Dartblog

Today’s new-look D has a piece long on generalities and short on specifics regarding the McKinsey report of several years ago. The PR folks seems to want to show that Dartmouth was ahead of the curve in bringing in consultants to re-order the sprawling bureaucracy. The piece includes the following nugget:

At the same time, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity was refocused to address discrimination issues exclusively, rather than also dealing with inter-office conflicts, Nordberg said.

Wrong! Dartblog has looked at OIDE before; in fact it is a bête noire for us. It’s eight employees should be reduced to the legal minimum as quickly as you can say “budget cut.” Given President Kim’s public position on political correctness, the resolve to do so should be there.

We might look into OIDE in more detail sometime in the future, but suffice it to say that there is no part of the College bureaucracy that is as widely viewed with disdain by faculty and adminstrators — no matter what their political orientation. OIDE encumbers the hiring process for faculty and staff in a manner that causes everyone to waste time and the College to lose recruits to more nimble institutions. Its costly diversity seminars most often have the adjective “mind-numbing” attached to them. And the Office is persistently accused of affixing racial and gender hiring criteria to certain positions. To put the latter point into plainer English: OIDE often tells search committees that specific jobs are reserved for women and African-Americans.

It will come as little surprise to loyal readers that OIDE — occasionally known as the Diversity Police — is led by the oldest of the Wright Olde Guard: 35-year Dartmouth veteran Holly Sateia.