Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/11/24/block_and_tackle.php
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The 'Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience'—simmering, simmering, simmering, for some time now—just came to a boil. On November 13th, at a gala launch event at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, the College announced a new $1.3 billion fundraising initiative, $457.5 million of which has already been raised. "It's a terribly important moment in Dartmouth's history," President James Wright told the Valley News last week. "But obviously institutions like this are always engaged in discussions about ways in which we can take advantage of opportunities, in which we can address some issues that we have, and in which friends can make an investment in making Dartmouth a stronger place."
Only an idiot would say that a billion dollars would not make Dartmouth a stronger place. It's what kind of place, though, what kind of opportunities are to be taken advantage of. If you give a close reading to what President Wright is saying here—and, for that matter, doing here—it's certainly possible to be less than sanguine. It's because his style of discourse works like a block and tackle.
A block and tackle's an assemblage of ropes and pulleys that allows you to trade force for distance. It's rigged so you can hoist a certain weight while expending less energy than you would using a simple winch alone; but in order to do so, you must reel in far more rope. Essentially, this is what he's up to. President Wright has managed to put huge things into motion, with a minimum of controversy, by doing it slowly, surreptitiously, by degrees. A speech here, a little twist to policy there, a massive capital campaign—and suddenly, Dartmouth is entirely different.
Forgive me if I've mistook the measure of the man. And don't think this an exercise in conspiracy and the paranoid style. Let me show you what I mean.
Discounting the 'initiatives' into the realm of student life, the central issue of President Wright's administration has been the tension at Dartmouth between its strengths as a college and what he argues are its strengths as a university. He often reiterates what he said in his Inaugural: that Dartmouth is "a university in all but name." "We are a university in terms our activities and our programs," he went on, "but one that remains a college in name and in basic values and purposes."
This tension is often erroneously cast in terms of research versus teaching, as if they are in competition with each other, and that an emphasis on one will necessarily lead to the detriment of the other. But few faculty members, I think, sink to either extreme, because the two are mutually reinforcing. They work together to keep the mind limber, in motion.
Rather, the tension is institutional. It's a question of priorities. Dartmouth is known, more or less, for the quality of its undergraduate instruction. It is decidedly a college, with a few affiliated satellite schools in business, engineering, and medicine thrown in for good measure. But President Wright has emphasized, again and again, and with increasing frequency, that his loyalties lie with the university ideal. The undergraduate portion is only a constituent of a larger machine, instead of the engine.
In an address to the general faculty on October 25th, he said, "I have often described Dartmouth as providing the strongest undergraduate experience in the country—this is our niche, this is our strength, this is our ambition." Still, he tends to deflect his own formulations. "But we all understand," he went on, "that Dartmouth's strength and reputation also derive from the growing quality of the professional schools." The pieties to College are anodynes; the qualifiers for University are underscored. Block and tackle.
President Wright's catechism of zippy catch-phrases serve the same purpose: Strategic Vision for Tomorrow,—Student Life Initiative,—Forever New,—Being Better and Being Dartmouth. Give any one of these real examination and they fall apart. Look at that last one. At an Alumni Council meeting a while back, Wright said, "It is time for us all to join together and to say that Dartmouth with today's students continues to be a better place even as it continues to be Dartmouth. These are not conflicting things but are essential to each other—being better and being Dartmouth." It should be self-evident that a thing can improve without losing its fundamentals. So why emphasize it?
This is more than semantics. By consistently reducing the sense of 'the College' to a rhetorical nicety, little more than a turn of phrase, it strips away meaning. It takes those "basic values and principles," as he put it in the Inaugural, for granted. It goes without saying what happens at Dartmouth to things that are taken for granted. Here's another telling passage from the same address:
Our traditions embody Dartmouth's core values—they have enriched us as an institution. Here at Dartmouth the sound of feet crunching on snow, the look and feel of soft September sunsets, the horizons marked by granite hills and large vistas, and a campus filled with secluded places, here these are not simply poetic abstractions. They are things that shape memories that mark lifetimes and they continue to bind generations of Dartmouth's sons and daughters to each other and to this special place.
A voluptuous piece of felicity, this; and I agree with him—the College is an extraordinary, unforgettable place. Who could possibly say otherwise? But this, too, is a dodge: a landscape is not a tradition. President Wright could have as easily been describing a postcard as a core value.
So it's true: it is a terribly important moment in Dartmouth's history. Dartmouth is obviously on the way to becoming a small university. It is this, rather, that is our niche, and our ambition. And though many will still love it, I don't see how anyone can hold fast to the idea that this place will be a small College much longer—three, four, two decades, tops? What is missing in all this is what President Wright told the Valley News was taking place: engagement and discussion. The business of conversation is deferred by the block and tackle.
The gradual transition from College to University will not be easy, and perhaps the new capital campaign will help grease the way. This is one of the few instances where I hope I'm completely and utterly off the mark. For the life of a university is not the life of a college.
An example. Harvard, in 1936, tried to pull the old bait-and-switch with George Bernard Shaw, offering him an honorary degree if he would participate in the university's tricentennial festivities. "If Harvard would celebrate its three-hundredth anniversary by burning itself to the ground and sowing its site with salt," he replied, "the ceremony would give me the liveliest satisfaction as an example to all the other famous old corrupters of youth, including Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne etc. etc. etc."
Of course, he didn't mention Dartmouth College.
Whatever the credentials of this institution as an old corrupter of youth, it is certainly not a famous one, at least in the sense Shaw was thinking, and for that we should be glad. Most come to Dartmouth because it is distinctive: because it is not a small university, but a very fine College. It is not a college in name only, but a College in a very real and visceral sense. And during this time of Thanksgiving we should, I think, be thankful for what we have—while we still have it.