When her son needed help during college, Karen Pelletier’s advice was simple: “Go to the administrator. They’re there to help you.”
Pelletier would know. For more than three decades, she has served as the department administrator for the Department of Economics, where she has helped thousands of students who passed through her office get into a class they needed, finish the major they’d planned on, and make it to graduation.
When Pelletier retires from Dartmouth in July, she will have supported roughly 5,300 students who graduated with an economics degree, and approximately 81,000 students who have taken economics classes across 3,500 course sections. “No wonder I’m tired,” she laughs.
“It is difficult to overstate the importance of Karen’s service to the department,” says Professor of Economics and department chair James Feyrer. “In a department of our size and complexity, our two-year rotation [of department chairs] could easily have produced chaos. Instead, Karen’s steady hand kept the department functioning smoothly and allowed each chair to do the work of leading the department. For students, she helped make a large department feel navigable and personal. For faculty, Karen made our lives easier in innumerable ways so that we could focus on research and teaching.”
At the center of it all
Pelletier’s “steady hand” has been the throughline of her tenure. She has worked under 15 department chairs, each serving a two-year term, while she remained the constant.
Each term, Pelletier builds the course timetable, manages classroom scheduling, and maintains course waitlists. She approves every student who declares an economics major, verifying prerequisites and course requirements along the way. She confirms graduating seniors meet the requirements for their degrees, which included more than 200 from the Class of 2026.
She also drafts the department’s teaching schedule, coordinates faculty sabbaticals, processes reimbursements, and supports a seminar series that has grown from a handful of annual talks to several events per week. Over her tenure, she has helped administer 53 successful faculty recruitments and supported a growing cohort of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, as well as an honors thesis program that has grown from just a few students per year to more than 20.
Of the department’s current tenure-track faculty, only two were tenured before she arrived. Twenty-eight were hired after her. As faculty arrived, colleagues retired, and the department grew from around 100 majors to more than 200, Pelletier was there for all of it.
“I’m one of the few non-emeriti faculty who remembers the ‘before Karen’ period and can heartily attest that the ‘after’ period was much improved,” says Patricia Anderson, professor of economics, who served as department chair from 2006 to 2008. “I relied on her to help carry out all aspects of chairing the department. To be honest, she took care of everything, and I just made sure that I did whatever she told me to do!”
Douglas Irwin, the John French Professor in Economics, saw that same quality during his own time as chair. "She has to hold the line against sometimes demanding students and equally demanding faculty to ensure that the department’s best interests come out in the end—and she always upholds them. When I was department chair, her counsel and advice were enormously important."
A legacy of community
The connections Pelletier builds with students, faculty, and colleagues are her motivation. She fondly recalls meeting up with fellow administrators around campus over the years, and she prizes her interactions with students above all.
A moment from last spring stays with her. At the end-of-year awards dinner, a graduating senior pulled Pelletier aside and asked for a photo. It was the first time a student had ever done that. “She wanted to point me out as being one that really helped her get through it all,” Pelletier says. “That made me feel really nice.”
While she is there to celebrate student successes, she’s also there to support students in times of need. She still remembers the students who broke down in her office—those who didn’t get into a class and couldn’t see a way forward or those tangled up in prerequisites and scheduling conflicts who needed someone to tell them it was going to be okay. And Pelletier always made sure it was.
“There’ll be a solution,” she’d tell them. “I’ll get you into something.”
It’s a quality that hasn’t gone unnoticed. "Karen’s retirement leaves an enormous hole in the economics department, both for faculty and students," says Irwin. "She is incredibly efficient, super knowledgeable, and knows how to get things done."
Pelletier’s connection to Dartmouth runs deeper than the Department of Economics. She first came to campus in the 1980s, working in Associate Dean of Faculty Gregory Prince’s office for a few years, before stepping away to raise her family. When she returned in the mid-90s, she took a temporary job with the Tuck School of Business before joining the economics department.
“The best decision I made as economics department chair 30 years ago was selecting Karen to be our department administrator,” says Nancy Peregrim Marion, the George J. Records 1956 Professor Emeritus of Economics. “Karen managed a growing and increasingly complex department with skill and professionalism. Most importantly, she has been instrumental in shaping the economics department into a collegial community of scholars and learners, a community of mutual respect and affection—and that may be Karen’s greatest legacy.”
In retirement, Pelletier looks forward to spending time with her grandchildren and traveling with her husband, but she knows she has a family on campus too.
“I feel like it’s truly a family,” Pelletier says. “We all get along really well. We all have one goal in mind.”