Elias Rivers at Dartmouth: The 1950s

In the early 1950s Dartmouth’s faculty was slowly improving and seemed to be learning in terms of professional activity and awareness. This was a slow process and was not always successful. With respect to our field of Hispanic literature, a great step forward was made with the appointment of Elias Rivers to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in 1952. He was the first person in modern times to be appointed as a fully prepared faculty member in terms of his calling to scholarship and teaching Spanish language and literature. He was responsible for expanding and deepening the activities of the department. Everyone who followed owes him a great debt of gratitude for all his labors and concerns for developing the Spanish area in particular, the department, and, in a broader sense, the college. He brought to the offerings in Spanish a broad and deep knowledge, particularly of the literature of the Golden Age, and his command of that material made us all feel that we were in a position of doing genuinely meaningful professional work. To me, it is a miracle that he stayed around as long as he did. I was sorry to see him go, and I will always miss him. By the time he left, the department had grown, and the Spanish staff felt affirmed and strengthened because of his presence.

When I came to the department in 1957 I felt completely accepted and supported in what I wanted to do, and it was Elias Rivers who encouraged me at every turn. I always had faith in him, and others shared that faith.

One of his most significant contributions was in the area of study abroad. In 1957–1958, the idea of study abroad was being discussed, and it was repeatedly rejected until finally we were empowered to undertake something which at that time was call the Dartmouth College Foreign Study “Plan.” Rivers was clearly the leader in this process. Our beginnings with experiences in Salamanca, Spain, and Caen, France, were slow, hopeful, and ultimately successful because the idea caught on rapidly among the undergraduates and also among some faculty members. By the second year we were no longer talking about a plan but a program. After the experience of one year, we were surprised to find that other departments wanted to follow this model and expand on it. Currently there are more than forty such programs in existence, and it is largely because of Rivers’s efforts that they began and thrived.

Romance Languages—Seated: G. E. Diller, H. M. Davidson, C. R. Bagley, F. Ugarte. Standing: P. R. Olson, E. L. Rivers, S. Nantier, C. F. Hofmann, R. H. Russell, P. M. Lloyd