Dartblog

Dartmouth tends to be an inward-looking place; we don’t spend a lot of time comparing the College to other institutions (sometimes for good reason… as will be illustrated in future posts). However, when we examine the grounds for alumni discontent over the past decade, it quickly becomes apparent that our disgruntled alums are not alone in their concerns.

A quick review of the popular literature on higher education does not turn up paeans to the current quality of undergraduate teaching; just the opposite:

Frank Newman, director of Brown University’s Futures Project and a former president of the University of Rhode Island, sounds a familiar note when he writes that “colleges have been focusing their energies on a form of competition based not on improving graduates’ skills and knowledge but on institutional prestige and revenues.” He states: “It is time to elevate the status of teaching to that of research.”

Harry Lewis, Harvard’s former Dean of the College, gave his book on colleges the self-explanatory sub-title: “How a Great University Forgot Education.” And books by Harvard’s former President Derek Bok (“Our Underachieving Colleges”) and Yale’s former Law School Dean Tony Kronman (“Education’s End”) both explicitly opine that universities have moved away from their core responsibilities to undergraduates in favor of research.

Finally, Richard Hersh, formerly president of Trinity College, has compiled a collection of articles entitled “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk” in which his essayists argue that the overall effectiveness of higher education has diminished due to a loss of focus on undergrads.

The independent Lumina Foundation’s recent report on “The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance” describes in detail the continuing disproportionate growth of colleges’ “non-instruction related costs” (translation: bloated bureaucracies), though in fairness, it says that private institutions have done better in this area than state schools.

Amazingly, these mainstream academics have come to the same conclusions about what ails higher education as Dartmouth’s petition trustees (not to mention the thousands of alumni who voted them onto the Board). Perhaps Newman, Lewis, Bok et al. are also secret members of a “radical minority cabal”? — to repeat the memorably foolish words chosen by former Trustee Peter Fahey ‘68 to describe Dartmouth’s petition trustees. Or perhaps they aren’t?

What is unique about Dartmouth is the alumni’s forceful attempt to act in response to the aforementioned problems. While there have been recent stirrings at Harvard and Colgate, only Dartmouth’s alums have risen up en masse to protest their College’s decline.