Over dinner in Los Angeles, I mentioned that I’d prepared for my first meeting of the Dartmouth College board of trustees, which took place earlier this month, by re-reading “God and Man at Yale,” WFB’s roundhouse attack on collectivism and secularism in New Haven. Hearing this, WFB skipped “Man” and went directly to “God.” “How,” he asked, “is Christianity doing at Dartmouth?” As it happens, the president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, Noah Riner, Class of ‘06, provided an answer just yesterday.

Welcoming the Class of ‘09 to the College during Convocation, Riner said:

“Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus….He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That’s character….

“In the words of Bono:

“‘[I]f only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed….’

“You want the best undergraduate education in the world, and you’ve come to the right place to get it. But there’s more to college than achievement. With Martin Luther King, we must dream of a nation—and a college—where people are not judged by the superficial, ‘but by the content of their character.’”

Like Yale, Dartmouth was founded as an explicitly Christian institution. As far as I know, however, young Mr. Riner was the first to hold up the example of Christ at a College event—and note that Riner was addressing the matter of character, not seeking converts—in many and many a decade. Read his full remarks here.