Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/08/05/real_questions_for_askdartmouth.php
Sunday, August 5, 2007
The new AskDartmouth website, run by the Office of Public Affairs, is the centerpiece of the Administration’s effort to respond to the “misinformation” supposedly put forward by the College’s petition candidates (“In trustee race, Wright fights misinformation,” The Dartmouth, April 2). Some of the more typical, if ridiculous, questions that AskDartmouth responds to include: Did President James Wright say, “Dartmouth is a university in all but name”? If so, what did he mean by that? We know that Dr. Seuss and Mr. Rogers attended Dartmouth. But did Captain Kangaroo? How many times around the green equal one mile?
Though the site promises to provide “facts that may help to clarify current events and things people are talking about,” in reality, AskDartmouth limits itself to self-congratulation. When asked questions with answers that don’t reflect well on the Wright administration, AskDartmouth is ominously silent.
Here are a few questions for which honest responses would help us all to better understand the state of the College. How about some direct answers AskDartmouth?
1. How did students in the classes of 2001-2006 vote in the recent trustee election? The administration trumpets its own surveys showing that graduating students support it; if this is true, one would suppose that alumni from the most recent classes did not vote in great numbers for Stephen Smith. Is this the case? Or, in fact, did they vote for Smith because they agree with his assessment of the College?
2. President Wright recently announced that 98% of students were “satisfied” with their access to faculty, but the College’s Office of Institutional Research will not release the questionnaire used to elicit this information. When I asked to see the questionnaire itself, which had been administered to 1,000 students in early June, I was told that it is “proprietary.” If 98% of students were “satisfied,” what percentage of students were “very satisfied” or “highly satisfied”?
3. Each year the Admissions Office provides a detailed breakdown of the races and ethnicities of incoming students in order to illustrate the success of Dartmouth’s diversity efforts. However, it should be clear to everyone that the College’s affirmative action obligations are not met by simply admitting students of color into the freshmen class; the real goal of a responsible institution of higher learning is to provide its students with four years of education and a degree.
How successful is Dartmouth in educating African-American, Native-American and Latino students? What percentage of students in these three groups actually graduates? And if their graduation rate is below the average of all Dartmouth students, what steps is the Administration taking to improve the academic support provided to students at risk in these groups?
4. The AskDartmouth site has announced that since 1997 the College’s student-faculty ratio has improved from 12:1 to 8:1. During this period, the Dartmouth Fact Book says that the total number of undergraduate students has increased by 4.6 percent.
The change in this ratio and the change in the number of students implies that the size of the faculty has increased by well over 50 percent. Yet the Administration says that the size of the faculty has increased by only 11-13 percent in the last eight years.
Which figure is accurate: the evolution of the ratio or the growth of the faculty? Any math major can tell you that both of them cannot be correct.
5. The much discussed issue of class overcrowding continues to perplex this writer. While the Administration puts forward statistics that detail class sizes and faculty hires, the real figure that we need to see is the total number of classes in which students can choose to enroll.
What was the exact number of undergraduate classes offered by the College in 1987, 1997 and 2007? If these figures show a decrease, we might understand the reason why today’s students have trouble enrolling in the courses that they want, and why the size of their classes are ever larger.
6. The College maintains that 85 percent of alums are happy with Dartmouth’s direction. Perhaps coincidentally, almost exactly 15 percent of the total alumni body voted for Stephen Smith.
Turnout in alumni elections since 1991 has been consistently between 22-28 percent. Is it correct to assume that the alumni who voted in trustee elections before 2004, in which all of the candidates were put forward by the Alumni Council, are no longer voting, and that the disgruntled 15% of alums has suddenly appeared at the ballot box?
Or is it more likely that virtually the same core group of committed alumni voted in all of these elections, and the advent of petition trustee candidates has finally given them an outlet to express their concerns about the College’s direction?
7. The Alumni Council, whose members voted unanimously for a constitution that the alumni voted against by a majority, is by and large not elected by alumni—in contrast to the leaders of the Association of Alumni. May we have a detailed breakdown of the method by which each member of the Alumni Council is chosen?
Aren’t these fair questions? If the Administration is confident of its track record, it won’t be shy in answering them. It has nothing to hide, right?