Dartblog

From All the President’s Men

Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.
Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s all. Just… follow the money.

The Valley News’s Sports Editor Don Mahler has written a two-part series — below in the extended — in which he throws out ideas about how the College can extricate itself from its financial bind. He focuses on the athletics department as an area where cuts might be found. He even goes so far as to suggest that all minor sports might be cut to save money, if big donors don’t pony up to fill the budget hole.

Amazingly, Mahler begins his analysis without an essential number: what part of Dartmouth’s 2009 budget of $735,408,000 was devoted to athletics. That is not a publicly available figure. Still, it’s tough to reason about budgets and athletics without understanding the scope of your subject. Follow the money.

Secondly, he doesn’t take into account two numbers that he and his newspaper already do have: of the College’s 4,400 employees, only 155 of them work in athletics. That works out to be a whopping 3.5% of Dartmouth’s employees. One might conclude from that percentage figure that the total athletics budget is penny ante stuff in the context of overall Dartmouth spending. Not the big money.

Finally, he omits to ask how many employees worked for the College ten years ago, and just how many of these people were in the Athletics Department then? By my lights, returning to the College’s staffing levels of ten years ago would save us all the money that we need to balance the budget and more — but that is a story for another day.

However, the essential point in all of this is the utter inadvisability of cutting even a single team. The Dartmouth Experience takes place outside the classroom more often than inside it, and the people who leave Hanover with the deepest bonds to the institution and the very best memories are students who inhabit little worlds of shared achievement: sports teams, fraternities, cultural projects, clubs, the D, other extracurricular groups, and in my day, wonderfully cohesive dormitories.

To cut teams and leave in place superfluous administrators and extravagant staff benefits is not just to cut bone and leave fat, it is cutting vital organs.

Big Green, Bigger Money Woes

BY DON MAHLER
Valley News Sports Editor
Saturday, December 19, 2009

The last time Dartmouth College was forced to trim its payroll, the college cut 72 jobs to help make up for a $72 million endowment loss.