The June 16th, 2025 issue of The Valley News has a column that pays tribute to Professor Kemeny who was President of Dartmouth from 1970 to 1981 and to our classmate, Dimitri.
Here are the opening paragraphs of a column that is definitely worth your time:
"This is a tale of two fellows, a college student and his math professor. The kid in our story graduated from Dartmouth back in 1969 and still lives nearby with his wife. He’s 77 now — an older “kid” — and continues to toil in a home studio and out back at his forge. He is, in his seniority, an artist of considerable renown, a sculptor who for decades has specialized in heavy-metal fine art installations and smaller pieces. His work has graced private households and public spaces from Opryland to Oz.
The math professor, a bona fide American genius, became president of Dartmouth in 1970 and oversaw — in fact, engineered and then enforced — the school’s transition from a tradition-bound, all-male institution into a modern, coeducational school ready to grow ever stronger in whatever remained of America after the social upheaval of that time — civil rights, equal rights, Vietnam, Kent State, Nixon, Watergate. The prof-prexy was Dartmouth’s George Washington, its essential man, during the school’s Revolutionary Wars of that time.
The genius and the kid knew one another back in the late 1960s. They shared the classroom, of course, and both were regulars at Dulac’s hardware, where they would sometimes bump into each other and shoot the breeze.
They are being reunited, spiritually, this spring through the auspices of Dartmouth’s Class of 1975, which, as part of its 50th reunion in June, has commissioned a commemorative artwork of the leader who shepherded them through the storms of the ’70s. The art is being created right now by the erstwhile kid. At reunion, the finished piece will be presented as a gift to the college, then to hang on a prominent wall of a prominent building in perpetuity."