Dartblog

With the announcement of Dr. Jim Kim this afternoon, I thought that I would present a template for College governance. The humble points that follow are value-neutral; they do not mandate any specific course of action only a consideration of general principles upon which (I would imagine) we can all agree and which might point us in the right direction.

1. Transparency
The importance of this principle has become particularly obvious in light of the recent budget cutbacks, but has been and will remain essential. When the campus—Student Assembly, student opinion columnists in The Dartmouth and Dartmouth Review, panelists on various budget discussions, etc—talk about the budget we are always talking in generalities. This is the case not because these people don’t care enough about the well-being of Dartmouth College to study the figures or are motivated by ideology and care to ignore inconvenient empirical truths. Rather this is the case because the spending and operating budget of Dartmouth College is a black box.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that wrong policies were

Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

The same is true of mistakes and misappropriated money in the Dartmouth budget. Between the trustees, alumni association, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni we have a pretty good set of minds, let’s all take a look together.

2. Efficiency

Along similar lines, we need to approach governance of the college with a spirit of efficiency. Two should not be permitted when one will suffice. This applies to duplicative administrators, wasted resources and energy, and all other areas of college operation.

A primary step that could be taken in this regard is full disclosure of the McKinsey Report done for Dartmouth College. Just a few years ago McKinsey, a premier consulting firm was retained to identify inefficiencies in Dartmouth operations, an enterprise that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and could save the school millions of dollars. Release that report! To date, only an executive summary has been disclosed. This report, along with a healthy dose of common sense and democratic input, is a key to eliminating inefficiencies in Dartmouth spending, better services, better professors, better classes, better education, and ultimately a better Dartmouth College.

3. Accountability
This principle, like transparency, was a theme hit upon by the 2005 McKinsey Report, but one that has yet to be realized. Accountability means 1. that there be a way to measure performance and 2. that good performers are rewarded and bad performers punished—at the levels of individuals, organizations, and even entire departments.

If a professor is consistently rated as a terrible teacher by students, via student evaluations, etc, they should not be kept on staff by their department. If a student organization serves no function or appeals to no membership, COSO should not be giving them funding. If an academic department consistently has low enrollment, they should be forced to cut classes, budgets, or professors or should be abolished entirely. There should be some mechanism put in place to evaluate the performances of Dartmouth deans and administrators and action on these results. Step 1: measurements of accountability everywhere. Step 2: actions reflecting accountability.

The principles of Transparency, Efficiency, and Accountability are not novel, but they are needed. These principles are not contentious ones, but their implementation would make our College a more effective and successful institution.