Dartblog

Sam Buntz ‘11 should file away his “Bored of Trustees” column in Friday’s D under the heading of “Things That Will Deeply Embarrass Me Once I Have Learned How the World Works.” His piece opines that the controversy over elections to the Board is irrelevant to him: his implication is that the College should dispense with such squabbles altogether and simply allow people to get on with their work. One must wonder what he thinks about elections for federal and state government offices.

What Sam misses is an understanding that civilizations, countries, companies and colleges in their present form are a compendium of myriad past decisions large and small. Perhaps he thinks that the present financial crisis at the College is simply due to a mysterious drop in the endowment, and does not stem from the Wright administration’s bloating of its personnel count by over 40% in the space of ten years. Or he might believe that course oversubscriptions just happened, and had nothing to do with the declining percentage of the College’s budget devoted to the faculty, and poor past decisions made about allocating faculty members between departments.

The world around us is there because people of greater or lesser ability made specific, conscious choices. Someone gifted chose to build Baker Library; someone with less of an eye left us with Berry. Someone decided to add more deans, and then stood by as future Nobel Laureate Mike Gazzaniga ‘61 left the College for U.C. Santa Barbara. Someone decided to give tenure to philosophy professors who had been deemed unworthy by their own department, and thereby led to the gutting of a first-class area of the College.

Someone decided to end parity on the Board of Trustees — telling a generation of alumni that their voice did not matter. Try asking many of them for a financial contribution now.

Yes, Sam, there is a reality out there. The College’s reputation, and students’ actual experience, will improve — or decline — over the upcoming days, weeks, months and years because of decisions made each day by President Kim and the Board of Trustees. Who we have as our President and who sits on the Board is of real importance. Even you, Sam, will acknowledge that our country and our College have had better and lesser Presidents. Does Bush equal Obama? Does Wright Equal Kim?

The same observation holds true for the Board, which sat idly by over the past decade as the College slid both in the rankings and in the reality of students’ daily experience (try to find someone from before the Class of 1999 who was turned away from a class; you may be able to do so, but it will take you a good while).

The world is not a static place. Decisions made today will change our world tomorrow. Who makes those decisions, and what they are, matter a great deal. And that is true even if Sam Buntz ‘11 is blithely happy with his life right now.