Kim Legacy to be Merged

And so ends Jim Kim’s tumultuous legacy.

What is perhaps former Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim’s magnum opus will soon cease to exist. The Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, created in 2010 under the direction of then-President Kim, will be merged with the better established Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Physician and anthropologist Jim Kim served as president from 2009 to 2012, after which he left to run the World Bank.

Kim’s Center for Health Care Delivery Science was created with significant publicity and a generous $35 million launch budget, a gift from an anonymous benefactor. Of this sum, nearly $25 million has already been spent. About $5 million of that $25 million had been spent on a master’s program orientation that the center ran at the Tuck School of Business. It accepted 50 mid-career healthcare executives each July. A Valley News article reports that the center spent another 10% of its $25 million aggregate expenditures on building “deep partnerships” with various institutions and governments in China, the U.K., Peru, and Rwanda.

College spokeswoman Diana Lawrence claimed in an email statement to the Valley News that the center’s “consolidation with The Dartmouth Institute was always part of the College’s long-term plan.” Albert “Al” Mulley, the Kim-appointed director of the Health Care Delivery Science center, echoed similar statements to the Valley News. Longtime College commentator Joseph Asch ’79, however, expressed his doubts at the veracity of such claims in a Dartblog article. In the same article, he also harshly criticized Kim’s decision to give Al Mulley “his own fiefdom” with the center’s directorship.

What exactly is to be done with the center’s 126 employees is up in the air. Lawrence, however, did exclaim that the center’s integration would likely not “result in any job losses.”

The announcement of the center’s merger follows a series of significant staff and policy changes after the end of the Kim presidency. Many prominent Kim Administration appointees, such as former Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson, are no longer affiliated with the College. The center’s absorption, in this regard, seems to simply be a continuation of a larger cleansing effort.