Nearly 30 Years of Dynamic Inquiry: Rockefeller Center Direct Line - Spring 2013

This September marks a special anniversary for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. Thirty years ago at its founding, Rodman Rockefeller '54, Nelson's son and a driving force behind the Center's creation, aspired for it to become "a true center of dynamic inquiry, controversy, and cross-fertilization." Speaking at the same ceremony, Dartmouth President David McLaughlin '54 described the challenge of the new Center to "Fill these physical spaces with intellectual excellence. Realize within these walls the excitement and stimulus of the life of Nelson Rockefeller."

Each director and staff of the Center in the intervening three decades have had the task of making these aspirations relevant for successive generations of students, faculty, and the wider Dartmouth community. We are quite proud of the way the Rockefeller Center has become a focal point for public policy research and discussion on campus.  In its report last spring, the Pedagogy, Teaching, and Mentoring working group of Dartmouth’s strategic planning process identified the Rockefeller Center as an example of a successful model of a multi-disciplinary center that facilitated faculty-faculty and faculty-student interaction across departments and schools outside the classroom.

The Center has hosted nationally televised primary debates in the last two Presidential election cycles and played a central role in launching the Leading Voices lecture series in the summer of 2011. Faculty members regularly convene together in our interdisciplinary workshops to discuss policy-relevant research. The Center plays an important role in supporting social science and public policy research with its targeted faculty grant program. In keeping with Dartmouth’s mission, our primary focus at the Rockefeller Center is on the experience of undergraduates with an eye toward engaging them in public policy and cultivating their potential for leadership. We have developed a unique model of educating students in and out of the classroom, on and off campus.

The Center today represents the culmination of decades of hard work and thoughtful development. We hope it is rising to the aspirations expressed so forcefully at its founding through the work of our faculty and the leadership challenges our students and graduates confront. I look forward to sharing our continued progress as the whole Dartmouth community welcomes a new president this summer and approaches its 250^th anniversary in the years to come.