JAMES O. FREEDMAN
FORMER DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PRESIDENT

[Biography | Honorary Degree]

JAMES O. FREEDMAN, the former president of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa and a champion of a liberal arts education, is a firm believer in the power of reading and learning to transform individuals and society.

“What I think a liberal education at its best can do is make us say, ‘You live but once,’ ” Freedman said. “Everyone has unusual abilities, unique abilities, and part of the satisfactions of life comes from deploying those abilities in the name of a great cause.”

As a teacher, scholar, administrator, leader, author and thinker, Freedman has devoted his considerable abilities to the service of American higher education. As president of both a large, Midwestern public university and a smaller Ivy League institution, Freedman shaped policies that influenced a broad range of students with significantly different interests and backgrounds. But his belief in the value of intellectual inquiry prevailed. At Dartmouth, for example, he instituted the Presidential Scholars program in which outstanding undergraduates could conduct research alongside their professors in a collaborative fashion.

Freedman himself is a product of the empowering nature of education in America. “In my life, there have been two themes. The first has been the question of education,” he said during a televised interview at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. “I fell in love with education as a young person. I love to read. I love to go to school. I didn’t want to leave college. I didn’t want to leave law school. That’s certainly one of the themes.

“The other theme has to do with whatever influences there were on me growing up in a Jewish home in a small New Hampshire town with a very small Jewish population. And there’s, of course, a very common, really mundane theme of Jewish kids striving to make their place in American society.”

Freedman grew up in Manchester, N.H. His father was a high school teacher; his mother fiercely believed the world held unlimited opportunities for her son. He graduated from Harvard University in 1957 and from Yale Law School in 1962. He then became a clerk for Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice who was then a federal appeals court judge.

After practicing law with a New York firm, Freedman joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1964, eventually becoming university ombudsman, associate provost and then dean of the law school. In 1982, he was appointed president of the University of Iowa. He left the Midwest in 1987 to become president of Dartmouth College, a post he held for 11 years. From 2000 to 2003, he served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Freedman is the author of three books, Crisis and Legitimacy: The Administrative Process and American Government (Cambridge University Press, 1978); Idealism and Liberal Education (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Liberal Education and the Public Interest (University of Iowa Press, 2003). He holds a number of honorary degrees, was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and is the recipient of the William O. Douglas First Amendment Freedom Award of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He sits on the Board of Trustees of Brandeis University.

“A lesson I draw is one that my father always taught me, which is about the importance of late-bloomers,” Freedman said in 2001. “We all mature at different rates. One of the things a liberal education does is make you ready for the moment—make the ground ready for the moment when the seed is prepared to drop. I hope students understand, and they’re preparing themselves, even if they’re not quite sure now where they’re going.”

Tufts will award Freedman an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.