Dartmouth is moving ahead on plans to expand its western campus near Tuck and Thayer by 459,000 square feet of new buildings. At least five of them will support Tuck, Thayer and the computer science department. A third Thayer School building is already in the planning stage. Also included in the conceptual plan is a path from the Green to the Connecticut River. No date has been set for construction.

A recent $80 million gift from the Arthur L. Irving Foundation and members of the Irving family will help Dartmouth create a new energy research institute. A cross-disciplinary group will work toward solutions to real-world problems such as the reliability of electrical grids and how to protect them. The institute had already received $33 million from other sources and hopes to raise another $160 million.

Dartmouth’s endowment dropped 1.9 percent—to $4.5 billion—by the end of the 2016 fiscal year on June 30. The College withdrew $214 million, which was more than replaced by $46 million received in gifts and $350 million earned on investments. Harvard and Penn reported losses, but Yale had a 3.4 percent increase.

On the academic side, Dartmouth has joined a group of schools across the country that no longer requires students to submit SAT scores with their applications.

Our class president, Howard Leavitt, died on October 13, 2016. Ever loyal to Dartmouth and our class, Howie stepped in as president when we needed him—at the same time continuing his newsletters that kept us up to date on the lives of our classmates. The newsletter will now be discontinued, so please send all personal notes to me and I will incorporate them into the report for the alumni magazine.

We also sadly report the deaths of Robert J. Fieldsteel, Lee Romanow and Stanley D. Skaug. Our condolences to their families. (All obituaries appear online.) To the 61 of us still hobbling around: Take care, keep warm and don’t give up the ship.

—John M. Jenkins, 80 Lyme Road, Apt. 304, Hanover, NH 03755; (603) 643-2757; mmjenkins@kahres.org