Between 1980 to 1988 M.S. degrees were granted in the Computer and Information Science Masters level program, which combined studies in information systems and business. the graduate program was concieved by and Thomas Kurtz in the late 1970's and started up in 1980. Before 1979 the CIS program John Kemeny was slated to help teach in the CIS program. However, this changed when President Carter in 1979 selected him to head the Three Mile Island investigation.

The CIS program, while innovative, failed to gain a 'critical mass'. In 1988 the program was terminated. However, the concept of Computer and Information programs has been widely adopted, since, at many other colleges and universities throughout the world.

Maybe, the Dartmouth CIS program was ahead of its time?

Dartmouth College has a long history with computer science beginning in 1887 when Harry Bates Th'79 designed an electrical punch-card machine. In the 1960's Dartmouth pioneered the use of the time-sharing operating system, and two professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, developed the BASIC programming language. In 1968 a Ph.D for a dissertation about programming language implementation was granted by the Mathematics Department. Not until 1979 was there an undergraduate major in Computer Science created. The Ph.D program in Computer Science was approved in 1986.

John Kemeny