Excerpt from the Obituary for The Manchester Guardian
author : J. Laurie Snell

John Kemeny will be remembered for his contributions to computing and mathematics education, and also for the sweeping changes he brought to Dartmouth during his eleven years as president of this prestigious Ivy League college...

Kemeny came to Dartmouth only 27 year old.. One of the first to anticipate the central role that computing would come to play in our world, Kemeny insisted that some knowledge of computing was an integral part of a liberal education. To make the computer accessible to undergraduates, a notion nearly unheard of at the time, he and his colleague Tom Kurtz developed one of the world's first time-sharing systems.  John carried out this time-sharing project in true Kemeny style. Knowing that the professionals would believe his goal impossible, he shunned them and enlisted instead the help of bright undergraduates who, like him, were naive enough to think it possible.

Just as von Neumann realized that a computer that did only ordinary arithmetic operations could have extraordinary power, Kemeny realized that to make this power available to everyone, a programming language could and should be exceedingly simple. This led him to develop with Tom Kurtz the computer language BASIC which is still one of the most widely used computer languages...

John Kemeny was a great teacher and teaching was his first love. The chairman of the Board of Trustees did not want him to impose the condition that he continue to teach for his acceptance of the presidency [of Dartmouth]. Kemeny remarked, " You would have given me two afternoons off a week to play golf, if I had insisted. My hobby happens to be teaching; look at it that way." He continued to teach throughout his presidency rarely missing a class...