The President's Scholars

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, April 22, 1998

I was hopeful as I sat at the Presidential indoctrination of James Wright. Previous Presidents have been easy to discount — McLaughlin for his intellectual irrelevance, Freedman for his narrow, grad school-chic ideologies. In retrospect, though, both men were way out of place on Hanover Plain: McLaughlin belonged to the mahogonied Midwestern boardroom, Freedman to the formica Cambridge study cubicle.

Jim Wright is a a different story. This man had spent thirty years in Hanover as one of the school's most popular teachers, with faculty and students alike. True, Wright may be Freedman's personal and ideological lackey, but if political delusion was a mortal sin we would have damned many of our best minds a generation ago.

The more he spoke, the more confident I became. He had impressive intellectual credentials. He knew the College and its traditions inside and out. Teachers whose opinions I respect couldn't seem to say enough good things about him.

He seemed, at his indoctrination, the academic incarnation of Garrison Keillor, offering up blandly soothing, Great-Lakes inflected grandfatherly gobbledyguk about Dartmouth's (duly sanitized) past, present and future. I was stunned — I might actually see eye-to-eye with a Dartmouth College administrator.

But then, halfway through his ceremony, Wright beamed his broadest smile, and promptly stubbed his great big Midwestern toe. 'My vision of Dartmouth is of a research community,' intoned Grandpa Academe. 'Dartmouth is a research university [already] in all but name, and we are not going to be deflected from our purpose.'

Heady stuff indeed.

I encourage the reader to consider without prejudice my interview with Roger Noll, Professor of Economics at Stanford University (page 7). Noll, who supports the research university, recently authored a book detailing the contemprary crises of these institutions.

When I pressed this staunch and prominent supporter of the research university, he said, 'Professors at teaching Colleges [like Dartmouth College] spend twice as much time with their undergraduates as do Professors at research universities.'

Dartmouth is an Ivy-League anomaly, distinct and happy in rustic isolation. Keep us away from the trendy TA mob, the gods and demigods of the academic pantheon. Keep us away from the superprofessors, the superconductors, the supermotivated ideologues that flock to the research university. Keep us here, with mentors, fellowship, and study. Keep this place Dartmouth College, not Wright University.

I do not deny the benefits of the research university. Academic training grounds are important; they encourage intellectual debate and creative thought.

Dartmouth, however, need not join the fray. We will, should Wright's prophecy fulfill itself, be lost in the competitive shuffle. We are light years behind Harvard, Chicago, Columbia in funding, facilities, and research faculty. Better to tout our distinctiveness and rely on alumni devotion to carry us than to trade in our traditon for token government grants.

There are many things I love about Dartmouth. I have yet to see one of them replicated at Harvard, Chicago, or Columbia. There's a logical reason, too — not one of them is possibly reproduced in the research university.

Wright's administration may still prove productive. Grandpa Academe must, however, break from the academic herd, and fashion himself a champion of teaching, learning, discussion, and fellowship — education, Dartmouth style. After thirty years here, he knows how to do it. I just hope he will.

The President's Scholars

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