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Ernest Martin Hopkins (November 6, 1877 – August 13, 1964) served as the 11th President of Dartmouth College from 1916 to 1945.


Dartmouth Presidency

At the dedication of the
Hopkins Center for the Arts Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College is located at 4 East Wheelock Street in Hanover, New Hampshire. The center, which was designed by Wallace Harrison and foreshadows his later design of Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is the college's ...
in 1962, the speaker, then-
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, turned to the man for whom the building was named and said, "I came to Dartmouth because of you." As a young man growing up in New Hampshire, he worked in a granite quarry and decided to attend Dartmouth for his undergraduate education over the stern objections of his father, who had attended
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...
and wanted his son to also attend Harvard. However, after graduating from Worcester Academy in 1896, Hopkins matriculated to Dartmouth. So strong were the impressions he made in Hanover during his student years that then-President
William Jewett Tucker William Jewett Tucker (July 13, 1839 – September 29, 1926) was an American Congregational minister who served as the 9th President of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, United States, from 1893 to 1909. Dartmouth presidency The ''New York Ci ...
employed him as a clerk and supported him with a scholarship during the depression of the 1890s. A Dartmouth graduate himself (class of 1901), Ernest Martin Hopkins did not fit the typical mold of a college president when he was selected by the Trustees in 1916. He was not an academic, had never held a teaching position and had spent the bulk of his career in the business world. But any doubts about his leadership qualities were quickly dispelled and he showed himself to be a champion of academic freedom in an era when that basic tenet of scholarship was under attack. The administration of Ernest Martin Hopkins spanned two world wars, and he was called to serve his country on several occasions. In World War I, he was named Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Relations and served in the Office of Production and Management at the outset of World War II. President Hopkins was the recipient of at least 15 honorary degrees, and, while president of Dartmouth, declined an invitation to serve as president of the University of Chicago in order, according to a 1964 obituary in '' The New York Times'', "to continue development of his ideas of what an undergraduate liberal arts education should encompass." The articulation of these ideas during the Hopkins administration has become an enduring legacy that continues at Dartmouth today.


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President of Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Wheelock Succession
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Ernest Martin Worcester Academy alumni Dartmouth College alumni Presidents of Dartmouth College 1964 deaths 1877 births People from Mount Desert Island People from Dunbarton, New Hampshire