The Nelson A Rockefeller Center for Public Policy

The Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College was founded in 1983 to commemorate the contributions of Nelson A. Rockefeller ’30 to the life of the nation. The Rockefeller Center seeks to educate, train, and inspire the next generation of public policy leaders in all fields of endeavor through multidisciplinary education, public lectures by visiting scholars and dignitaries, skills training, and public policy-oriented research across the social sciences. The Center seeks to connect experiences in and out of the classroom, on and off campus to reach this goal.

The curricular offerings of the Rockefeller Center provide a wide variety of opportunities for students to engage with public policy in their area of interest. In addition to enrolling in one of the more than a dozen public policy courses offered each year, students have the ability to complete a public policy minor for in-depth exploration of the public policy process, policy research and analysis, and a targeted focus on a substantive policy area (e.g., health care, environment, education, social welfare).  The Center sponsors the Policy Research Shop, a student-staffed, faculty-mentored research enterprise in which students conduct research at the request of New Hampshire and Vermont state, county, and local government officials, often with the opportunity to testify on their findings. The Center also offers an exchange program with Keble College at Oxford University and grants to students working on honors theses in the social sciences.

Outside the classroom, the Center provides students with robust co-curricular programs designed to build on their leadership skills and capacities. Programs help students to reflect upon, develop, and assess their strengths and their capacity to work in teams to achieve common good. These programs include the First-Year Fellows Program in Washington, DC; funding for off-campus internships; a Mini-Grant program for supporting special student-initiated initiatives; Dartmouth Model UN Program; and a sequence of leadership programs consisting of Dartmouth Leadership Attitudes and Behaviors, the Management and Leadership Development Program, the Rockefeller Global Leadership Program, and Rockefeller Leadership Fellows. The Center's Public Programs provide students with the opportunity to meet and engage with speakers who are scholars or practitioners related to a current public policy or leadership issue.