Dartblog

The June issue of the propaganda rag Dartmouth Life contains an interview with Board of Trustees Rubber-Stamper Russell Carson ‘65. When asked to “pinpoint the three most profound ways in which Dartmouth has changed during this past decade,” (read: under the leadership of the incumbent College president), he has this to say:

There hasn’t been revolutionary change, but there’s been evolutionary change. Dartmouth has made great strides in gender equality. Our faculty continues to be world-class, our students keep getting more talented and accomplished, and the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience—the most ambitious in Dartmouth’s history—is on track and will have a profound beneficial impact on the College for generations to come.

Well.

Gender equality. According to the Dartmouth College Fact Book, in the period from the 1996-97 to 2007, gender ratios at Dartmouth have adjusted as follows:

For tenured Arts and Sciences faculty, 72:28 to 64:36;
For tenure-track, non-tenured Arts and Sciences faculty, 62:38 to 54:46;
For undergraduate students, 52:48 to 50:50.

Do those adjustments look “profound” to you?

Mr. Carson is at least superficially correct about the second “profound change” he lists, the improving quality of Dartmouth’s students. Each incoming class is slightly more accomplished than the last, in an absolute sense. But each graduating high school class is more accomplished than the last, so the same effect is visible across virtually every college and university in the country. There is no evidence whatsoever that Dartmouth’s students are improving in quality faster than the mean—or more importantly, faster than Harvard’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s.

Mr. Carson’s last “profound change” is that the College’s current fundraising effort is “on track.”

If it hadn’t appeared in a propaganda rag, I would have mistaken Trustee Carson’s response to that question as some cruel joke. Mr. Carson was invited to brag about the three best, most exciting changes Dartmouth has made over the past decade!

What does he answer? A minor, gradual improvement in a particular statistic, a trend happening everywhere, and a self-satisfied feeling of adequacy in fundraising.

I never thought I would hear myself say this, but I sincerely hope that Trustee Carson is totally, utterly ignorant of the current state of affairs at the College. If he is not—if those really are Dartmouth’s three most profound changes of the last decade—then James Wright must be fired immediately. We can’t waste another year under his non-leadership.