Boundless Opportunities

Class of 2013 journeys toward leadership

September 1, 2009

President William G. Durden ’71 welcomes the class of 2013, comprised of 583 students from 36 states and territories and 21 countries.

Among the 583 first-year and 29 transfer students in the class of 2013 is Afghanistan’s top blogger, who served as a National Constitution Center Fellow and Duke University Media Fellow. There also is a novelist and an intern with Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, and a Miss Teen New Jersey.

In her welcome remarks at Convocation on Aug. 30, Stephanie Balmer, vice president for enrollment and communications and dean of admissions, said, “This year’s class is among our most diverse, with nearly 14 percent comprised of domestic students of color. Thirty-six of you are international citizens and 29 have an international background.”

As the students prepared to ascend the steps of Old West and sign in to the college, as is tradition, President William G. Durden ’71 noted the importance of place in Dickinson’s history, referring to Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “interesting and puzzling” decision to locate the college in Carlisle, then the Western frontier.

“Rush intended Dickinson to be the bellwether for a new kind of higher education that would be distinctly American,” he said. “It was a bold, symbolic move imparting through a liberal-arts education a sense of what I now call ‘frontier pragmatism’—a notion that acknowledges the vast uncertainty and boundless opportunities that accompanied the founding of a new nation.”

Today, he continued, “We are once again asserting what Dr. Rush wanted us originally to proclaim for Dickinson College and its place in Pennsylvania … By choosing to study at Dickinson, you have chosen wisely to be influenced … by this particular sense of place and the habits of thought and action that accompany it—by ‘frontier pragmatism.’ This is Dickinson’s edge—your singular advantage in being a Dickinsonian.”