Dartblog

The issue of compassion came up repeatedly on Monday at the General Faculty meeting. Who should bear the burden of the upcoming budget cuts? English Professor Donald Pease plucked at the heartstrings in evoking “our friends and neighbors, people with whom we have worked for many years.” And several questioners spoke of “the most vulnerable” — ostensibly in horror of casting low-level employees out into the snows of the cruel capitalist system.

Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt chirped defensively that in the last round of budget reductions many courses had been cut, seemingly saying that it wasn’t just superfluous employees that had been eliminated, but adjunct professors, too. And wasn’t that good?, she pleaded.

President Kim showed some spine, albeit obliquely, in recognizing the inherent conflict between the College’s “culture of caring” and “our greatest values.”

So leave it to Dartblog to say things straight out: should we save the jobs of administrative assistants, maintenance staff, and administrators of various ranks, even if those actions require us to reduce the quality of a Dartmouth education in other areas?

If there is one thing that has been a constant in the alumni controversies of the last decade, it is the observation that the College is overstaffed on the administrative side of things. A few months ago, I detailed the burgeoning headcounts in various offices in a column in the D entitled “Waste and More Waste”:

In 1997, the President’s Office numbered 6.5 full-time employees; 10 years later there were 10. During that time period, the Dean of the Faculty Office went from 14 to 28 full-time employees. The Dean of the College Office went from 16 to 26; the Provost’s Office went from 6.5 to 11.5; and the combined headcount of the First-Year Office, the Office of Student Life and the Office of Residential Life went from 26.5 to 47.

As a first step in saving money, these bloated areas should be rolled back to their previous levels, and if firing staffers is the only way to do that, well, that’s a hard choice that needs to be made. By doing so, we can help ensure the long-term health of the College, and when the endowment starts to throw off cash again, we can show compassion for students by hiring professors who will add to the quality of a Dartmouth education. The College should have started engaging more professors ten years ago, instead of hiring ever larger numbers of paper-pushers.

In the business world, the idea that a company would cut the quality of its products in order to keep superfluous employees on staff would be laughed out of the room. Competition doesn’t allow a corporate executive’s focus to deviate from customers and the overall health of a company. Imagine getting a letter like this:

For faculty members and others to hold the view that staffers once hired should have jobs for life, no matter what the burden on students and the College, is simply soft-hearted foolishness — of the kind that will bring a great institution to its knees. Folks, we are not on our knees yet, but with thinking like this, we will surely get there.