— Haldeman and Mulley darting questions —
Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/04/21/presidential_dodgeball.php
Monday, April 21, 2008
This week, the Presidential Search Committee, headed by Board of Trustees member Al Mulley ’70, held a series of open meetings with assorted groups on campus to receive input from the College about selecting a president to succeed James Wright. Mulley and Ed Haldeman ’70, the current Chairman of the Board of Trustees, held four sessions on Monday and Tuesday, April 14 and 15, to field questions and suggestions from Dartmouth’s staff, students, alumni, and faculty; the first three meetings took the form of open forums and were open to the press. The faculty committees met with Haldeman and Mulley at a reception and dinner on Tuesday evening.
Chairman Haldeman prefaced each forum with a brief sketch of the Board of Trustees’ goals and action plan for selecting a new President: During the scheduled Board meetings in May and early June, the members of the Board will select an individuals to serve on the Presidential Search Committee under Al Mulley. The Board will also be developing a “Statement on Leadership Criteria” to guide the selection process and seeks community involvement, at least in name, in drafting the final statement. Haldeman further mentioned that interested individuals who could not attend the on-campus engagement sessions could provide their input to the search committee through the Trustees’ website or through mail, and that over 200 people had sent in responses through the website.
During each of the three public sessions, Haldeman and Mulley asked for audience members to queue up at one of the microphones set up around the meeting area and state their comment or question; a different College administrator moderated the discussion each time. Volunteers handed out cards to audience members printed with the suggested topics for audience input:
1. What do you see as Dartmouth’s significant opportunities and challenges over the next few years that a new president must address?
2. What qualities of leadership should the next president have in order to ensure Dartmouth’s continued preeminence in higher education?
3. Are there other considerations for the search that you would like to share?
What follows is by no means a comprehensive summary of the questions, suggestions, and statements of audience members, Mulley, Haldeman, and the moderators. Rather, The Dartmouth Review wishes to highlight some of the most salient, insightful, or notable commentary discussed at three sessions: the staff, student, and alumni sessions.
At the staff input meeting, two speakers referenced President James Wright’s admirable efforts in veteran education in two separate questions. One recently graduated alum emphasized the importance of choosing a president who could continue to serve as a national leader in articulating concerns about higher education and, in doing so, keep Dartmouth relevant nationally and instill pride in our College, as President Wright has done. An employee at the medical school inquired as to whether the next President would carry the torch of veteran education; Haldeman’s hollow response praised President Wright for his efforts at both the macro and micro level, which gave veterans a Dartmouth education.
Brian Kunz, the Assistant Director of Outdoor Programs, expressed his hope that the next President could truly appreciate Dartmouth’s sense of place and view it as an asset to the College, not a liability. In his capacity as one of the Outdoor Programs Directors, Brian is certainly qualified to discuss the incredible, unique opportunities that Dartmouth’s location and rural setting offers to all those in the community: his position oversees a enormous variety of programs, from DOC outdoor-education classes, to the rock-climbing gym, to the Ledyard Canoe Club and waterfront on the Connecticut River, to outdoor rentals for students to go camping, skiing, kayaking, canoeing, climbing, or any outdoor activity imaginable in the vast, breathtaking natural landscape that surrounds our College. Dartmouth’s natural setting forms an integral part of the College’s character, and a President who fails to understand this characteristic—who views our rural location only in terms of long travel delays and lack of access to a Wal-Mart—will not truly understand the Dartmouth experience.
The most striking aspect of the open forum for student input, held in Alumni Hall on the afternoon of Monday, April 14, was the sheer number of empty chairs; I was fairly certain that the number of student reporters in the room outnumbered the amount of students actually attending the event in order to gain insight into the Presidential search process. Both Mulley and Haldeman seemed underwhelmed by the meager attendance, but questions from students (oftentimes the same students came up to the microphone multiple times) lasted the entire ninety minutes of questioning. Also notable: Dean of the College and newly inaugurated Sweet Dude who Hangs Out Thomas Crady moderated this discussion, adding input at appropriate places, although he left most of the commentary up to the Trustees. Both Molly Bode ’09 and Nafeesa Remtilla ’09, the newly elected Student Assembly President and Vice President, were in attendance, remembering their campaign promises to increase student involvement in affairs relating to the Board of Trustees.
Molly Bode opened the questioning by asking Haldeman and Mulley how many students they intended to include on the Presidential search committee. Mulley evaded the question, stating that the committee was still in its infancy and its makeup had not yet been decided, and responded vaguely to Bode’s follow-up comments that other Ivy League schools had a far greater student presence in such critical Board of Trustees affairs as the selection of a new President.
The future President’s role in environmentalism and fighting climate change came up once again. Early in the session, Nick Devonshire ’11 stood up with a three-pronged petition on the new President and sustainability. Roughly paraphrased, the petition demanded that the future President:
1. Cap the rising level of CO2 emissions from Dartmouth.
2. Prioritize energy efficiency in all construction.
3. Issue a binding sustainability policy and mission statement for the College.
Unsurprisingly, both Mulley and Haldeman declined to sign the petition at the time.
— Haldeman and Mulley darting questions —
Tom Glazer ’08 again stressed the overwhelming importance of a President who would commit to carbon neutrality. He pointed to the over 500 signatories of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, including fellow Ivy League schools Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, as evidence of a larger trend in higher education that Dartmouth should follow. He also mentioned Harvard University’s sustainability office staffed by 12 people with a budget of over eight million dollars per year—something against which our newly-appointed future Sustainability Shepherd Kathy Lambert ’90 cannot possibly hope to compete.
The issue of the advantages of choosing a President from within the College, versus one from the wider world of another educational institution, public service, or business, arose repeatedly. Mulley and Haldeman capably described the importance of a leader familiar with the “environment, traditions, history, and sensitivities in the community” special to Dartmouth, but also the advantage of finding somebody with a fresh perspective. One freshman Dartmouth student implored the Board to not underestimate the importance of a President who truly loves and understands Dartmouth, citing meeting President Wright at Dimensions and realizing his passion for the College as one of the main factors in his decision to matriculate
Mulley made an insightful comment in response to the insider/outsider question, stateing that the selection process would not hinge on a single criterion: “Alum or not, woman or man, business or not—usually it’s a much richer constellation of characteristics that we attach to real people.”
In response to a question as to what the “hard sell” of Dartmouth to potential presidential candidates would be, Haldeman’s answer was really quite cogent: “We don’t have a hard sell because people know so much about our strengths already… our history and tradition and faculty, the passionate commitment of alumni and financial strength, and they know it’s certainly within the top ten educational institutions in the US...The best way to sell Dartmouth was to get a potential president to come to Dartmouth and see how happy and satisfied the students are.” Dean Crady concurred, stating that the students were what sold him on Dartmouth on his first visit to our College.
Anne Kasitaza ’08 gave a quite perceptive description of Dartmouth’s problem with institutional memory, exacerbated by the D-Plan: she mentioned that controversy at Dartmouth seemed to happen in cycles, with little being resolved. She gave the example that there’s currently an enormous amount of attention on campus being paid to “alternative social spaces”, but very few remember the failure of the Social Life Initiative of 1999. Kasitaza described the lack of resolution of such issues as “disheartening.” Although nobody in attendance had an easy answer for what a future President could do to address this deficit, its mention raised several interesting questions.
Of the three sessions, attendance was highest at the alumni centric discussion, who added their opinions to many issues that had been raised at the previous sessions, such as recruitment of faculty, insider vs. outsider presence, the coexistence of Dartmouth’s priorities on graduate and undergraduate education, etc.
John Engelman ’68 touched on a key qualification for success as a President of Dartmouth: “I look at the most recent Presidents: McLaughlin, Wright, Freedman. To take nothing away from the accomplishments of Freedman, but he never quite understood what it was about Dartmouth that made the alumni so passionate and loyal—he didn’t have that emotional connection with the alumni. I don’t think you have to be a graduate or longtime teacher here (like McLaughlin or Wright), but it’s necessary to make that emotional connection. I don’t know how you judge that if the candidate has no experience with Dartmouth.” Another alumni touched on Freedman’s disconnect with Dartmouth by pointedly asking that the next President “sees this as the last job he could ever have -- not just a stepping stone to another position.” Haldeman suggested a “litmus test” for whether a candidate was capable of understanding the uniqueness of Dartmouth, to test whether he “gets it or not”: “Does [the Presidential candidate] see the debate among our alumni body as an entirely bad thing, a hurdle, or as an outgrowth of love for our institution?”
Jerry Mitchell ’51 drew laughs when he suggested an ideal President could be cloned by combining the genes of John Sloan Dickey and James Wright into one person, expressing his admiration of Wright and Dickey’s involvement and engagement with the student body and community. President Wright, indeed, can be found everywhere on campus, and this active, visible commitment to the College helps maintain enthusiasm and pride in Dartmouth. Dickey’s Great Issues program, which Mitchell described as “sorely missed,” also initiated campus dialogue and encouraged a diversity of ideas.
Appropriately, the alumni questions tended to focus more on long-term vision for the College than the current controversies and pressing issues that dominated the student forum. Alumni brought up concerns about a President who would be able to embrace rapidly modernizing technology in a manner which kept Dartmouth at the forefront of higher education, about continuing President Wright’s efforts to keep Dartmouth involved in the Upper Valley community and smooth out any town-gown strains that may arise, about the demands on a President of the College to act as “half CEO, half Headmaster”, and the viability of the future of Dartmouth’s liberal arts undergraduate education.
Although Mulley and Haldeman dodged quite a few questions, they can hardly be blamed for declining to commit to specific Presidential criteria this early in the selection process. This kind of input from all sectors of the Dartmouth community, including the oft-neglected concern of Dartmouth staff, will no doubt be highly useful in determining a successor to James Wright who will lead the College for the next ten to fifteen years—if, indeed, Haldeman and Mulley intend to actually take the community’s suggestions to heart, instead of simply staging information sessions for the publicity and paying lip service to the idea of “community involvement.” We can only hope.