The New President of Dartmouth
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Editor’s Note: The following is a reprint of an editorial about the then new President Wright. It was published on September 30, 1998 by The Dartmouth Review.
The Dartmouth Review greets the ascendance of James Wright as the 16th President of Dartmouth College with tempered optimism, despite our vehement disagreement with his plan to convert Dartmouth into a research university.
The real problem with the last President lay in his attitude. He took his post as a pulpit for a particular brand of ideological zeal that rendered all questions of institutional direction into a horridly simple formula—all those people, institutions, and events which advocated, represented, or evolved from Dartmouth’s tradition were bad; zealous reform was good, nay unquestionably so. Freedman was clearly a figure external to the College, and this only fueled the nasty stridence of his chosen mission.
Wright, of course, is a career-long Dartmouth man. He has a personal stake in the College while Freedman had a personal stake only in his own agenda. He has the necessary understanding of the College’s traditions and uniqueness, and, it seems, at least an abstract appreciation of them.
Nearly as significant is the tone of Wright’s rhetoric. The new President does not come across as a crusader. He is an academic, not an absolutist politician (like Freedman). His stated mission is not Freedman’s purposeful commitment to social reform (attempting to close fraternities and change Dartmouth’s values) but improving Dartmouth’s academic quality.
Wright’s thirty years in Dartmouth’s History department bode well for another reason: his consequent ties to the faculty are strong. Wright is extremely well-liked by most professors at Dartmouth. While David McLaughlin failed to gain the respect of the faculty and it cost him his post, Wright will have no such problems.
All of this promise, however, will mean little if Wright continues in his present plan to turn Dartmouth into a research university.
The Carnegie Foundation, an influential academic watchdog organization based in Pittsburgh, released a study this Spring that found American Higher Education was being converted into a system built around a research university that cheats the undergraduate. The Carnegie Foundation found an inevitable and inescapable connection between increased concentration on graduate research and declining quality of undergraduate teaching.
What was remarkable about Wright’s speech was that he ignored this trade-off, trying to cover himself with empty affirmation. Dartmouth College, he said, can become a research university without sacrificing the undergraduate. The two aspects of the modern university can happily coexist.
The problem is that they can’t.
Economists who have studied the modern research university, perhaps most significantly Stanford’s Roger Noll, concede that there is a necessary tradeoff, that expanding research programs does cost the university—professors are necessarily unable to devote as much time to undergraduates. (Worth noting is that Noll supports the research university, yet still concedes that teaching suffers). This conclusion supports the Carnegie Foundation’s research.
A favorite rhetorical tack of Wright’s has been to argue that the existence of the Tuck Business School, the Thayer Engineering School, and the Dartmouth Medical School means that graduate education is firmly entrenched in Dartmouth’s history, and that, consequently, the research expansion is in harmless keeping with traditional institutional values.
This line of reasoning ignores an important distinction between ‘graduate programs’ and ‘professional schools.’ Tuck, Thayer, and the Medical School are fairly innocuous add-ons to the undergraduate college because they are professional schools.
The medical school does not strip resources from undergraduates because the staff is entirely separate from the undergraduate staff.
If Dartmouth were to add a graduate English department, however, it would keep professors from concentrating on teaching, because they would be necessarily involved in the graduate programs.
Wright’s insistence on the research university, then, threatens to mar what would otherwise be a promising Presidency. Hopefully, he will realize the error of his policies. Whether or not he does, he is certainly an improvement over his predecessor.
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