The Devil You Don't Know

Friday, November 4, 2005

Even though Halloween has come and gone, what you will read in this issue ofThe Dartmouth Review may frighten and horrify you. While we are not featuring any reviews of witch-hunting manuals this issue, [see TDR 7/22/2005] the story of Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt's and Associate Dean for Humanities Leonore Grenoble's abuses of power may shock you all the same. Young children, pregnant women, and those of faint heart are urged not to read further.

As Carol Szurkowski reports on page six, both Folt and Grenoble over-stepped their authority considerably when they changed the grades of students without professors' knowledge. While there may have been mitigating factors involved in both cases—Appleton, for one, should have made his grading criteria more clear to his students—the insouciance with which grades were changed without professors' knowledge is startling at best and potentially unethical. These pages have been concerned with grade inflation in the past [see TDR 3/1/2002], but if a complaint to the Dean's office is all a student needs to raise their GPA, a Dartmouth mark might soon have the same approximate value as a German mark circa 1923. For a look to the future, one has to only consider Harvard, where more than ninety percent of seniors graduated with honors a few years ago. When students are allowed to change a grade merely by volume of their complaints to the Dean's office, not only are all other students' grades cheapened, but any meaning of the grade as a measure of learning and achievement is lost.

Of course, Folt and Grenoble are not solely to blame for this phenomenon. It is partially the result of domineering parents who demand high grades, oftentimes at the expense of actual learning. After all, students sometimes benefit from low marks themselves. A student who receives a failing grade and is sent home on academic probation for a term might incur the wrath of his parents, but he will also hopefully be able to re-evaluate priorities, re-group, and return to Dartmouth ready to take education more seriously.

But Folt and Grenoble's very actions speak to a larger problem within the Dartmouth administration. By changing students' grades behind professors' backs, they were striving for a solution that minimized conflict and appeased all of the involved parties: students rid themselves of grades they considered to be burdensome, the professors were mollified by virtue of their ignorance of the deans' actions, and Folt and Grenoble defused a potential scandal. It was defused, at least, until Appleton was alerted to Folt's erasure of his students' grades.

Over the past several years, the same disturbing trend has emerged within President James Wright's policies. Like Folt and Grenoble's behavior in the recent grade-changing quandary, Wright has displayed a remarkable talent for behaving in a fashion similar to what Herbert Hoover once called FDR—"a chameleon on plaid." Lacking a core vision for the College, Wright resorts instead to attempting to be all things to all people, never makes a tough decision unless forced to, and reverses course whenever convenient according to the currents of campus politics. The result, however, ends up looking more like the vacillating John Kerry than the wily FDR: by attempting to please everyone, he pleases no one.

The aftermaths of Wright's attempts at politicking are not hard to see. A major initiative like the SLI, as ignorant as it may be of Dartmouth's student culture, (see Prof. Hoyt Alverson's report on Dartmouth's drinking culture on page eight), is eviscerated over recent years and left meaningless; the swim team is first cut under budgetary pressure but then reinstated amid protests; Zeta Psi is derecognized for relatively harmless, if tasteless actions while Theta Delta Chi is let off with a slap on the wrist for more serious offenses; Wright claims that he is striving to increase Dartmouth's research prestige, but allows Michael Gazzaniga, one of the College's few super-star professors, to leave for UC-Santa Barbara and allows Dartmouth's research grant funding to drop almost ten percent over the last year (from $205 million in 2004 to $187 million in 2005). It isn't that Wright's policies are misguided—it's that there are no policies at all, just an ad hoc series of initiatives and face-saving measures. Scott Glabe's detailed exploration of the proposed changes to the Alumni Association constitution on page ten just one example of Wright's self-serving policies. And when a tone so devoid of leadership is struck by the top of the College's administration, it is only echoed by the chorus of lower administrators, by Folt and Grenoble among many others.

The construction of the new McLaughlin cluster and Tuck Mall dormitories is left as one of Wright's few concrete accomplishments. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the College's budget remains shrouded in Delphic mystery—if it were revealed, the administration would have to stake out positions on what programs it is choosing to fund and why. And G-d forbid anyone try to have an informed discussion with Wright on what his priorities are.

The same cannot be said of Dartmouth's previous presidents. As heinous and misguided as his leadership may have been for the College, James Freedman at least set forth a stated agenda and laid out a vision for where he wanted to take Dartmouth. Wright may open his address to the faculty, as he did this past week, by claiming that "the state of the College in its 237th year is excellent," but empirical evidence suggests that few agree with him. Many faculty members are either searching out greener pastures elsewhere, like Michael Gazzaniga and Jon Appleton, or are quietly gnashing their teeth. Alumni have made their voice heard through the election of three reformist petition candidates to the Board of Trustees over the past two years—T.J. Rodgers '70, Peter Robinson '79, and Todd Zywicki '88. And among students, one is hard-pressed to find defenders of Wright, no matter what their political stripe.

It almost—almost—makes one long for the days of Freedman. As the saying goes, the devil you know is oftentimes better than the one you don't. Although at least the devil we don't know hasn't held any rallies against hate lately.

The Devil You Don't Know

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