For the first time in decades, the economic headlines are hitting Hanover residents where they live. In February, Dartmouth College, a member of the Ivy League and the region's second-largest employer, announced it was laying off 60 workers, all in nonfaculty positions, and eliminating another 90 jobs through early retirements and attrition, part of aggressive cost-cutting measures after the college's endowment was thrashed in the stock market. Many public universities and poorer private colleges, of course, are being forced to slice much more deeply than Dartmouth, which will excise $72-million from its budget through 2011. Still, Dartmouth's predicament, and that of other top colleges stung by the stock-market slump, has a certain resonance: How is it that the recession is being felt here, at this wealthy and storied institution? What effect will it have on the ambitions and expectations of a place that, by any measure--the growth of the endowment, the caliber of the faculty and students--was on a clear upward trajectory? After all, wasn't higher education supposed to be recession-proof?