Dartblog

I really should let this go, now that Jim Kim has taken his degree-filled carpetbag and headed south, but at least some of his recent spin must to be noted for the record.

In an interview that he gave to the Alumni Magazine in the second week of May, Kim assured us that his longtime colleague, Steven Kadish, would not leave Dartmouth along with him:

Q: Is your executive vice president and CFO, Steve Kadish, who also worked with you at Harvard, going to leave Dartmouth with you for the World Bank?

A: I think Steve’s going to stay here for a while. I’ve been told we have a fantastic staff at the World Bank. Steve and I have a great chemistry, but I think he still has a lot to contribute here at Dartmouth, and he and Carol Folt work brilliantly together. I think they will maintain the momentum that we’ve built through the strategic planning process and help take Dartmouth to the next level.

About two months after Kim’s interview, Kadish announced that he would be taking a senior position at Northeastern University in Boston, where Kadish kept his home during his short stint in Hanover. Given the pace of academic hiring and the fact that Kadish’s wife Linda Snyder took a job a Tufts University in Boston on the same day, no one should believe that the Kadish/Snyder duo were not actively looking for a job as Kim made his remarks.

However, perhaps Kim did not know at that time — or perhaps he did? — that World Bank rules do not allow a President to parachute cronies and friends into senior jobs there.

I recently learned the term humblebrag. I don’t know if it will stick in the language, but Jim Kim’s below answer will make it easy for you to understand the word:

Q: Looking back on your three years as Dartmouth president, do you wish you had any mulligans?

A: One thing I would definitely do more of is just walk around campus, drop in on classes, talk to students and faculty and spend more “down time” with the community. Unfortunately, with the budget situation, fundraising work, the strategic planning process and many small crises, I didn’t have time to just hang out. Maybe tackling the most difficult problems first is just in my bones, but I wish I’d had more down time with the community.[Emphasis added]

What a guy, humble and incredibly brave at the same time — and he can’t help himself!

In a Washington Post story describing a World Bank press conference, Kim was quoted as follows:

“There are so many sources of capital in the world these days that often that is not going to be our role,” said Kim, noting that his experience running a major university prepared him to manage an organization that he regards as “a huge academic institution. . . . There is a tremendous amount of research and analytic firepower.”[Emphasis added]

The College is now a major university, is it? And Kim did such a bang-up job of running the place that he is all set to manage the 9,000-employee World Bank. Wow. You have to have real chutzpah to make that assertion publicly.

My sense has always been that Jim Kim hired on at Dartmouth after markedly overstating the work he had done in public health. Now he has landed at the World Bank, and he is vaunting his supposed achievements as Dartmouth’s President. Pretty slick, don’t you think?