Dartmouth College. Office of the President. Ernest Martin Hopkins (1916-1945 )

Dates

• Usage: 1916 - 1945

Biography

Ernest Martin Hopkins (born November 6, 1877, Dunbarton, New Hampshire [U.S.] – died August 13, 1964, Manset, Maine [U.S.]) AB 1901; AM 1908; LittD Amherst 1916; LHD Hobart 1936; LLD Colby 1916; Rutgers 1916; Brown 1919; U Pa 1921; U NH 1922; McGill 1925; Yale 1925; Williams 1925; Harvard 1928; St John’s 1932; Wabash 1932; Williams and Mary 1939. ΦBK. Sec to Pres 1901-05; sec of the Coll 1905-10. Personnel work and industrial organization West Elec Co Filene’s Curtis Pub Co NE Tel Co 1910-16. Asst to sec if war in charge of industrial relations 1918. Trustee Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial 1924-28. Mem Rockefeller Foundation 1928- . Mem General Education Board 1930- ; chairman 1939- . Trustee Acad Andover 1926- . Trustee Newton Theol Inst 1930- . . Dir B & M RR 1920- . mem executive com 1937-39. Dir National Life Ins Co of Vt 1933- . Special investigator fir war dept if Porto Rican education system 1933. Hopkins served as the College’s eleventh president (1916-1945).

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 and wanted his son to also attend Harvard.[1] 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 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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