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Members of the 1st co-ed class at Dartmouth, Martha Hennessey & Jenny Kemeny, along with former Dartmouth Prof. Lynn Mather, share their experiences as trailblazers who helped change the face of Dartmouth. Jennifer Lee ’22 moderates.

Martha S. Hennessy ’76
NH State Sen. (Ret.)

Jenny Kemeny ’76
Frmr. Partner, Arthur D. Little

Lynn Mather
SUNY Distinguished Service Prof. Emerita
Univ. at Buffalo School of Law

Moderator: Jennifer Lee ’22
Govt. Major, Dartmouth

Martha S. Hennessey served in the NH Senate from 2016-2020. She chaired Sen. Judiciary Committee, and served on Transportation and Health & Human Services Committees. She served on the Children & Family Law Committee in the NH House of Representatives from 2014-2016.

Hennessey was in the 1st class of women admitted to Dartmouth and graduated with a degree in psychology in 1976. She went on to earn an MBA from the Univ. of Pennsylvania as well as a PhD in developmental psychology. She practiced as an educational psychologist in Mass. and NH, before joining the NH legislature.

Lynn Mather taught in Dartmouth’s Govt. Dept. for 30 years. During that time, she served as Acting Dir. of the Rockefeller Ctr., chaired the Govt. Dept., and co-founded the Women’s Studies program. She received the Distinguished Teaching Award and held the Nelson A. Rockefeller Chair in Govt.

In 2002 she became Dir. of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy and Professor of Law & Political Sci. at the Univ. at Buffalo. Mather is currently SUNY Distinguished Service Prof. Emerita. She has continued her research on lawyers and lawmaking in different countries, examining the impact of international organizations on the regulation of lawyers, and through study of attorneys in different legal fields. She has published: Lawyers in Practice: Ethical Decision Making in Context; Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession; Divorce Lawyers at Work: Varieties of Professionalism in Practice (winner of the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Assn.); Empirical Theories About Courts; and Plea Bargaining or Trial? The Process of Criminal-Case Disposition.

Jennifer Kemeny had a management consulting career focused on the complex, seemingly intractable issues that are a barrier to organizational success.

She developed a unique 2-pronged approach using a Systems Thinking based method, and her clients developed a deeper understanding of the issue’s cause and could identify powerful interventions. To implement the solutions successfully required the second prong - finding new ways to think and work together.

A former Partner at Arthur D. Little, she found these techniques to be effective across a range of clients, from Senior Management Teams in Fortune 10 companies to nonprofit startups.

The foundation for her work came from doctoral studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Mgmt. where she was the 1st student to combine two apparently unrelated fields: Computer simulation model of complex systems, and Organizational Behavior.

Daughter of John Kemeny, 13th president of Dartmouth, she graduated in 1976, with a major in mathematics/computer science. She is proud to have been a member of Dartmouth's 1st co-educational class.

Jennifer Lee ’22 is a Govt. major and Public Policy minor at Dartmouth, where she is Co-President of Dartmouth Women in Law and Politics and a War & Peace Fellow. She has served as a Presidential Scholar Research Asst. in the Govt. Dept. Jennifer intends to pursue a career in law.