Dartblog

A few days ago, Dartblog posted on the diminution in the number of college students studying subjects in the humanities, and the distinction between the number of incoming freshmen at the College anticipating study in each of the three academic divisions and the number of eventual graduates in these areas. In response, I received a thoughtful note from Bill Carney ‘75:

As for your post the other day, I think Admissions will say they pay no attention to applicants’ academic preferences. Many applicants, especially boys, select sciences. That’s what they know and what they are good at. When they get to college, nearly half realize that: 1) they are not so good,; 2) they don’t want to do all the work; or 3) there are more interesting fields of study. (I changed from chemistry to philosophy based on all of the above. Then I got an MBA.) This consistent drop-off in sciences dwarfs any of the other changes in trends.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a shift away from the humanities and toward the social sciences. I’m just saying that Admissions doesn’t manage it.

High school kids are becoming more focused on careers and income. Everyone wants to manage a hedge fund. Why bother with being a general practitioner making only $300K per year, let alone a teacher. It’s sad, but people want a return on their tuition investment. (My older son got a masters in electrical engineering. The younger one chose business. I don’t think either took a humanities course that wasn’t required, despite my efforts to the contrary.)

Good luck.

Bill Carney

Note: Bill Carney ‘75 was a District Enrollment Director for approximately twelve years, for which he won the Karl Furstenberg Award several years ago, and he was an Alumni Councillor.

Here’s a prediction for you: in five years all Dartmouth teams will be training barefoot, including (and especially) distance runners — and so will recreational runners. At most, they will be wearing lightweight Vibram slippers with no special cushioning.

While I haven’t seen anyone running barefoot in Hanover during the winter, other than my wife, this innovation is acquiring the characteristics of a movement (it is well past the cult stage).

Ken Bob Saxton seems to be the guru of barefoot running; his web page maintains that he has been advancing the cause since 1997. Christopher MacDougall’s book popularized the idea. Academic research has provided solid experimental support. And on-the-ground experience has been so positive that the word is spreading via groups like the Metro Boston Barefoot Runners Group. In addition, the New York Times has done a good job covering the development of barefoot running.

The core observation driving barefoot running is that we are not built to slam our heels down on the ground with massive force each time that we take a stride. This gesture — even when softened by fat-heeled running shoes — sends a debilitating shock though our bodies. Fortunately, the elaborate bone and muscle structure of our feet and legs is designed to absorb the impact of running in a flexible, spring-like manner, as long as our feet land in a balanced, weight-on-the-balls-of-the-feet-and-mid-arch fashion — which is virtually impossible in post-1970’s running shoes.

I’ve been running barefoot indoors for about a month now, and the new springiness in my feet is something quite unexpected. Too many people have out-of-shape feet, no matter how fit they are muscularly and cardio-vascularly. In addition, my overall flexibillty seems to have improved; I used to call running The Anti-Stretch. No more.

Could it be that the human race’s 40-year experiment in radically altering the way that people run is coming to an end?

Warning: Don’t try this at home without reading up on the subject first.

Addendum: Here is a great hi-res video on barefoot running with the Harvard researcher, Daniel Lieberman, who has studied the subject in the greatest depth.

The Hanover Inn will soon have a little competition in the in-town lodging market: the Six South Street Hotel should be open by year’s end. Trumpeting its “edgy” design (oh, please), the hotel will have 69 rooms and 30 underground parking spaces.

Giving visitors a choice will put pressure on the College to upgrade the Inn, long a subject of concern in this space (see here and here). Burdened by Dartmouth’s heavy cost structure and an unresponsive management that has been repeatedly cited by the State of New Hampshire for labor law violations, the Inn is rarely full. And its lovely restaurant, the Daniel Webster Room, which should be the finest dining establishment between Boston and Montreal, closes in the evening due to a lack of business.

If the Inn were a better managed business, one wonders if a new hotel like Six South Street would have opened. In any event, welcome.

The parallel websites of Mort Kondracke and John Replogle currently contain the following post:

Last Wednesday night (March 3) President Kim met with some 700 alumni at the Dartmouth Club of New York. When asked in the public Q&A session what qualifications he’d like to see in Trustees to be elected by alumni beginning March 10, President Kim “I think we need someone who is wildly successful in his career, who would bring to the Board a wealth of experiences that would help us to take Dartmouth to new heights. I also think that what we don’t need is someone who wants to second-guess everything we do and get involved in micromanaging our administration around operational details that are really my responsibility. The Board needs a big thinker who is an accomplished, proven leader, and I need a true partner whose counsel I can seek. I’ve developed that relationship with many on the board who are world-class leaders of global companies and I think that’s a great model.”

After reading President Kim’s quotation, it seems that many people took these remarks as an endorsement of my candidacy for Trustee, at least according to President Kim, as he is quoted in The D today:

Kim told The Dartmouth he wanted to emphasize that he has not endorsed a particular candidate.

“I have just been hearing from so many different places that they have the impression that I have endorsed a particular candidate, in this case Joe Asch, and I just want to make it really clear — that is not my role here,” Kim said.

I wonder what impression the 700 alumni in NY took away from the meeting?

No, no, not the College’s English department. The Decline of the English Department is the title of an engaging piece in The American Scholar by William Chace, the former president of both Wesleyan and Emory. It received a David Brooks’ Sydney Award as one of 2009’s best pieces of commentary.

Chace laments the decline of the humanities in general in the academy, and more specifically, of English:

First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

I’ll refrain from summarizing Chace’s thoughts, which bear close study, but I do want to add the observation that the admissions departments of our institutions of higher learning seem to have played some role in this development.

Perhaps this is a chicken and egg problem, but we should not be surprised if nationally only 16% of students graduate in the humanities when only approximately that percentage of matriculating students express a primary academic interest in the division before setting foot on campus. Foolish consistency is either the hobgoblin of little minds, or it could point to the existence of numerical quotas of some kind. From the ever helpful Dartmouth Fact Book’s profile of incoming freshmen’s academic preference:

Perhaps one of Dartblog’s faithful readers in the Admissions Department can enlighted us — on a confidencial basis if so desired. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds: does the Admissions Department seek to reach such consistent percentage figures, or is this just how things happen to turn out?

All that said, reality once again proves more interesting than expected. It seems that though many students arrive in Hanover with low expectations about the humanities, the multiple charms of the faculty in that division do exert a certain pull:

Double majors are counted twice here, but still.

Addendum: It is interesting to see the accretion of students in the above tables to the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and their marked attrition from the Sciences. It seems that only half of Freshman Week scientists end up majoring in the sciences. I wonder why?

Acting AD Bob Ceplikas ‘78 stood up for Datmouth’s basketball players in a Letter to the Editor after a recent Valley News story criticized the skills of individual members of the varsity team. This writer has observed that in the Dartmouth Athletic Department’s own sports reporting, players are almost never identified by name after “defensive miscues,” etc. Ceplikas’ letter:

To the Editor:

On behalf of Dartmouth’s coaches and student-athletes, I am writing to express our deep disappointment in the Valley News for including such personally humiliating comments about individual student-athletes in its coverage of last Saturday’s men’s basketball game. We respect the media’s responsibility to report on achievements and failures alike, and we understand that the media will not always share our perspective. We are truly dismayed, however, that the Valley News found it necessary to publicly insult the athletic abilities and intelligence of individual amateur athletes using such unduly harsh terms as “hapless”, “limited basketball sense”, and “hands of stone”, among others. We are hopeful that the paper will treat these dedicated student-athletes with more respect and dignity in the future.

Robert A. Ceplikas
Acting Director of Athletics & Recreation
Dartmouth College
Hanover

And the offending sections of the VN article:

Green Drops Home Finale
By Tris Wykes
Valley News Staff Writer

Hanover — One of the worst seasons in recent Dartmouth men’s basketball history concluded its home slate in typical fashion last night, the Big Green losing 76-57 to Brown…

[Brown pivot] Mullery’s dominance, much of it against hapless freshman center Matt LaBove, drew other defenders to him and allowed his Bears teammates leisurely time and space to set up and follow through. Brown made 10 of 24 attempts from 3-point range, held a 24-12 rebounding advantage in the second half and improved to 11-18, 5-7…

Dartmouth’s list of deficiencies is lengthy. The Big Green has no go-to scorer, no true point guard and no paint player with any true combination of grit and finesse. Guard Jabari Trotter needs work on his left hand, forward David Rufful is hot one game and ice cold the next and forward Mbiyimoh Ghogomu might be the team’s best athlete, but is out of control half the time he’s on the floor.

Under the basket, junior Clive Weeden is a warrior but more comfortable away from the lane. Conversely, LaBove can’t regularly score from outside five feet and has such a high center of gravity that he’s constantly being knocked off-balance. Sophomore Herve Kouna is a physical specimen with hands of stone and limited basketball sense.

Never one to spare the rod, Dartblog has to conclude that Cep has something of a point here — especially given the overarchingly condemnatory nature of these personal criticisms. The basketball program has struggled for a while, and journalism like this does not help anyone.

Although the Dartmouth Fact Book provides extensive details on the admissions of different ethnic groups to the College, it does not offer any information at all on how successful these groups are at graduating — which I think is the necessary bookend to admissions data. This omission must be intentional because the administration gathers precisely this data in order to submit it to the NCAA, as do all other colleges and universities with competitive athletic programs.

The College energetically recruits Native Americans (a group more frequently called American Indians beyond the Hanover Plain; see the NCAA form below, too) to come to Hanover: members of different tribes currently constitute 4-5% of each incoming class. However, six years after matriculating, only a little more than three quarters (77%) of these students have received a degree — a result below the College average.

These figures have only varied slightly since 2001.

Dartmouth could do better here. If the College is going to make special efforts to recruit certain students in furtherance of our historical mission, it should make equally concerted efforts to ensure that they graduate. It is time to re-establish our commitment to the Charter; extra academic advising and other resources could help American Indians graduate as frequently as members of other groups. And overall, the College should look at why, according to an AEI study, 7% of all students have failed to earn a degree six years after matriculating.

Note: Curiously, the figures in the AEI study, and the statistics that the College submits to the NCAA, diverge slightly.

Addendum: The goal of the NCAA’s data gathering in this instance is to study the graduation rate of students receiving athletic scholarships. Dartmouth offers neither athletic nor merit-based scholarships, so the College provides no information at all to the NCAA on the graduation rate of, for example, our football players. However, Coach Teevens informs me that in his five years here he has had but a single player transfer to another school and only one in academic difficulty, a student who is still working to finish his degree. Otherwise all of his players have graduated, most of them after four years — undoubtedly with a future Treasury Secretary and General Electric CEO among them.

I had planned to write a brief post about the multiple talents of Dartmouth undergrads, and then perhaps segue into a pitch for this space’s favorite team — women’s hockey — whose rugged defenseman, Katie Horner, showed a tunefulness as an Idol that opposing players who tried to take the puck from her last season had not heretofore appreciated.

But that post is not to be. For in the middle of a Michael Jackson group medley, in the spoken section of Thriller:

And whosoever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell

a Jackson-suited figure came upon the stage. His voice was full and low. Dressed in a fedora, leather jacket, loafers with white socks, and a single glove, he glided forward in a crouch — his face hidden. He moved well, and many in the crowd wondered who he was, given that the six Idols were already on stage and the judges were accounted for, too.

And then he turned, his face popped up, the band hit the chorus, and to the ecstatic roars of the rising crowd, we all recognized a beaming President Kim.

Unannounced, with the audience unawares, his coup de théâtre had worked perfectly. He remained on the stage for the next minute or so, dancing merrily with the Idols, as the audience whooped and cheered.

I won’t go on beyond this for fear that readers will think that I am getting soft, but folks, let me say this: we are in the presence of star power. Jim Kim has the makings of a beloved President.

Addendum: Even though there is no question in my mind that Katie Horner ‘11 has the best slapshot among the Idols, Dan Van Deusen ‘11 won the competition, followed by Kevin Oh ‘12 and Jamie Hwang ‘10. Go figure.

Even though certain members of the administration soft-pedal today’s oversubscription woes, or assert that the problem has been with us for all time, there are still unhappy parents and students out there:

I am a Dartmouth parent with a child who graduated a couple of years ago. I am also a Dartmouth alum, and I have been a very strong financial supporter of Dartmouth.

My son had to be creative in various ways to solve course oversubscription and scheduling problems. He was a dual math and engineering major.

At one point, he wanted to take Meir Kohn’s Economics 26 course, The Economics of Financial Intermediaries and Markets. Economics 1 was a prerequisite. Economics 1 was always oversubscribed during the time slots in which he did not have required courses. He solved the problem by discussing his interest with Professor Kohn, who waived the prerequisite requirement. Of course, my son was at a significant disadvantage because all of the technical material was new.

In another term, a required course for each of his majors was offered only at the same time. And there was no other term that one of these courses could be taken without delaying graduation for an extra year. My son talked the math professor into letting him take the math course at the same time as the engineering course, with the only classroom requirement being attendance for exams. Of course, it is very hard to get a grade higher than a B if you never go to class. As a parent paying $5,000 per class, I don’t think we received our money’s worth in this situation.

As for my son’s math professors, his experience was exactly the opposite of what the Development Department tells me when they are asking for money. Of his first seven professors, one was tenure-track, one was a one-term visitor, two were research instructors (post-PhD grad students), two were grad students (though one was very good in the classroom), and the last one was an adjunct (non-tenure-track) professor. Just because I list only six non-tenure-track professors out of seven does not mean that there were not others. It just means that I gave up counting at six.

Note: The above observations are backed up in a column in The D today by freshman Suril Kantaria:

The trend is clear: many students, particularly freshmen, often do not receive their first-choice class selections.

The significance of this column goes beyond the experience and the opinion of one freshman. The decision of The D’s Op-Ed Editor to publish the piece testifies to its relevance to many students.

Another Note: A second parent opines:

I’m the parent of a ‘10. There is no question that underprogramming of certain courses, or poor annual scheduling, has negatively affected my kid’s course selection process and his ability to pursue (or even sample) multiple major fields. His experience has involved similar “creativity,” usually waiving out of a prerequisite. As a result, he takes the course out of sequence, without the prior material as background. Bad idea, both as an introduction to a field, and in what he gets out of the course. This course programming/scheduling situation promotes a pre-professional, one-track approach to what is supposed to be a broad liberal arts education. This seems to occur in the Econ and Government areas and, I have been told, in Biology also.

The NYT had a good piece not too long ago describing the increased role of adjunct (non-tenured, non-tenure track) professors at institutions of higher learning.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

The Times article points readers to several sites where information can be had about the statistical breakdown of a school’s faculty, but later the article wisely advises that prospective students and parents ask what percentage of a school’s courses are taught by professors in each category. A good idea.

Let’s look at these two issues as they relate to Dartmouth. According to the Dartmouth Factbook, at the end of 2008, the College’s faculty broke down as follows:

Tenured Faculty: 283
Tenure-track Faculty: 98
Adjunct Faculty (full-time): 79
Adjunct Faculty (part-time): 100

A friend who is a data cruncher extraordinaire adduced the following figure for me: one third of the College’s courses in the fall term of 2009 were taught by non-tenured/non-tenure-track faculty. However, a few years ago, a senior administrator told me that over 40% of all classes were taught by adjunct faculty.

The reason for the disparity between the number of faculty members and the courses taught by the two groups has to do with the teaching load carried by professors in the different categories. The College’s tenured/tenure-track professors in the Humanities and Social Science divisions teach four courses/year and those in the Sciences teach three courses; however, adjunct faculty members can teach two courses per quarter, so their annual teaching load can surpass that of tenured/tenure-track profs.

As in all things, the issue here is balance. Any institution needs a certain percentage of adjunct professors — people to whom it does not make a long term commitment. For example, these flexible relationships allow the administration to shift resources from departments less favored by students over time to more popular ones. And often adjunct faculty are the highly qualified spouses of tenured professors, for whom there is no available tenured position. Their teaching and research can be first-rate.

That said, adjuncts can also be department orphans, excluded from departmental meetings and subject to little or no oversight. As the saying goes, quality may vary.

Overall, the College is doing far better than the national averages cited by the Times in this area. Let’s hope that economic pressures don’t push us away from a balanced commitment to undergraduates.

Trustee Candidate Mort Kondracke has an interesting nugget on his website:

… when a student is accepted at both Dartmouth and any other Ivy League school, we lose the overwhelming number to every one but Cornell.

If true, this is very disturbing information, but I wonder where Mort obtained it? In order to get verification, I went to the source — in the usual Dartblog manner — in this case, to the estimable Dan Parish ‘89 of the Admissions Office. Herewith his reponse:

Joe,

Thank you for your message and for your question.

I don’t believe that there is any publicly available information on the numbers of students who choose Dartmouth as compared to another college when admitted to both.

I assume that these numbers are not public in part because the data that Dartmouth and other institutions collect on these trends are based on self-reported student information (there is no way to share individual admissions results, student-by-student, among institutions).

Thanks again - sorry not to have more information,

Dan

Dan Parish
Director of Admissions Recruitment and Communication
Dartmouth College

The chart to the right accompanied a NYT story by David Leonhardt from 2006. It summarizes a survey of 3,200 high school seniors at 500 schools across the country. While the College does poorly against HYP (93%, 88% and 81% respectively of graduating high school students would choose those schools over the College), we lose only marginally to Brown and Columbia, and we take more students than we lose among seniors contemplating four years in Ithaca or downtown Philly.

These are not great results, but neither do they indicate an “overwhelming” preference for our sister Ivies (except Cornell).

The great thing about the Internet is that a writer can link to sources. I’ll follow up with Mort and ask him where he obtained his info.

Addendum: It looks like Mort will not be revealing his sources on this one, according to his official campaign manager, Stephanie Lewin:

Mr. Asch,

I am not choosing to communicate with you any longer as you violated a personal trust by publishing my personal email to the larger community.

Stephanie Lewin

What a shame. I really am interested to see if Mort’s assertion is true.

Let’s play a parlor game and see what you would do if you had to make the decisions that President Kim is called upon to take.

Scenario 1: A wealthy alum offers the College an inflation-adjusted annuity of $500,000/year. Would you: a) hire three professors; b) re-hire six newly laid-off clerical workers?

Scenario 2: Your cost-cutters tell you that by using a computerized payroll system, you can lay off six clerical workers and use the savings to hire three professors. Would you: a) lay off the clerical workers and hire three professors; b) protect employment in the Upper Valley and keep the clerical workers on staff?

In a nutshell, these are among the issues facing President Kim. Folks like Dartmouth Students Stand with Staff and the Gang of 75 would seemingly choose Answer b) in both instances. On the other hand, Economics Professor Doug Irwin and this writer roll their eyes that anyone could even contemplate anything other than Answer a). And I expect so would the parents of any student paying tuition to study in Hanover.

What would you do? Do you value the avoidance of short-term dislocation to the lives of real people over the long-term health of the College?

President Kim has given us his answer. In The D today, a story describes how in numerous departments the hiring of needed faculty members continues apace — despite the layoffs that are taking place around us. That’s leadership.

As I have said before, we no longer have a split-the-difference President. Jim Kim has a vision for excellence at Dartmouth and he is not turning away from it despite pressures from people with other concerns.

Note: Ironically, The D’s story details that two of the newly hired professors will be Professors of English. Of the members of Gang of 75, 22 were English profs, who, it seems — when push comes to shove for their own department — stand for academic excellence over the interests of the staff. At least they support in practice the values that they cannot abide in theory.

Another Note: An alert reader urges me to clarify how three new profs could cost the College $500k. This figure is what is called in industry a fully loaded cost. It takes into account fringe benefits, payroll taxes, support functions, and all other overheads. These latter items are such a burden to the College that $500k could probably only get us three up-and-coming faculty members, not three highly regarded full professors.

A senior adminsrtrator expressed the view to me on Friday that the currently-much-discussed problem of class oversubscriptions at the College has long been a feature of Dartmouth student life — and if students from the 1990’s and before don’t recall it, then that is just an indication of their poor memories.

I have talked to scores of students from the last century, and when I ask how often they were refused entry to a class, their standard response is a quizzical look, and then the remark that they were never refused entry to a class — that being one of the great things about Dartmouth. They usually go on to say that they know of nobody from their time at the College who could not get into a desired class (with the occasional exception of a prized seminar with a star visitor).

This jibes with my own recollection of an earlier era, when small classes in all departments were wonderfully common (I ended up in three <10-student seminars in my sophomore summer — what a mistake!).

If you were a student in one of the 1990’s classes and you encountered problems in getting into classes — or if you had friends who did — can you write to me at Mail@Dartblog.com and tell me about it. Thanks in advance. And if you had no trouble at all getting into all of your courses, and none of your friends did either, please feel free to write in, too.

The NYT has an interview today with Harry Markopolos, a securities specialist who tried for years to convince the SEC that Bernie Madoff was a fraud.

How refreshing to hear direct language: clear, hard, unpretentious. No Victorian gentility for this guy. He does not let politesse get in the way of the truth as he sees it.

Shame about the brown suit, however.

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has a multi-part series on its website that reviews Dartmouth’s recent alumni involvement in the governance of the College. Entitled Alumni Democracy at Dartmouth College, the final installment, Changing the Culture, describes our alumni’s uniquely active role in campus affairs.