The Next Dartmouth President Must...

By Jeffrey Hart | Sunday, November 16, 2008

The next Dartmouth president must take on the difficult and expensive job of improving the faculty. Some of our liberal arts Departments are not as good as they should be. I could be specific on this but for obvious reasons I will put that aside here. Improvement will be expensive because Dartmouth will be competing with other institutions for the best professors, defined in part by achievement and national reputation. I say “in part” because ability to communicate counts a great deal, especially at the undergraduate level. Graduate school has a fundamentally different purpose than an undergraduate liberal arts educations: graduate school is professional training.

At the present time we have, for example, no Dante specialist and no distinguished Shakespearian to replace the now retired Professor Peter Saccio.

This is a very serious matter. As T.S. Eliot said these are the two most important poets in the post-classical Western world:

[T]ake the Comedy as a whole, you can compare it to nothing except but the entire work of Shakespeare. . . Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and the greatest depth. They complement each other. It is futile to ask which undertook the most difficult job.

You must read them both, and you see the importance of getting the best instruction available in these two major figures.

When I arrived at Dartmouth as a freshman in the Fall of 1947, I didn’t know then that President John Dickey was making strenuous efforts to improve the faculty. Even as a freshman, I understood that the faculty certainly needed improvement. The only professor who impressed me, doing so profoundly, was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in the Philosophy department.

Of course, I didn’t know that this continuing effort by Dickey would bring me back to Dartmouth from the Columbia English Department in 1963. That was an interesting story, and I will return to it in a moment. John Dickey was an outstanding college president. Politically he could be described as a moderate Republican; he had a State Department background.

In my opinion, the faculty really needed improvement. I had come from Stuyvesant High School, one of the three public high schools in New York City that admitted students on the basis of an entrance examination. About 85 percent of the students were Jewish and most were headed for medical school. The effort to achieve high grades was intense. I remember that when I scored only 95 percent on a New York State Regents Exam, my friends asked if I was ill. One of my friends, Otto Eckstein, would go on to teach at MIT and also became one of Lyndon Johnson’s economic advisors. Garry Felsenfeld went on to work in neuroscience; even when what he was doing was explained to me I didn’t understand it.

And the Stuyvesant faculty was first-rate. Most were Jewish too and today would be on college faculties, which would have been impossible during the 1930s due to racial tensions when most of them went into teaching. Even Lionel Trilling, because he was Jewish, had difficulty being promoted to tenure at Columbia; President Nicholas Murray Butler had to intervene.

At Dartmouth in 1947-1948, the English Department struck me as tweedy, mediocre, and “prep school”—the latter not a complimentary term for me. The Shakespearian, Professor Francis Childs, gave good lectures, featuring his eloquent readings from the plays.

But then I came across Columbia professor Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare in the Sanborn House Library. Van Doren was able to analyze a passage of poetry—or Falstaff’s great prose—and show how it created character through verse techniques. I certainly never imagined that I would become a colleague of Mark Van Doren in the Columbia English Department, along with the just mentioned Lionel Trilling. These were the types of professors Dartmouth needed, the kind that Dickey wanted to recruit to Dartmouth, and the kind that the incoming president, whoever he may be, needs to recruit.

In 1963, while I was teaching at Columbia, Dickey’s Dean of the Faculty Arthur Jensen made me an excellent offer. I still remember him saying, “We want this book.” He was referring to my recent Eighteenth-Century Political Writers: From Locke to Burke published by Knopf. And there’s an interesting story to go along with this.

My editor at Knopf was Angus Cameron, a Communist. No kidding, an actual Communist, in 1962. He had been head editor at Little Brown in Boston, the publisher of Arthur Schlesinger’s books. Arthur had been in England and obtained for Little Brown the American rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Angus rejected Animal Farm, a satire on Communism. Arthur told Little Brown that unless they got rid of Angus he would take his books elsewhere. So Angus ended up at Knopf and edited my book, doing an excellent job.

We became friends. Angus was a hearty fellow, enjoyed life, and liked expensive French restaurants as long as they were on his Knopf entertainment account. We also went to the fights at Madison Square Garden, seeing the then unknown Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali). His speed and grace were astonishing.

I got to know Angus well enough to ask him why he was a Communist. He replied, “You’ve got to have hope.” Some people seem to need that transformational kind of hope, comprehensive and quite different from the ordinary kind of hope. When Angus died a few years ago The New York Times obituary said that he “had been attracted to leftist causes.” I think Joe McCarthy had made it almost impossible to say a Communist was a Communist. Anyhow, the book of mine he published secured me a tenure track position at Dartmouth.

Dartmouth at the present time needs to invest heavily in new faculty. There is no reason for complacency just because Dartmouth admits about 17 percent of applicants. The very best students—who will become leaders after graduation—are going to go where the best teachers are, and we are competing with Harvard, Yale, Princeton and comparable institutions.

What would it cost to attract the best, or one of the best, Shakespeare specialists in the United States? Perhaps—I’m guessing—$200 thousand a year in salary.

One way to accomplish this would be endowed chairs: The Henry Big Bucks Chair in Shakespeare Studies. Perhaps Henry Big Bucks could put up half the cost of the endowment, with the College covering the rest. Donors like to pay for buildings to be named after them. But who teaches inside the buildings matters. Dartmouth has invested heavily in buildings. Now is the time for important people to teach in them.

Eugen Rosensstock-Huessy was one of the most influential professors ever to teach at Dartmouth. A Rosenstock-Huessy Chair in The Philosophy of Religion would be entirely appropriate and very important.

Outstanding people on the faculty can also be useful to their colleagues. If you want an answer to something in their specialty, you can get a reliable answer. Therefore, creating endowed chairs and bringing experts to Dartmouth will improve the faculty as a whole.

It may well be that departments would resist a strenuous recruiting effort by the new Dartmouth president, and resist for a variety of reasons: jealousy about a star being imposed upon them, competition over filling a tenure slot that otherwise might go to a younger faculty member already here, and suspicion that funds were being diverted from other salaries. The list goes on. In strange ways, academic institutions can be very conservative places. The president would have to reassure the departments on all such concerns, and guarantee them that tenure slots would not be affected, etc.

This could take some diplomacy. But that’s part of the job of being a college president. And every college president today must worry about the fate of President Larry Summers at Harvard, who dared to tell Professor Cornel West that Harvard expected more of a professor than CD hip-hop records.

Cornel West went off to Princeton in a huff and with a big salary, and Summers was accused of racism. Eventually, for this and other reasons, the faculty forced him out. But Summers, an able economist, will have the last laugh as the likely Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration.

In short, the primary goal of Dartmouth’s incoming president should be what former President Dickey’s goal was: to recruit highly capable scholars to Dartmouth so that they can fill current gaps in the faculty.

Many elite professors have left Dartmouth in the past few years, and its time to recruit equally elite professors back to our campus.

The Next Dartmouth President Must...

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