the ideal qualities of a leader: willingness to ponder, consider, and achieve the best actions he could conceive; compassion, understanding and empathy for others; absolute belief in the rising generation of college students; and courage in the face of challenging public issues, contentious and warring opinions, and concerns. From immigrant roots to college presidency and the national stage, this book tells the full story of a genius and giant of the world of academia.

A compelling account of John Kemeny’s leadership during one of the most transformative and tumultuous periods in Dartmouth’s history and the history of higher education in the U.S. This biography exposes the personal side of someone who is a hero and role model of mine – a mathematician who not only sparked a personal computing revolution, but continued to teach as President of the college while guiding the institution through a period of dramatic change. Anyone seeking to understand how brilliant scholars like Kemeny come to lead with such impact will glean much from the insights afforded in this book., Easily the smartest person I have ever known is Dartmouth President John Kemeny. So, too, much the finest, most decisive and influential college president I have witnessed in action is John Kemeny. But John Kemeny was not simply a smart and markedly successful college president. He was also and always a professor, a master teacher. And his leadership style was just that, the style of a compassionate, decisive, witty master teacher. Now, at great long last, we have what we have lacked, what we have missed and longed for: a sensitive, well researched, engaging biography by veteran student of the American college presidency, Stephen J. Nelson. Reading Professor Nelson’s biography is the surest way to come to know just what a great man was John Kemeny., The range of communities whose members will gain important insights from reading this book is its singular feature – a product of the person who John Kemeny was, the charged times in which he served as a university president and the skill of the author who writes about both. For presidents and administrators who lead colleges and students about to go to college, for journalists who write about education and faculty who provide that education, for trustees who oversee academic institutions and parents who entrust their children to those institutions, for politicians who make educational policy and voters who elect those politicians and certainly for those who are members of the Dartmouth community and those who know it first-hand from the outside, this work will inform and provoke. The reader will finish with a stimulating mix of information, insights and anecdotes about the person and about the times in which he lived and worked.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of education and educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown University.