Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/11/04/why_wont_the_faculty_stay.php
Friday, November 4, 2005
Dartmouth has always prided itself on the exceptional caliber of its faculty, and rightly so—it includes luminaries and innovators in countless fields. Dartmouth professors might not always be published the most often, or win the largest research grants in comparison to Harvard, MIT, or Caltech, but the College's instructors are instead, exactly that—liberal arts educators committed to focusing their attention on teaching students, even if that sometimes comes at the expense of their research. Dartmouth's administration has largely been supportive of the liberal arts mission, but recent events have drawn into question whether or not the administration is committed to keeping the best and the brightest professors on faculty, and to what extent administrators value the academic freedom of these professors.
Perhaps the most visible incident of administrative interference in professorial academic freedom has been the reassessment of final grades in veteran music professor Jon Appleton's fall 2004 Music and Technology class. Appleton, who is Dartmouth's Arthur R. Virgin professor of music and the former department head, is widely considered a pioneer in the field of electro-acoustic music; he founded Dartmouth's graduate program in that area.
Appleton recently circulated a letter to the faculty bemoaning "The Decline of Academic Freedom at Dartmouth College." In it, he describes the guidance he offered to students and the grading for his class's composition assignment. He also relates that many students, upset that the grades they received in a music class were going to lower their GPAs, complained to the Chair of the Music Department, and to Carol Folt. Folt then asked Appleton "what 'metric' [he] used to grade these compositions."
Appleton writes in his letter, "I explained to the Dean that I had been teaching this course successfully for thirty-three years and I was employed at Dartmouth because of my reputation as a composer. I offered to show the papers and compositions to the Dean but she never responded. I thought if something had gone terribly wrong with my teaching that perhaps an outside committee of composers might tender a second opinion. Alas, no administrator ever attended the class nor reviewed any of the student work. A week later the Dean of Faculty informed the students that anyone unhappy with their grade could have it erased and be given a 'credit' for the course."
Folt responded in an e-mail to the Department Chairs that "the 'Decline of Academic Freedom' e-mail is filled with errors and unpleasant personal allusions." She went on to claim that the number of students who complained—42 out of a class of 76—was "unprecedented," that the review of the situation "was very thorough and took four months to complete," and that it included "interviews by the Assistant Dean with 28 complaining students who were on campus, review by the Associate Dean of grades on all assignments, review of course information distributed to students (including information about grading criteria) and a discussion between the Associate Dean and the Professor about grading practices." The "investigation concluded that unspecified extra credit had been given to students who came to speak with the instructor about the course and their compositions, regardless of whether they improved their work based on his feedback, and that students had never been told that they could raise their grades simply by meeting with the instructor." The remedy the Dean's Office devised was to give the students "the option of receiving credit instead of a grade for the course."
Folt also wished "to emphasize that student complaints about grades are very rare at Dartmouth and only lead to administrative action in the most exceptional cases where there is clear evidence – after review by assistant and associate deans – of unfairness in the assignation of grades.
When questioned by the Review, Appleton responded to Folt's e-mail by saying that the review of the student complaints could not have been "very thorough" as she claimed because "not one person looked at the papers or heard the compositions. It was only on the word of the student that the professor graded them unfairly. There was no examination of the evidence." Appleton also took issue with Folt's e-mail in points of fact, saying that meetings outside of class with the instructor were not the means of gaining hidden extra credit as Folt claimed, but were in fact required of every student. To Folt's assertion that a discussion about grading practices had occurred between the Associate Dean and the Professor, Appleton responded, "I had no meetings with anyone in the office of the Dean of Faculty and was simply informed by e-mail that the grades had been changed." He also noted that although "Folt claims complaints about grades are 'very rare at Dartmouth,' this is not the case as I have received a number of e-mail messages from my colleagues to the contrary."
Appleton also implied that the Dean's office may have been influenced by a parent, who also happened to be a large donor to the College, calling to complain about his child's grade.
But most significantly, Appleton noted that although Folt claims "'administrative action [occurs only] in the most exceptional cases,' academic freedom means it should NEVER occur. Deans do not tell faculty what or how to teach courses nor how to grade," he said. "None have for thirty-eight years until the arrival of Dean Folt."
But Appleton is by no means the only professor who has suffered from administrative intrusion. When a student in the English department failed to turn in a rewritten paper by date mutually agreed upon by the student and the professor, the professor let the original paper grade of "D" stand. The student, who was on shaky grounds academically, would have been placed on academic suspension as a result of the grade. The student then complained to Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities Lenore Grenoble, who took it upon herself to read the paper in question, decided it deserved better than a "D," raised the student's grade. The professor was not informed of this development until he stopped Grenoble during a chance encounter to inquire about the complaint's status.
And neither is Appleton the only faculty member to announce his depature from Dartmouth in recent days. Professor Michael Gazzaniga '61 of the Psychology and Brain Sciences Department, a pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, will leave Dartmouth along with Appleton after the fall term for the University of California at Santa Barbara. Though Gazzaniga was offered the chance to direct a new center at UCSB that would take a broader approach to the study of the mind, this incentive does not fully explain his decision to leave the College. Not only will he be leaving behind the brand-new Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience, for which he and other Dartmouth researchers recently secured a National Science Foundation grant, he also has great personal attachment to the College, being himself a Dartmouth alumnus.
Gazzaniga resigned from his position of Dean of the Faculty in the spring of 2004 after a vote of no confidence of the Committee of Chairs, an assembly that includes the heads of each department as well as the heads of interdisciplinary programs such as Environmental Studies and Women and Gender Studies. The vote's nominal reason was that faculty doubted Gazzaniga's abilities as an administrator. However, the deeper issue at stake was that humanities and social scientists professors felt that Gazzaniga, as a scientist, lacked the appropriate sensitivities to administer a liberal arts college.
A number of other professors have also left the College recently, including Jennifer Richeson, a rising star of the psychology department, whose husband was offered a position at Northwestern, Amitabh Chandra of the economics department, who left to take a position at Harvard, Daryl Press of the government department left when his wife was refused a tenure-track position, Jamshed Barucha, who left in 2002 to become the Provost at Tufts, and, of course, Jim Kuypers, the College's sole professor of rhetoric, who was driven away out of sheer administrative neglect. While not all of these departures can be construed as a rejection of the direction of Dartmouth's administration, they speak to a larger problem—the inability of Dartmouth to hold on to some of its most talented faculty members.
What explains this professorial exodus? Professor Appleton, in an interview with the Daily Dartmouth, decried the lack of "intellectual leadership" in the College's administration. When deans go behind professors' backs to change grades and fail to protect the positions of the most outstanding talent on the faculty, it's not hard to see the root of the problem: the administration itself.