Dartblog

The issues about which so many alumni have been concerned are hardly unique to Dartmouth. Reduced attention to undergraduate education, administrative waste due to sloppy management, oversubscribed courses, the heavy use of adjunct faculty, etc. are the subject of innumerable recent books and articles about academia. Harry Lewis, Harvard’s former Dean of the College, gave his book the self-explanatory sub-title “How a Great University Forgot Education”; Harvard’s former President Derek Bok (“Our Underachieving Colleges”) and Yale’s former Law School Dean Tony Kronman (“Education’s End”) explicitly wrote that universities have moved away from their core responsibilities toward undergraduates in favor of research; and Richard Hersh, formerly president of Trinity College, compiled a collection of articles in the same vein entitled “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk.” Even the New York Times had an article this past April headlined: “Staff Jobs on Campus Outpace Enrollment.”

However, what has been unique at Dartmouth has been the activism of alums in trying to turn things around. The campaigns for alumni trustees and the referendum on the alumni constitution have included large investments of time and money by folks on both sides of the battles. Some people are opposed to this kind of controversy, but my sense is that if money is being spent on mailings to educate alumni, where’s the harm? And the debates about the College’s direction have been valuable in causing people to re-examine Dartmouth’s mission for themselves.

The other special element in this situation has been the attempt by defenders of the administration to characterize critics of the College as “ultra-conservative” or members of a “radical minority cabal,” to cite pieces in the “D” - though to my knowledge, the opposite charge has never been leveled in the other direction. Certainly, the authors of the books that I listed above are not right wingers.

A couple of years ago, a group of five students distributed a flyer that called me a “conservative dinosaur.” I responded to them by e-mail and invited them all for coffee. And I asked, given that I had never met any of them previously, which of my many columns in the “D” were evidence supporting their colorful characterization. When we met, their only response was that they believed that I was opposed to the College’s large Office of Pluralism and Leadership - a subject about which I had never written. I told them that I thought the Office’s million-dollar budget could be better spent, but I had never seriously looked into the subject.

It was fun to talk to a great bunch of Dartmouth kids - which I do a lot - and I hope that they left our discussion with the sense that not all alums wear raccoon coats and want to return Dartmouth to the 19th century. Perhaps I contributed something to their education by teaching them that the ideas motivating discontented alumni are more complicated than a right-wing label implies.

In any event, here in Hanover everyone is awaiting President Kim’s arrival with great interest. While his background is not the usual one for a college president, his track record and commitment to real change are grounds for hope that at Dartmouth he’ll work hard on the problems that face so many institutions of higher education.