Dartblog

From today’s D:

Kim, who said in the meeting with the Editorial Board that the College is still considering all of its options, added that he did not know whether Dartmouth would benefit from an external review [by outside consultants]. “If you pay someone a million or $2 million to find $145 million in savings that you wouldn’t have seen, then it is a good investment, and we’re just not sure if we’re in that category,” Kim said. “My sense is that we are pretty efficient.”

With all due respect to our new President, his sense of the College’s efficiency is incomplete. Kim has little experience running large organizations, and as we have discussed even in looking at his own office, the potential gains in efficiency at the College are more than significant.

So why bring cost-cutting consultants like Bain & Company to Hanover? (Full disclosure: I worked in Bain’s London office from 1983-1985.) For the simple reasons that they will bring a world of knowledge to an institution that has been inward-looking for decades, and they will assist current administrators who have little management experience.

As Dartblog has now pointed out ad infinitum, virtually the entire Wright Administration was composed of College veterans of 20+ years experience. Even now, other than Steve Kadish and his wife, few senior members of the Administration have ever worked outside of Hanover. The exceptions to this rule, like relative newcomer Dean of the College Sylvia Spears, have no significant administrative experience at all.

In contrast, consultants like Bain spend their time understanding best practices throughout the public and private sectors. Not only have they worked with other institutions of higher learning, but also in lean competitive companies. Each client adds to their experience and base of knowledge. And given that Dartmouth is not competing directly with other schools or businesses, everything that a consultant has learned from previous clients can be freely passed on to us.

Of course, we could send our senior people out into the world of higher education to study how to do things better, and they could also look at strong private companies to better comprehend possible gains in technical areas like purchasing and back-office administration, but that would take them many months — time that we don’t have. And odds are that they won’t learn what consultants like Bain already know.

We need to have the confidence to bring in consultants. They will teach us what any local business who deals with Dartmouth already knows: the College is not “pretty efficient.” In fact, if you were to make that statement to a roomful of experienced Upper Valley businessmen, the laughter would not die down for several minutes.

Addendum: If President Kim brings in outside consultants, they will work only for him, and for the good of the institution. They won’t have loyalty to friends, neighbors and colleagues, and the whole range of relationships that have been like cement overshoes around Dartmouth’s feet. Dealing with Barry Scherr and Adam Keller should have already made this latter point clear to our young President.