On Tuesday, January 26, President Phil Hanlon announced that in June of 2023 he would resign as President of Dartmouth College. Hanlon has served as leader of the College since 2013, and his stepping down marks the end of a ten-year-long era in the history of Dartmouth College. During his tenure Dartmouth has undergone fundamental change, from a liberal arts college in the woods to one of the world’s premier research institutions. In his announcement he stated that he still hopes to accomplish a great deal in his last year as president. Last Month, I sat down with President Hanlon to talk about his tenure as president and what exactly he hopes to accomplish in the next year.
I, like most ’25s, had previously only seen President Hanlon once, during orientation week. We filed into his office with our floor groups, listened to a short welcome speech, and filed out. Disappointingly, we did not each get to shake his hand because of COVID (apparently hand sanitizer isn’t real). So, I went into the interview not really knowing much about President Hanlon except for a few generalities regarding his time at Dartmouth and what I had found on his Wikipedia page.
President Hanlon was on a call when I first arrived, so I waited in his receptionists’ office, not knowing what to expect from the AD-brother-turned-Math-PhD-turned-president. He finished the call after I had been waiting for about five minutes, and he met me outside his office. My first impression was of a friendly and personable (if somewhat awkward) man, more like a professor than an administrator.
The body of the interview focused on the president’s accomplishments while in office and what he aimed to do in his last year. I had sent him questions beforehand, and he had prepared notes, although he rarely read from them. The president was careful not to characterize the accomplishments of the past decade as his, emphasizing that they belong to the Dartmouth community. That being said, he was proud of many of the initiatives he led. Namely, under his watch Dartmouth’s academic impact and global standing increased greatly, with strong growth in graduate and undergraduate research. The main goal of the Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative was the transformation of the College into a national academic leader. President Hanlon certainly succeeded. He also expressed a great deal of pride in the successful conclusion of many of the College’s fundraising initiatives. The current fundraising drive has reached $3 billion, well ahead of the 1.3 billion that the last drive raised. He was particularly grateful to the community about the financial aid drive, with a donation this year making it possible for Dartmouth to become need blind for international students. The primary job of a university president is fundraising, and at that Phil Hanlon has been an overwhelming success.
He has been less successful, though, in using those funds. He emphasized efforts to remedy the student housing crisis, mentioning plans to build apartments on Lyme Road. However, the president shied away from calling for greater usage of the endowment to fix the problem. There is a .5% yearly payout from the endowment that goes towards modernizing aging undergraduate dorms, but in a follow-up question he blamed the slow progress of modernization on a lack of workers rather than a lack of funds. While I am hardly an expert on the subject, I would think that using more money one could hire more workers. Supply and demand and all that.
The president emphasized that he still has a lot to get done during his last year. Financial aid initiatives remain incompletely funded, and there is an impending modernization of the HOP Center for the Arts. He also expressed understanding at the damage that Dartmouth suffered during the COVID Pandemic and said he wants to work to restore normalcy to campus as the pandemic winds down. He hopes to incorporate many of the lessons that Dartmouth learned during the pandemic, using tools like virtual talks to enhance the Dartmouth experience. In particular he intends to push for further funding for DOC initiatives in order to recommit Dartmouth to the outdoors, a commendable initiative that should help Dartmouth grow in the aftermath of the pandemic.
One particular initiative that the president emphasized was Dartmouth’s re-commitment to equity and inclusion. A common theme here and in other areas was being proud of how far Dartmouth has come but recognizing what it still needs to do. Students will know that Dartmouth’s original mission was the education of Native Americans in the region, and the president singled that out as one area in particular where Dartmouth still failed to measure up to its founding promise.
President Hanlon’s answers to some questions about Dartmouth and the COVID pandemic were less satisfying. While yes, we had little understanding of COVID last year and it was certainly more frightening before we had a vaccine, nothing the president mentioned explains the excesses of last year. Dean Lively demanding that students follow community guidelines or be “disappeared” cannot be explained through simple caution. While the president is not directly responsible for COVID policy, he still has the power to stand against the unreasonable policies of his subordinate bureaucrats. Simply acknowledging the community’s hardship is not enough. No, President Hanlon should accept at least a measure of responsibility for what Dartmouth students went through last year.
Finally, I do think the president has become somewhat disconnected from the Dartmouth Student in the forty-five or so years since he graduated. Hanlon focuses on research and academic standards. He cares about tangible initiatives like pushes for greater diversity or investments in the DOC. Yet, Dartmouth is special because of so many things that are intangible, and I fear that he has lost sight of that.
Dartmouth is not a research institution. It is a liberal arts college with a distinctive culture and undefinable spirit. It is not a smaller Harvard or classier Cornell. During his tenure as president, Phil Hanlon has pushed to make Dartmouth like those other schools. For him, moving Dartmouth forward means increasing its number of publications and removing many of the anachronisms that continue to render it distinctive as an institution. He introduced the housing system and reigned in Greek life in order to bring Dartmouth in line with peer institutions. He has wanted to change Dartmouth from its status as a liberal arts college in the woods and make it instead like every other Ivy. Yet so many of us came to Dartmouth precisely because it isn’t like Harvard or Yale. In our application essays each of us answered the question, Why Dartmouth? I certainly didn’t pick Dartmouth because of its research opportunities or its standing in worldwide rankings, but because it is Dartmouth. I worry that in “moving forward” we have left something behind. In trying to become what we are not we have lost who we are.
Hanlon’s departure can not come soon enough. He handled the pandemic with, the polar opposite, of aplomb. Jim Kim though somewhat aloof and not the most engaged of presidents, was infinitely better than this Woke Joke.
the conclusion to this piece is so spot on, it’s breathtaking. as an alumnus of more than fifty-five years, I marvel at the perspicacity of this young man. he expresses in a succinct and clear manner what I have been thinking about the school ever since they took a wrong turn in the late eighties, leading to a long series of substandard leaders (Freedman, Wright, Kim, Hanlon). none of them were willing to let Dartmouth be Dartmouth.
just one example of this was the lament that the majority of prospective students who were admitted to both Dartmouth and that school down south in Cambridge had chosen the latter. my reaction was the thought that if such a student had targeted both of these schools, they were probably too confused or ill-informed to make any kind of reasonable choice in the matter.
kudos to mr. Eiler–well done.
Phil Hanlon was a complete disaster. A liar and totally out of touch with the needs of an undergraduate institution. He wrecked a golf program that had a fine tradition. An utter twit.