Dartblog

From the College’s press release about Michael Bloomberg’s recent Presidential Lecture:

President Kim, who recently completed his first year in office, launched the lecture series to “supplement the classroom experience with real-life lessons on innovation, collaboration, and leadership.” Kim will speak about “habits of the mind” in the second lecture on July 29, 2010. [Emphasis added]

Our dear President should try to be more thoughtful in his choice of words. He already has a brewing problem with the faculty, who increasingly feel cut out of the search process for senior administrators and other decisions where consultation should be the order of the day. If Kim is now going to characterize faculty members and the subject of their teaching as something other than real life, well, he is going to ruffle more feathers.

Of course, I am not going to defend abstruse theories of literary interpretation as being derived from close observation of the human condition, but there is plenty of research and teaching done at Dartmouth that is drawn from down-and-dirty investigation and that has direct application to policy and innovation: for example, Danny Blanchflower of the Economics Department did an extraordinary job of economic forecasting on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee just last year, and other Econ profs have held serious jobs in Washington; Hany Farid has developed revolutionary methods in digital forensics for authenticating paintings and understanding the modification of images; and Victor Petrenko’s understanding of ice will soon have wide-ranging ramifications. This list goes on in any number of areas; understanding the real world and the human condition is what faculty members at a liberal arts institution do, or at least perceive that they do.

For President Kim to voice the trope of the ivory tower, absent-minded professor who cannot teach “real-life lessons” does not do justice to our faculty; in fact, it will rile them up. In future, Jim Kim should take more care in his phrasing and thinking, lest he acquire a reputation for unreflective glibness.