Dartblog

A family trip to the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, NH — scene of the famous IMF/world-economic-order-creating conference in the summer of 1944 — produced a repeat of an observation that I have made at places as far-flung as West Palm Beach, Canobie Lake Amusement Park, and virtually any big city hotel: despite the economic storm supposedly howling around us, the American hospitality industry seems dependent on foreign guest workers.

At Brettton Woods, we met waiters from Argentina, Brazil, Jamaica, and Chile; and they told us that in the summer months (when it is the winter in the Southern Hemisphere and most are back in school), their jobs are filled in turn by workers from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The U.S. has a special H2B visa program that admits tens of thousands of workes each year to do jobs for which there are no available Americans. I don’t quite understand how we can have this much unemploymeent and this many temporary workers.

In any event, we can be sure that over the years, hundreds of thousands of young, energetic foreigners are enjoying their time learning about America and making a few bucks to boot.

Addendum: It note just the hospitality undustry that can’t finder workers. Want to be a dairy farmer?

Nathan Bruschi ‘10 and Brice Acree ‘09, both central to the activities of the Dartmouth Political Union, the College’s debating society, have posted about the current Trustee race on the Little Green Blog. Enjoy.

• The Dartmouth’s Anti-Asch Bias
• Guiding Lights of Stewardship
• The Trustee We Need

I can’t say that I agree with everything that they have written, but I don’t see that I disagree with much that they have written either.

Like most local employers, I pay my employees market wages and benefits. I don’t want to lose them to competitors. I help them to understand that the wages that they receive are fair in the open market. The people who work for my businesses work hard; they are dedicated to our customers and to providing a first-class product.

All that said, the wages that they receive, and most certainly their benefits, are far below the levels that employees receive at Dartmouth. High wages, generous retirement plans, lengthy vacations, and Cadillac medical coverage make the College a high-cost employer.

My dilemma? As an alumnus, what should I do with the percentage of my company’s profit that I allocate for charitable giving? This profit comes as much or more from the efforts of my employees as it does from my own sense of enterprise. I have three options:

• Give money to the College:
• Give money to other charities:
• Give money back to my own employees so that their level of compensation might begin to approach the salaries and benefits provided by Dartmouth.

Aren’t my employees more deserving of this money than the myriad staffers at Dartmouth, the great majority of whom never enter into contact with students?

It is one thing to give money to the College so that students have an experience similar to or even better than mine, so that faculty can do great research and then enrich students’ lives, so that the College remains beautiful and modern. But it is quite another to support back-of-the-house staffers — to use Presdient Kim’s term — who are paid far above the Upper Valley wage scale.

A speaker at the College a year or two ago referred to foreign aid as “taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries.” Is that in effect what I am doing by taking profits out of a market-place business and giving them to over-compensated Dartmouth employees?

Can anyone help me with this ethical problem?

Note: A loyal reader has written in to suggest giving employees the right to express an opinion on how the company’s charity budget should be allocated. Hah! That’s easy. Dartmouth would not get a cent. All of them would want any extra spondoolicks to go to reducing their own health insurance contribution, which is considerably higher than that paid by Dartmouth employees. That’s money right into their pockets with no tax consequence. They envy Dartmouth’s benefits plan — even if they don’t want to work at the College.

Writing is hard. And I imagine that drafting an article for a peer-reviewed journal is the hardest writing of all. When Dartmouth faculty members come to understand the full range of views in a specific field, and then are able to add original observations and information to it, they have passed the most arduous intellectual challenge that the academy offers.

In contrast, teaching students does not impose the same level of intellectual discipline: professors can say almost anything they want about a subject to undergraduate students; their 18-22-year-old charges will rarely catch them in error. This comment is not a criticism of students; it is simply an observation that the classroom does not oblige faculty members to achieve the level of rigor required for publication.

I have written about the tension between teaching and research at the College before, but the demands imposed by formal writing were recalled to me when I thought about Chief Justice John Roberts’ remarks in his confirmation hearing about the drafting of legal opinions:

“Eventually, they [the Justices of the Supreme Court] get to a point where they take a vote on what they think the disposition should be. The decision should either be affirmed or reversed or sometimes something else in between — half affirmed, half reversed, sent back, whatever.

And then the opinion is assigned [to one of the Justices of the Supreme Court], and that’s still very much part of the process — the writing of the opinion — because, quite often, or maybe not quite often, but often enough, the justices find out that, as they try to write a particular opinion, different problems come up; it’s not writing as they thought it would.

And sometimes they have to go back and revisit the case because the judge — the justice — assigned the opinion decides that it should come out the other way or there should be a different reason, a different basis for the decision.”

Roberts’ general point is that in verbally discussing a subject, we often slide into accepting less accurate thinking than when we must reduce our thoughts to words on paper. Which leads to the conclusion that non-publishing faculty members at Dartmouth are not pushing themselves to their intellectual limits — and will therefore be less informed and vigorous teachers.

Note: Chief Justice Roberts has also carved a bit of a niche for himself with his energetic and direct style of writing.

Addendum: Several faculty friends write in to observe that being published is only the half of it; the other part of the equation is being read and subsequently cited in the work of other scholars. That is the acid test of relevance. To find out a professor’s impact, follow this primer on Google Scholar.

The amusing anomaly in the current Trustee election is that both my supporters and critics agree that I possess extensive on-the-ground knowledge about the daily operations of the College — but they disagree almost violently on the implication of this observation. I’ve audited courses for two decades, gotten to know several generations of students and members of the faculty, and in writing columns for The D and posts for Dartblog, I’ve acquired a good database of statistical facts about the College — along with a healthy scepticism for the spin that emanated too regularly from the past administration.

My supporters believe, as I do, that this background will make me a valuable addition in the Boardroom, where the majority of members were all too eager to accept the past administration’s justifications for bad decisions — the results of which beleaguer the College today in a hundred million different ways.

My critics assert, however, that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. While I agree that ignorance is bliss, does being uninformed help one be an effective trustee?

These critics worriedly express the concern that I will be unable to restrain myself from “micro-managing” the College’s affairs. Why is that exactly? As a strategy consultant with Bain & Company in London, I did not suffer from this problem. My son just asked me what a non sequitur is; I cited this strange proposition.

Let me give you an example of why extensive knowledge helps rather than hurts Trustees do their job. For almost a decade, students, faculty, parents and alumni have asserted that the College is overstaffed. I wrote a column in The D about the problem in 2004. And yet year after year, the overwhelming majority of the Trustees approved President Wright’s budgets — which is one of the Board’s key responsibilities (along with evaluating the President, setting long-term strategy and managing the endowment). Would they have done so had they known, among myriad other examples, that the number of non-faculty staffers at the College was exploding (increasing from 2,408 to 3,417 between 1999 and 2008), that the cost of Dartmouth’s benefits policy was out of control, or that the College’s administrative staff was laboriously doing tasks by hand that other schools has long ago automated at great savings?

I have never before seen ignorance celebrated at Dartmouth, and I definitely have never heard it regarded as a job requirement anywhere. However, I can see why certain people deem it important: such an assertion is in their self-interest, for ignorance is a quality that they possess in abundance.

Note: I have written here and here about the need for the Trustees to educate themselves about the daily life of the College, and I’ve pointed to Williams College as a good example to follow. When will they ever learn?

Was I quoted correctly in The D?

The Board’s 2007 decision to end parity between Board-selected and alumni-elected trustees was another issue discussed in the letters Asch received, he said, adding that alumni were “upset” and “wounded” by the decision.

“The idea that [the trustees] were expanding the Board to have greater diversity on the Board or because we had more alumni representation than other schools wasn’t convincing,” Asch said. “I think everyone sees it as what I believe it was — as a defensive measure to stop the petitioners from achieving a higher influence on the Board.”

Although he said he is a supporter of parity on the Board, Asch said he never supported the second lawsuit against the College and that it was a “mistake.”

“[Judge Timothy Vaughan] made what he thought was a fair ruling and I can’t disagree with that,” Asch said. “I hope that lawsuits are over, but I also hope that President Kim will see that he has to unify an alumni body that’s really split, and the way to unify the alumni body is to bring back parity.”

Yes.

A few days ago, Dartblog posted on the diminution in the number of college students studying subjects in the humanities, and the distinction between the number of incoming freshmen at the College anticipating study in each of the three academic divisions and the number of eventual graduates in these areas. In response, I received a thoughtful note from Bill Carney ‘75:

As for your post the other day, I think Admissions will say they pay no attention to applicants’ academic preferences. Many applicants, especially boys, select sciences. That’s what they know and what they are good at. When they get to college, nearly half realize that: 1) they are not so good,; 2) they don’t want to do all the work; or 3) there are more interesting fields of study. (I changed from chemistry to philosophy based on all of the above. Then I got an MBA.) This consistent drop-off in sciences dwarfs any of the other changes in trends.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a shift away from the humanities and toward the social sciences. I’m just saying that Admissions doesn’t manage it.

High school kids are becoming more focused on careers and income. Everyone wants to manage a hedge fund. Why bother with being a general practitioner making only $300K per year, let alone a teacher. It’s sad, but people want a return on their tuition investment. (My older son got a masters in electrical engineering. The younger one chose business. I don’t think either took a humanities course that wasn’t required, despite my efforts to the contrary.)

Good luck.

Bill Carney

Note: Bill Carney ‘75 was a District Enrollment Director for approximately twelve years, for which he won the Karl Furstenberg Award several years ago, and he was an Alumni Councillor.

Here’s a prediction for you: in five years all Dartmouth teams will be training barefoot, including (and especially) distance runners — and so will recreational runners. At most, they will be wearing lightweight Vibram slippers with no special cushioning.

While I haven’t seen anyone running barefoot in Hanover during the winter, other than my wife, this innovation is acquiring the characteristics of a movement (it is well past the cult stage).

Ken Bob Saxton seems to be the guru of barefoot running; his web page maintains that he has been advancing the cause since 1997. Christopher MacDougall’s book popularized the idea. Academic research has provided solid experimental support. And on-the-ground experience has been so positive that the word is spreading via groups like the Metro Boston Barefoot Runners Group. In addition, the New York Times has done a good job covering the development of barefoot running.

The core observation driving barefoot running is that we are not built to slam our heels down on the ground with massive force each time that we take a stride. This gesture — even when softened by fat-heeled running shoes — sends a debilitating shock though our bodies. Fortunately, the elaborate bone and muscle structure of our feet and legs is designed to absorb the impact of running in a flexible, spring-like manner, as long as our feet land in a balanced, weight-on-the-balls-of-the-feet-and-mid-arch fashion — which is virtually impossible in post-1970’s running shoes.

I’ve been running barefoot indoors for about a month now, and the new springiness in my feet is something quite unexpected. Too many people have out-of-shape feet, no matter how fit they are muscularly and cardio-vascularly. In addition, my overall flexibillty seems to have improved; I used to call running The Anti-Stretch. No more.

Could it be that the human race’s 40-year experiment in radically altering the way that people run is coming to an end?

Warning: Don’t try this at home without reading up on the subject first.

Addendum: Here is a great hi-res video on barefoot running with the Harvard researcher, Daniel Lieberman, who has studied the subject in the greatest depth.

The Hanover Inn will soon have a little competition in the in-town lodging market: the Six South Street Hotel should be open by year’s end. Trumpeting its “edgy” design (oh, please), the hotel will have 69 rooms and 30 underground parking spaces.

Giving visitors a choice will put pressure on the College to upgrade the Inn, long a subject of concern in this space (see here and here). Burdened by Dartmouth’s heavy cost structure and an unresponsive management that has been repeatedly cited by the State of New Hampshire for labor law violations, the Inn is rarely full. And its lovely restaurant, the Daniel Webster Room, which should be the finest dining establishment between Boston and Montreal, closes in the evening due to a lack of business.

If the Inn were a better managed business, one wonders if a new hotel like Six South Street would have opened. In any event, welcome.

The parallel websites of Mort Kondracke and John Replogle currently contain the following post:

Last Wednesday night (March 3) President Kim met with some 700 alumni at the Dartmouth Club of New York. When asked in the public Q&A session what qualifications he’d like to see in Trustees to be elected by alumni beginning March 10, President Kim “I think we need someone who is wildly successful in his career, who would bring to the Board a wealth of experiences that would help us to take Dartmouth to new heights. I also think that what we don’t need is someone who wants to second-guess everything we do and get involved in micromanaging our administration around operational details that are really my responsibility. The Board needs a big thinker who is an accomplished, proven leader, and I need a true partner whose counsel I can seek. I’ve developed that relationship with many on the board who are world-class leaders of global companies and I think that’s a great model.”

After reading President Kim’s quotation, it seems that many people took these remarks as an endorsement of my candidacy for Trustee, at least according to President Kim, as he is quoted in The D today:

Kim told The Dartmouth he wanted to emphasize that he has not endorsed a particular candidate.

“I have just been hearing from so many different places that they have the impression that I have endorsed a particular candidate, in this case Joe Asch, and I just want to make it really clear — that is not my role here,” Kim said.

I wonder what impression the 700 alumni in NY took away from the meeting?

No, no, not the College’s English department. The Decline of the English Department is the title of an engaging piece in The American Scholar by William Chace, the former president of both Wesleyan and Emory. It received a David Brooks’ Sydney Award as one of 2009’s best pieces of commentary.

Chace laments the decline of the humanities in general in the academy, and more specifically, of English:

First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

I’ll refrain from summarizing Chace’s thoughts, which bear close study, but I do want to add the observation that the admissions departments of our institutions of higher learning seem to have played some role in this development.

Perhaps this is a chicken and egg problem, but we should not be surprised if nationally only 16% of students graduate in the humanities when only approximately that percentage of matriculating students express a primary academic interest in the division before setting foot on campus. Foolish consistency is either the hobgoblin of little minds, or it could point to the existence of numerical quotas of some kind. From the ever helpful Dartmouth Fact Book’s profile of incoming freshmen’s academic preference:

Perhaps one of Dartblog’s faithful readers in the Admissions Department can enlighted us — on a confidencial basis if so desired. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds: does the Admissions Department seek to reach such consistent percentage figures, or is this just how things happen to turn out?

All that said, reality once again proves more interesting than expected. It seems that though many students arrive in Hanover with low expectations about the humanities, the multiple charms of the faculty in that division do exert a certain pull:

Double majors are counted twice here, but still.

Addendum: It is interesting to see the accretion of students in the above tables to the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and their marked attrition from the Sciences. It seems that only half of Freshman Week scientists end up majoring in the sciences. I wonder why?

Acting AD Bob Ceplikas ‘78 stood up for Datmouth’s basketball players in a Letter to the Editor after a recent Valley News story criticized the skills of individual members of the varsity team. This writer has observed that in the Dartmouth Athletic Department’s own sports reporting, players are almost never identified by name after “defensive miscues,” etc. Ceplikas’ letter:

To the Editor:

On behalf of Dartmouth’s coaches and student-athletes, I am writing to express our deep disappointment in the Valley News for including such personally humiliating comments about individual student-athletes in its coverage of last Saturday’s men’s basketball game. We respect the media’s responsibility to report on achievements and failures alike, and we understand that the media will not always share our perspective. We are truly dismayed, however, that the Valley News found it necessary to publicly insult the athletic abilities and intelligence of individual amateur athletes using such unduly harsh terms as “hapless”, “limited basketball sense”, and “hands of stone”, among others. We are hopeful that the paper will treat these dedicated student-athletes with more respect and dignity in the future.

Robert A. Ceplikas
Acting Director of Athletics & Recreation
Dartmouth College
Hanover

And the offending sections of the VN article:

Green Drops Home Finale
By Tris Wykes
Valley News Staff Writer

Hanover — One of the worst seasons in recent Dartmouth men’s basketball history concluded its home slate in typical fashion last night, the Big Green losing 76-57 to Brown…

[Brown pivot] Mullery’s dominance, much of it against hapless freshman center Matt LaBove, drew other defenders to him and allowed his Bears teammates leisurely time and space to set up and follow through. Brown made 10 of 24 attempts from 3-point range, held a 24-12 rebounding advantage in the second half and improved to 11-18, 5-7…

Dartmouth’s list of deficiencies is lengthy. The Big Green has no go-to scorer, no true point guard and no paint player with any true combination of grit and finesse. Guard Jabari Trotter needs work on his left hand, forward David Rufful is hot one game and ice cold the next and forward Mbiyimoh Ghogomu might be the team’s best athlete, but is out of control half the time he’s on the floor.

Under the basket, junior Clive Weeden is a warrior but more comfortable away from the lane. Conversely, LaBove can’t regularly score from outside five feet and has such a high center of gravity that he’s constantly being knocked off-balance. Sophomore Herve Kouna is a physical specimen with hands of stone and limited basketball sense.

Never one to spare the rod, Dartblog has to conclude that Cep has something of a point here — especially given the overarchingly condemnatory nature of these personal criticisms. The basketball program has struggled for a while, and journalism like this does not help anyone.

Although the Dartmouth Fact Book provides extensive details on the admissions of different ethnic groups to the College, it does not offer any information at all on how successful these groups are at graduating — which I think is the necessary bookend to admissions data. This omission must be intentional because the administration gathers precisely this data in order to submit it to the NCAA, as do all other colleges and universities with competitive athletic programs.

The College energetically recruits Native Americans (a group more frequently called American Indians beyond the Hanover Plain; see the NCAA form below, too) to come to Hanover: members of different tribes currently constitute 4-5% of each incoming class. However, six years after matriculating, only a little more than three quarters (77%) of these students have received a degree — a result below the College average.

These figures have only varied slightly since 2001.

Dartmouth could do better here. If the College is going to make special efforts to recruit certain students in furtherance of our historical mission, it should make equally concerted efforts to ensure that they graduate. It is time to re-establish our commitment to the Charter; extra academic advising and other resources could help American Indians graduate as frequently as members of other groups. And overall, the College should look at why, according to an AEI study, 7% of all students have failed to earn a degree six years after matriculating.

Note: Curiously, the figures in the AEI study, and the statistics that the College submits to the NCAA, diverge slightly.

Addendum: The goal of the NCAA’s data gathering in this instance is to study the graduation rate of students receiving athletic scholarships. Dartmouth offers neither athletic nor merit-based scholarships, so the College provides no information at all to the NCAA on the graduation rate of, for example, our football players. However, Coach Teevens informs me that in his five years here he has had but a single player transfer to another school and only one in academic difficulty, a student who is still working to finish his degree. Otherwise all of his players have graduated, most of them after four years — undoubtedly with a future Treasury Secretary and General Electric CEO among them.

I had planned to write a brief post about the multiple talents of Dartmouth undergrads, and then perhaps segue into a pitch for this space’s favorite team — women’s hockey — whose rugged defenseman, Katie Horner, showed a tunefulness as an Idol that opposing players who tried to take the puck from her last season had not heretofore appreciated.

But that post is not to be. For in the middle of a Michael Jackson group medley, in the spoken section of Thriller:

And whosoever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell

a Jackson-suited figure came upon the stage. His voice was full and low. Dressed in a fedora, leather jacket, loafers with white socks, and a single glove, he glided forward in a crouch — his face hidden. He moved well, and many in the crowd wondered who he was, given that the six Idols were already on stage and the judges were accounted for, too.

And then he turned, his face popped up, the band hit the chorus, and to the ecstatic roars of the rising crowd, we all recognized a beaming President Kim.

Unannounced, with the audience unawares, his coup de théâtre had worked perfectly. He remained on the stage for the next minute or so, dancing merrily with the Idols, as the audience whooped and cheered.

I won’t go on beyond this for fear that readers will think that I am getting soft, but folks, let me say this: we are in the presence of star power. Jim Kim has the makings of a beloved President.

Addendum: Even though there is no question in my mind that Katie Horner ‘11 has the best slapshot among the Idols, Dan Van Deusen ‘11 won the competition, followed by Kevin Oh ‘12 and Jamie Hwang ‘10. Go figure.

Even though certain members of the administration soft-pedal today’s oversubscription woes, or assert that the problem has been with us for all time, there are still unhappy parents and students out there:

I am a Dartmouth parent with a child who graduated a couple of years ago. I am also a Dartmouth alum, and I have been a very strong financial supporter of Dartmouth.

My son had to be creative in various ways to solve course oversubscription and scheduling problems. He was a dual math and engineering major.

At one point, he wanted to take Meir Kohn’s Economics 26 course, The Economics of Financial Intermediaries and Markets. Economics 1 was a prerequisite. Economics 1 was always oversubscribed during the time slots in which he did not have required courses. He solved the problem by discussing his interest with Professor Kohn, who waived the prerequisite requirement. Of course, my son was at a significant disadvantage because all of the technical material was new.

In another term, a required course for each of his majors was offered only at the same time. And there was no other term that one of these courses could be taken without delaying graduation for an extra year. My son talked the math professor into letting him take the math course at the same time as the engineering course, with the only classroom requirement being attendance for exams. Of course, it is very hard to get a grade higher than a B if you never go to class. As a parent paying $5,000 per class, I don’t think we received our money’s worth in this situation.

As for my son’s math professors, his experience was exactly the opposite of what the Development Department tells me when they are asking for money. Of his first seven professors, one was tenure-track, one was a one-term visitor, two were research instructors (post-PhD grad students), two were grad students (though one was very good in the classroom), and the last one was an adjunct (non-tenure-track) professor. Just because I list only six non-tenure-track professors out of seven does not mean that there were not others. It just means that I gave up counting at six.

Note: The above observations are backed up in a column in The D today by freshman Suril Kantaria:

The trend is clear: many students, particularly freshmen, often do not receive their first-choice class selections.

The significance of this column goes beyond the experience and the opinion of one freshman. The decision of The D’s Op-Ed Editor to publish the piece testifies to its relevance to many students.

Another Note: A second parent opines:

I’m the parent of a ‘10. There is no question that underprogramming of certain courses, or poor annual scheduling, has negatively affected my kid’s course selection process and his ability to pursue (or even sample) multiple major fields. His experience has involved similar “creativity,” usually waiving out of a prerequisite. As a result, he takes the course out of sequence, without the prior material as background. Bad idea, both as an introduction to a field, and in what he gets out of the course. This course programming/scheduling situation promotes a pre-professional, one-track approach to what is supposed to be a broad liberal arts education. This seems to occur in the Econ and Government areas and, I have been told, in Biology also.