Dartblog

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.

Government Professor Alan Stam, who left these climes several years ago to improve the University of Michigan, wrote the below piece at the time when the College was riven by the revelation that Dean of Admissions “King Karl” Furstenberg had written a letter on College stationary to the President of Swarthmore condemning varsity athletics (“football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours.”) Furstenberg announced his retirement the following year — to the great relief of Dartmouth’s coaches.

Stam later observed to me that he had been told that reprints of his article graced the office walls of college and high school coaches across the country.

Dartblog has already praised President Kim”s resolve in protecting all of the College’s varsity sports teams from budget cuts, and it is worth urging here that club sports teams be similarly protected. The number of club teams has soared since my day in Hanover; athletes less gifted than our varsity recruits still seek the joy of wearing green, and the communal pleasure of playing on a competitive team. Herewith Professor Stam’s memorable column:

In its Dec. 17 editorial that expressed support for Dartmouth Dean of Admissions Carl Furstenberg, the Valley News opined that, “(I)t’s hard to grasp the rationale for excluding that budding poet or philosopher in preference to a recruited athlete if providing a world class education is your mission.” Hard indeed. That is, if one falls prey to a couple of dubious assumptions.

First, to assert that recruited athletes have less value we must assume that recruited athletes cannot be budding poets or philosophers. Second, even if the first is true, we must also assume that budding poets and philosophers add more to other students’ education than do the athletes on campus. Not having access to the private information that one would need to actually base such judgments in fact, I can rely only on my own experiences, both as a varsity athlete in Cornell University’s rowing program and as a tenured professor in Dartmouth’s Government Department.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — The IOC will investigate the behavior of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal by swigging beer and champagne on the ice.

“I already have files on several of these girls,” Chief Giaccone was reported to have said. “Cigars is the least of it. I will seek to have their victory annulled and their medals returned to the IOC if it turns out that any Keystone Light or Korbel was involved in their celebration. This kind of behavior leads to utter lawlessness. Trust me, I know.”

Dartblog will follow this unfolding situation closely.

The Reverend Kent Dahlberg recently described a survey that Williams College does of its alumni five years after Commencement to gage their perception of a Williams education. Dartmouth should do the same, and while in that vein, here are a few more surveys that the College could conduct on a regular basis:

• Varsity team members should be polled each year on how effective their coaching has been. Our incoming AD should judge our coaches on more than their won/lost records. We need to understand how successful coaches are in developing and motivating their players.
• Incoming athletes should be surveyed on the strength of Dartmouth’s recruiting efforts. Athletes in past years have told me that the quality of recruiting varies wildly from school to school and team to team. Do we know how our competition is doing and how well we are doing in comparison?
• We should send admissions staffers to take campus tours at competing schools to see how they present themselves. Look at the entire admissions process. Secret shoppers are a business-world standard; we should follow suit.

President Kim is entirely correct that we must measure the effectiveness of everything that we do. But we should also compare what we do with the actions of our competitors. Over the long term, let’s try to be perfect; in the short run, we should make sure that we are the best.

Addendum: Reverend Dahlberg sheds further light on Williams’ alumni surveys:

My understanding is that Williams surveys its alumni every five years throughout their lives and careers (vs. simply one time five years after they graduated). So the school’s leadership is assessing how the liberal arts education they provided is serving its recipients or “customers” at age 27, 32, 27, 42, 47, 52, 57, 62, etc.

Another Addendum: Although the current athletes with whom I spoke have not filled out questionnaires, it seems that the Athletics Office does provide questionnaires for sophomore and senior athletes. And one alumnus has written in to say that he has done a number of questionnaires since graduation — a privilege that I have not heard of from other alumni, nor had myself. I stand corrected.

I got more than a little blowback regarding my post about the departure of Dean of Residential Life Marty Redman. The good Dean has many friends and supporters, though he also has many people who were critical of his performance — as Joe Malchow’s amendation showed.

But the main point of my remarks was that President Kim continues to pare down the bureaucracy and trim the ranks of President Wright’s Old Guard. The Kim administration is actively looking for new ideas, and new energy to put them into place. That’s good for Dartmouth.

I understand that Friends of Marty might be upset — and I apologize if he and they are offended — but our new President has larger aims than the continuance of business as usual. On October 26th at an open meeting on the budget crisis, President Kim referred to the tension between our “culture of caring” and “our greatest values.” Which of the two categories is more important to you?

Tris Wykes of the Valley News has a balanced and candid profile of the Dartmouth swim team program, coached by Jim Wilson. The piece’s use of statistics is refreshingly complete, and it reprises some of the themes that Dartblog has highlighted over the past months, to wit:

Wilson said he [had] sometimes wondered [while Kark Furstenberg was Dean of Admissions] whether staying at Dartmouth was worth the struggle to get prospects admitted. The coach said only two swimming recruits might be included in one year’s freshman class, while the next might include nine or 10. Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions from 1990-2006, was viewed by some in the college’s athletic community as difficult to work with, especially after a 2004 controversy that revealed his disparaging views on the Big Green’s football program.

Ceplikas said admissions outcomes are “much more predictable now,” not just for swimming and diving, but for all of Dartmouth’s athletic programs.

Such unaccustomed candor. Much welcomed.

Ex-Trustee Michael Chu ‘68 had a column in The D yesterday that, I must admit, leaves me more than a little mystified. Can anyone explain his concept of governance?

A trustee needs to arrive to all Dartmouth issues with a truly open mind, where the opinions of other trustees have equal weight in a sincere attempt by all to distinguish the enduring good of the College.

At its core lies the conviction that ultimately Dartmouth is better served by the Board’s collective wisdom rather than your own views. I now believe adhering to this is the highest expression of my love for Dartmouth.

At first, I thought that Mr. Chu was expressing the Leninist notion of democratic centralism, which Wikipedia accurately defines as follows:

Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party. The democratic aspect of this organizational method describes the freedom of members of the political party to discuss and debate matters of policy and direction, but once the decision of the party is made by majority vote, all members are expected to uphold that decision. This latter aspect represents the centralism. As Lenin described it, democratic centralism consisted of “freedom of discussion, unity of action.”

But Chu seems to eschew the notion that one should have views of one’s own. Perhaps Trustees should place their hands on one great Ouija Board, a kind of group-fed oracle, out of which wisdom will flow? Or should Trustees keep their thoughts to themselves, for fear of being deemed divisive — today’s pejorative of choice in Hanover?

Or maybe Chu is the product of the kind of 1960’s-style education that Ayn Rand described as “learning to smell the scent of the pack” — wherein one seeks to learn where the majority is going, and then follows happily along?

I mean, really, what can Chu mean by placing himself among those who, as he writes, “believe the future of a jewel born in 1769 is best assured by mobilizing the collective wisdom of the family”?

I hesitate to call the intellectual product of a Dartmouth Trustee incoherent, but I won’t hesitate for too long. I can’t for the life of me understand the mechanics of the executive decision-making process favored by Michael Chu.

Some members of the Executive Committee of my class are circulating a note in support of my opponents in the upcoming Alumni Trustee election. Its content gives a good sense of where governance at Dartmouth might be headed:

Both candidates were selected by the Dartmouth Alumni Council’s Nominating and Alumni Search Committee in a thorough review of dozens of qualified candidates. We believe in this method of candidate selection since it gives dedicated alumni from diverse backgrounds ample opportunity to assess the abilities of candidates to both add compelling value to the existing Board of Trustees and effectively work with the existing Trustees and President.

This election is important as it provides us with an opportunity to break from the divisive political process that has characterized our most recent elections. The new Association of Alumni rules that establish the election process for Dartmouth’s alumni trustee elections now permit the Alumni Council to nominate only one candidate for each open seat. [emphasis added]

Do you believe in this method of candidate selection, too? The Alumni Council’s Nominating and Alumni Search Committee is made up of only seven or eight people, plus the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, who is an ex officio member of the committee. This small committee interviews and chooses candidates for the Board, and then these candidates are presented — without prior identification or opportunity for review — to the Alumni Council for a ratification vote, which takes place immediately (and is almost always unanimous; this year one Councillor out of 90 dissented).

It appears that my classmates feel that the best way to “break from the divisive political process that has characterized our most recent elections” is to dispense with elections altogether. They want to let their little committee choose a single candidate for each open Trustee seat, have that candidate summarily approved by the Council, and avoid any discussion with those 69,000 pesky alumni out there who might have other ideas.

If I recall correctly, in the last century there were a good many nations that tried this kind of thing in their national politics, but very few of them do so today.

Paul Mirrengoff at Power Line has endorsed my candidacy for Alumni Trustee. I am grateful for the endorsement, and even more appreciative of his thoughtful analysis. Go to Powerline to read Paul’s thoughts with links here, or see the text below:

A word to our Dartmouth readers

Power Line
February 22, 2010
Posted by Paul at 8:45 PM

Dartmouth is holding elections for two trustee positions. Voting begins on March 10.

The Dartmouth power structure has selected Morton Kondracke and John Replogle to seek these position. Kondracke, the well-known journalist, will be unopposed. Replogle will face our friend Joe Asch, who gathered the petitions necessary to run against the establishment’s hand-picked candidate.

For me the Asch-Replogle race is a no-brainer, and I hope our readers will see it that way too. Joe Asch would bring a critical eye and a profound knowledge of all things Dartmouth to the Board. Replogle, as far as I can tell, is basically another corporate CEO who would jet in and out of the Upper Valley without adding anything distinctive to the Board. Indeed, as I’ll argue below, there is reason to think he will detract from the quality of the Board.