The D is running a four-part series on the Board of Trustees, and while the descriptions contained therein are more or less on the mark (with a few awful omissions), the young journalists have failed to engage in critical thinking worthy of a Dartmouth education. When Trustee Chair Steve Mandel makes a statement, a good reporter should ask a follow-up question or two. Let’s take a look at one example of a missed opportunity for a set of serious, probing responses:
From this statement we can incontrovertibly conclude that MBAs have a high opinion of themselves, but how can we objectively test the proposition that the shift over the last 10-12 years to an MBA-dominated Board has led to better management of the College? Here are a few metrics (there’s a Harvard B-school word for you) that an MBA might use to evaluate the effectiveness of Dartmouth’s business-oriented Trustees, and that our intrepid reporters might have brought up in their discussion with Chairman Mandel:
Endowment Growth: As we have recently seen, the College’s endowment grew more quickly than any of its Ivy peers in the 1990s; however, since 2000, growth has been the slowest in the Ivy League.
Personnel Bloat: The number of non-faculty employees at the College grew by 33% between 1999 and today (almost a thousand new staffers) — even as the student population remained stable. Unnecessary growth occurred in virtually every area of Dartmouth’s budget-sapping bureaucracy. The undergraduate side of the College now has almost five staffers for every faculty member.
Budget Growth: Total College expenditures in 2000 were $383,970,000; in fiscal 2011, the College spent $738,341,000. That’s a total increase over 11 years of 92.3% — a period of time during which inflation was 30.6%.
Salaries and Benefit Growth: Total employee compensation grew even faster than the budget: from $216,456,000 in 2000 to $434,917,000 in 2011 — a jump of 100.9%. Benefit levels were the most expensive in the Ivy League by a wide margin.
Tuition Cost Growth: Annual tuition/room and board/fees at the College are now the second highest in the Ivy League (after Columbia), even though Hanover is the second-lowest-cost environment in the Ivies (after Cornell).
Personnel: The Board permitted Jim Wright to remain in office long after his sell-by date (if he was ever effective in the first place), and his replacement by Jim Kim and now Carol Folt continues the line of weak leaders. Wright, Kim, Folt and senior administrators like Adam Keller, Barry Scherr and Sylvia Spears would not have been hired by any well run corporation, yet they remained in place in Hanover for years.
Moral Climate: Brand management seems to be the order of the day for the Trustees, with spinning a close second. Kim/Folt’s presentation of just how $100 million was supposedly trimmed from the budget did not pass muster with even Humanities professors; to professionals, it was a joke. The hazing controversy was cynically ignored by Jim Kim for almost two months, so as not to cloud his World Bank campaign. Justifications for changes to DDS mealplans and the closing of the swim docks were ludicrously dishonest. Rigor, transparency and the ability to admit that the College is anything less than perfect are not qualities present in the current Board.
I-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n: Does anyone on the Board or in the administration even know how to spell this word? What new programs, initiatives or ideas have been put into place over the last decade to improve the undergraduate academic or residential experience? None that I can see, though the faculty is not short of proposals. But the President and the Board just don’t seem to be open to any kind of change (sorry, but committees on binge drinking and sexual assault, or on-line healthcare Masters programs for adult students, don’t count as real change). Of all the criticisms of the Trustees and the administration, to me this is the most damning.
Am I missing an area where the MBA-Board has been strong (other than in self-congratulation)? I think not.
That said, the core point here in not that these MBA Trustees are unintelligent. In the world of finance and investing, they have all made a ton of money. The problem is that they, like their other colleagues on the Board, just don’t spend enough time at the College to understand Dartmouth’s strengths and weakness. In addition to their professional and family responsibilities, they often serve on a half-dozen or more prestigious corporate and charity boards. The end result for Dartmouth is a rubber stamp Board of Trustees that does not interact enough with faculty, students and staff in order to gather the information necessary to oversee the administration. As I hope has been abundantly clear above, the corrosive effects on the College of insufficient oversight are obvious, no matter how much Chairman of the Board Steve Mandel might pat himself on the back.
George Mason Law Professor Todd Zywicki ‘88 was removed from the Board of Trustees in 2009 following a proceeding that Trustee T.J. Rodgers ‘70 termed a “a kangaroo court.” Ostensibly the Board’s decision turned on a series of intemperate remarks that Zywicki had made about the College during a conference at the Pope Center; however, one cannot help but surmise that Zywicki also raised hackles among the Trustees by questioning the placement of large portions of the endowment with Board members’ investment funds.
In an amicus curiae brief that he filed with the State of New Hampshire Supreme Court, Zywicki noted his efforts to review the College’s investment policies.
College Invests Endowment In Bain Capital as a Favor to a Trustee’s Spouse
While Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital is in the news because of the Obama campaign’s broadbrush criticisms of the Republican candidate, Dartmouth’s Trustees have no problem in investing in the huge fund. The College’s IRS Form 990 for 2010 shows no less that 12 different transactions (capital contributions and distributions) with Bain Capital’s various funds. Several examples:
The spouse of a Trustee (does anyone know who?) seems to have been the conduit for the various investments. (A longtime Dartmouth reader suggests that the spouse in question is Bain Capital’s Mark Nunnelly, the husband of Trustee Denise Dupre ‘80.)
The same report notes six transactions with former Trustee Leon Black ‘73’s Apollo Management firm:
Let’s be precise. The issue is not that the College invested in these funds. They are open for investment by large, sophisticated investors, and some of them have been very successful. However, as we have seen, others have not been profitable, and the College’s investment performance has suffered in the last decade.
My concern is whether the choices to invest in Trustee’s funds have been arm’s-length ones. Are investment decisions being made on the merits? Or is there a gentleman’s understanding among the men and women on the Board that “I’ll vote to invest in your fund if you’ll vote to invest in mine.”? Add to this the open secret that a donation of $10 million buys a seat on Dartmouth’s Board, and it is not hard to conclude that buying your way in as a Trustee leads to rich compensation.
From the looks of things, it sure appears as if the old boy’s club is in full operation.
Addendum: This space has nothing against private equity firms; in fact, we see them as critical actors in American economic life — as David Brooks intelligently opined in a recent column in the Times.
In tandem with our reports on the widespread abuse of cocaine at the College (here, here and here), Natalie Colaneri ‘12 recently published a column in The D on student abuse of study drugs like Adderall. She has now put together a forum on these narcotics. How good it is to see a student take the lead on this issue.
FINALS are coming…. GOT ADDERALL?
Do these drugs actually work? Are they dangerous? Can we extend the reading period?
A Forum on Study Drugs
Wednesday, May 23rd, 7-8:30PM
COLLIS COMMONGROUND
Panera Bread AND Morano Gelato!
YOU WANT GELATO.
*This forum is not about how “study drugs are bad”… it’s informative, not judgmental*
Come listen to a panel consisting of psychiatrist Dr. Ben Nordstrom, Dean April Thompson, Professor Lee Witters, and Dean Francine A’Ness and ask questions/discuss the issue.
The D’s Editor Wants Your Honest Opinion About President Kim
Let him have it.
From: The Dartmouth
Date: Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:53 AM
Subject: HOW HAS KIM DONE?
To: CAMPUS-EVENTS@listserv.dartmouth.edu
With President Jim Yong Kim’s impending departure from the College, The Dartmouth wants to know: What do you think of his tenure?
***Did Kim effectively work to reduce binge drinking on campus?***
***How were his efforts surrounding sexual assault prevention?***
***What kind of impact will he leave on Dartmouth in the long run?***
Results will be published in the pages of The Dartmouth later this week!
Take the survey to make your voice heard.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KGQ7VN3
We look forward to hearing what you have to say.
Curiously enough, while the survey asks questions about hazing, binge drinking, sexual assault, healthcare and the budget, it makes no reference to Kim’s impact — or utter lack thereof — on the College’s academic life and students’ residential experience. Have The D’s editors confused the responsibilities of Dartmouth’s President with those of the Dean of the College or even the Director of Student Health Services?
Yesterday’s post about the whistleblower letter by the anonymous Friends of Eleazar Wheelock group of Dartmouth employees detailed the placement over the last decade of much of the endowment with investment funds run by Dartmouth Trustees and other alumni cronies. Let’s update the figures showing the disastrous effect of this policy.
During the 1990-2000 period, Dartmouth’s endowment enjoyed the highest growth in the Ivy League:
In the subsequent eleven years (2000-2011), with much of the endowment in the hands of Trustees and their friends, the endowment had the lowest level of growth in the Ivies.
What will be the end result of this corrosive insider dealing, and the concomitant atmosphere of spin and dishonesty that pervades the administration? At some point in time, faculty, students, staff and alumni will say that they have had enough of poor governance — and of Dartmouth. However, I fear that none of these groups will act collectively to stop the rot; rather, individual members of the faculty will leave Hanover, the best students won’t come here, the finest staff members will depart, and alumni will reduce their donations to the College. One can argue that this process has been underway for some time now.
Addendum: As we have noted, to make up for the endowment’s poor performance, the Trustees permitted the College’s total debt to explode over the past twelve years, both in absolute terms and in comparison to our Ivy sister schools.
If you are trying to answer the Jeopardy question of what Dartmouth professor a) has endless amounts of time for students, b) is a tough-as-nails teacher whose classes fill up instantly, c) runs weekly discussion groups almost every term where students review an interesting book, d) is the object of paeans in The D, and e) has a fine publishing record, look no further than today’s What Matters to Me and Why lecture by Professor Meir Kohn.
From: What Matters To Me And Why Subject: Jewish Morality…and Economics
Jewish Morality…and Economics. What’s the connection?
Find out at today’s What Matters to Me and Why lunch discussion with Professor Meir Kohn ECON! He’ll be discussing Jewish Morality and Economics over free Collis soup from 12-1 at the Tucker Living Room.
Where: Tucker Foundation Living Room When: Tuesday 5/22, 12pm What: Collis Soup and Converstaion Who: YOU and Professor Kohn Why: Take a break in this final week of class and get to know a professor outside of the classroom over a delicious soup lunch! See you there!
The New Hampshire diocese’s next bishop will be Robert Hirschfeld ‘83, formerly of the Grace Church in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hirschfeld is the spouse of Polly Ingraham ‘79. He rowed crew at the College and Ingraham played on Dartmouth’s first women’s hockey team. The couple have three children, one of whom, William, is a ‘14. Hirschfeld’s appointment is a step back from controversy for the diocese: the 2003 election of openly gay bishop Gene Robinson led to bitter debates in the world-wide Anglican-Episcopalian community.
College Whistleblowers Denounce Trustee Conflicts to Government
This space has regularly reported on the incompetence and malfeasance of the Dartmouth administration. While most of our reporting comes from public sources, a great deal of Dartblog’s content has been provided by honest people on the College’s payroll — longtime staffers, past and present, who are disgusted by the conflicts of interest and self-dealing that have diverted the College from its educational mission.
Dartblog has now learned that a group of College insiders, who call themselves the Friends of Eleazar Wheelock, have written a whistleblower letter to numerous government figures and other institutions: NH Governor John Lynch, NH Attorney General Michael Delaney, Massachusetts House Judiciary Committee Chairs Cynthia Creem and Eugene O’Flaherty, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Massachusetts Senator Patricia Jehlen and Massachusetts Representative Mike Moran (sponsors of a bill that would require enhanced disclosure of conflicts of interest, investment holdings, managers and fees, as well as other vital financial data from private colleges and universities), the Internal Revenue Service, the Service Employees International Union, the NH Department of Justice Charitable Trusts Unit, the Union Leader, and the New Hampshire Health and Education Facilities Authority.
The letter details how members of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees — a Board dominated by MBA money managers, unlike other Ivy Boards — and people in their circle have plundered the College’s endowment, using it to fill the coffers of their investment funds. The details go far beyond the information contained in a Tellus Institute report and a Valley News series that were published last year.
While the conflict of interest of Trustees steering College money to their own enterprises is obvious, the effect on Dartmouth of these unwise decisions should also be noted. As Dartblog has previously described, the endowment’s performance in the 1990’s was the best in the Ivy League; during the past decade — when these practices took flight — it has been the worst.
Find the above-mentioned link regarding Pamela Joyner here.
Find the above-mentioned link regarding Leon Black here.
To download the entire letter as a pdf file, please click here.
At this time, it is unclear whether the various governmental authorities who have received the above communication have responded to it or initiated any kind of investigation.
Not an oil truck. No. A flour truck, parked in front of Béchu, our lovely local bakery. It makes two deliveries each week, pumping flour as if it were fuel into a large tank in the basement. Béchu buys about 150 quintales of flour each month; that’s about one ton every two days. In our apartment across the street, we have bread on the table at lunch and dinner, usually a ficelle — a small version of a baguette. We need it to go with cheese and to mop up sauce, and as an accompaniment throughout any meal.
Béchu’s bread is often sold straight from the oven; the staff laughs when I grinningly complain that it is too hot. The bakery is also a place where the people behind the counter seem to remember every customer. Occasionally when I shop before a meal, I’ll be told that we don’t need any bread because my wife has already been by.
We’ve long held the position that a Dartmouth foreign study program should be mandatory for students; today only 60% of undergrads take advantage of the College’s wide range of options. Being comfortable in a foreign environment is an essential skill, and relieving crowding in Hanover would be helpful, too.
In the picture above, Dartmouth students viewed the royal carriages exhibited in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Arras, a city in northern France not far from Vimy Ridge, the site of bloody battles in WWI. Students also saw the Carrière Wellington, a huge series of underground quarries that sheltered as many as 25,000 Allies soldiers in the Great War. Their visit was written up in an article in La Voix du Nord.
Addendum: The D is reporting that “The Off-Campus Student Advisory Board, a committee designed to improve study abroad programs, plans to improve student knowledge about off-campus programs by launching a website next week detailing academic, cultural and internship opportunities, as well as basic safety and accommodation information for each off-campus program.” This is a smart improvement: I’d have enjoyed seeing other students’ accumulated knowledge when I was on LSA in Mainz.
Addendum: Similar to the above-mentioned website, the Student Assembly’s new Dartmouth Group Directory, a Wikipedia-style database with information about student groups, is a nice bit of progress on an otherwise moribund campus.
By all accounts Bruce Rauner ‘78 is a smart investor, but sometimes one has to wonder about the taste of Dartmouth’s many MBA’s. At a well attended Dartmouth Club lunch for Jim Kim last week at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Chicago, Rauner introduced Kim as “the greatest of Dartmouth’s seventeen presidents.” He listed Kim’s accomplishments as the Science of Health Care Delivery masters program, cutting back the endowment draw by over 2% without cutting back on any academic budgets, and creating the national collaborative to combat student drinking.
Kim thanked Rauner for the introduction, did not take issue with the praise that he had received, and then referred to Rauner in turn as “Dartmouth’s most generous donor.” (I guess Dr. Seuss has been quickly forgotten.)
What a bunch of back-slapping, towel-flicking boys. How sad to see supposedly educated people bereft of intellectual discipline and historical perspective.
Addendum: Personally, I’d rank John Sloan Dickey, who was President for 25 years (1945-1970), and at least a dozen other leaders, ahead of Jim Kim. Rauner’s list of Kim’s supposed accomplishments includes nothing related to the College’s academic and residential life. Kim couldn’t even re-create Dickey’s Great Issues course — about which he talked so much in his first couple of years in Hanover, until he found out that it took actual work, and not just slick speeches, to put innovations into place.
Next year’s Ivy tuition numbers are in for everyone but Columbia (for some reason that school doesn’t announce its increase until the end of June each year), and the College is once again the most costly Ivy — though we’ll undoubtedly drop back to #2 once Columbia’s figures appear.
This result is particularly unacceptable given that the cost of living in Hanover is the second lowest among the Ivy cities and towns, and the cost of living in Manhattan is the highest (see below). Additionally, the College’s 4.8% increase for the coming year in tuition, room/board, and fees was the second highest jump in the Ivy League after Yale:
We seem to be putting space between ourselves and schools like Princeton. Four years in Hanover will now cost you $26,872 more than getting your education in Princeton, NJ. If you had the choice, where would you (and your parents) choose to go to school?
Addendum: Unless the College gets serious about its costs, the 2013-2014 academic year will see the basic cost of attending Dartmouth break $60,000.
As they did in the last Presidential Search — and look where that got us — the leaders of the Presidential Search Committee have announced public meetings to elicit the views of students, faculty and staff regarding the appropriate profile for the College’s next President. What a sham.
The last time around, these meetings were filmed under klieg lights, and a number of faculty members noted that the setting was hardly propitious for a full and frank exchange of views. Let’s put things more directly: what faculty, student or staff member is going to stand up and give a serious critique of the current administration when their words are sure to get back to the administrators who pay them? At best, people will speak guardedly, or in code as Professor Susan Ackerman did in 2008.
If the Trustees were serious about understanding the views of the various stakeholders at Dartmouth, all 23 of them would each organize meetings with random individuals at the College. And they would suggest that those people invite several trusted colleagues of their own choosing to participate in the get-togethers. In that way, the Trustees could listen to, and question over an extended period of time, the people who know Dartmouth best. It doesn’t take a Ph.D in communications (or anthropology) to know that statements made in public meetings will omit more information than they contain.
If each Trustee held two morning and two afternoon meetings, and each meeting were attended by five people, then in a single day the members of the Board could hear the unfiltered, honest views of close to 500 people from the College. They could learn the real opinions of faculty, students and staff about the current administration and what Dartmouth needs from its next President.
What schools breed Fortune 500 CEO’s? There are at least two things to take away from the U.S. News & World Report’s table below. First, only 244 of the 500 CEO’s came from the top-contributing 13 schools. That’s less than I would have expected. And secondly, where are Yale, Princeton and Brown when it comes to producing leaders of men and women?
Addendum: A reader comments:
I just wanted to point out that in fact fewer (likely a lot fewer) than 244 of the CEOs of Fortune 500 came from the Top 13 contributing schools. There is certainly significant double counting among the undergraduate and MBA ranks (just look at our own Board of Trustees, e.g. Immelt and Donahoe). I think the Undergrad Ranking in this study is significantly more enlightening.
Dartmouth is the only “college” in the Ivies; the other poor souls call themselves “universities.” But damned if you could tell that from our website. How about taking pride in our origins and the fact that we have far more undergrads than graduate students? Perhaps the newest iteration of the Dartmouth College website could speak our full name without shame? Pass it on.
Addendum: The accursed word never escapes the lips of Provost Folt. In fact, it seems that she’d like a name change to Dartmouth U.
Addendum: A vigilant alum adds to the picture:
Same darn thing on Facebook, Joe. If you try typing “Dartmouth College” into the search box, the results will literally never display the school’s official Facebook page. It doesn’t come up in the search drop down, and it won’t show up at all in the All Results, either. Here, you might see an unofficial “Dartmouth College” Facebook placeholder page that just re-posts Wikipedia information, you’ll see “Dartmouth Community College”, you’ll see “Dartmouth College” in Ladera Heights, CA, you’ll see friends and classmates who went to Dartmouth College, you’ll see the Facebook page for the Hop, and Career Services… but you will not ever see “Dartmouth”… unless you happen to already have “liked” the page and then happen to scroll way down past the search results to “Posts by Friends.”
So they’re apparently willing to ignore the name and heritage of the College, confuse the brand, and intentionally make an important communications portal harder to find, just to prove a nasty point about who’s in charge? It’s just pathetic the degree the level of antipathy shown towards our spectacularly unique alma mater by the people now running this school. A thousand other schools that don’t treasure being the “College” or appreciate the reasons for embracing an identity as a college; a thousand other schools could never generate such strong bonds amongst alumni and between alumni and the school, a thousand other schools that don’t have the financial resources that Dartmouth does and yet charge far less in tuition; a thousand other schools that couldn’t hope to ever attract such special teachers to such a special place. And somehow the College is now run by people who look at this all as a bother, and worse, act on their contempt.
Former Brit PM Gordon Brown will be at the College today. He’ll be giving a public speech at 2 p.m. in Cook Auditorium. Curiously, Brown won’t be speaking to any classes or doing anything else with faculty or students. Methinks he is lobbying for something related to the World Bank. We’ll keep you posted.
Brown was Britain’s longest-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer (1997-2007). Perhaps he is in town because he wants Dr. Kim’s views on some particularly thorny questions of international finance and fiscal policy.
Addendum: It is this space’s view that Jim Kim couldn’t answer the most basic questions from Econ 01. Why is there inflation? What factors influence the value of a nation’s currency? What effects do interest rates and government spending have on economic growth and job creation? Brown would be surprised by the weak answers he receives, if he offered up a few simple queries to the lightweight Dr. Kim.
Addendum: In a last minute change of schedule, Gordon Brown met with students in Econ 46 and 76. And, by all accounts, he gave a great speech.
Not that it was all roses and formal dates in my time, but the modern-day hook-up culture is one of the least appealing parts of current student life. There are finer ways to live your life than via an unending series of drunken couplings.
Fortunately, the desire for romance still seems to lurk in the hearts of most students, though it does take some time to get them to admit it. I wonder what this speaker has to say on the subject.
Interestingly, Mr. Harper’s visit is sponsored by OPAL.
Addendum: A Baker Tower Irregular reports that Doctor Harper is, in fact, the holder of a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration. His talk focused primarily on the plight of black males in the academy. While Harper began his talk promising not to ascribe blame, he failed to offer any possible solutions to the problems he described. In fact, he spent most of his talk blaming élite institutions like Penn and Dartmouth. The idea of romance seemed to get lost along the way.
Dean of the College Chartotte Johnson’s responses to the questions posed by students on Google Moderator (students suggested questions; other students voted on them; queries receiving the most votes were asked) followed a familiar pattern: Everything is fine at the College; we are already acting on your concerns; when we are not responding, there are five or six reasons for not doing so. In short, lots of words, little content, less integrity. And certainly never an admission that mistakes have been made. All in all, it should be clear to any longtime observer of the College scene that Dean Johnson spent plenty of time en tête à tête with IP/Provost Carol Folt figuring out ways to fob off students’ queries.
Let’s parse a few of the Q&A’s — which the College has limited to restricted viewing on the College intranet. Fortunately, Dartblog has obtained them for you with the assistance of a charter member of the Baker Tower Irregulars.
Q #3: “Why is there no option for students to remove themselves from the mealplan?”
Leading with the positive, Dean Johnson responds that there is an exemption procedure for “students who are non-traditional [?], students who have families, students who have religious beliefs or religious practices that prohibit their participation on the mealplan,” but these exemptions “aren’t widely granted.” But as to why students are actually obliged to sign-up for a mealplan, Dean Johnson gave two reasons. Mealplans a) allow students “to build broad social networks” and “interact across difference,” and b) to “ensure that students have access to healthy and nutritious food options.”
In other words, folks, it’s about the money. If the College can oblige almost all students to sign up for mealplan, there is a guaranteed income stream to support the overpaid, bloated staff at DDS. As to the specific reasons Dean Johnson gave, they are easily shown to be invalid. Regarding the social aspect of dining, the new DDS plans moved from à la carte ordering to all-you-can eat. The latter prohibits a quick visit to Thayer to accompany a friend who is having a meal. Students may now only enter Thayer at the cost of a meal-swipe or the cash payment of a full meal. So much for improving social interaction. As for her concern about nutrition, perhaps Dean Johnson does not know that students were not obliged to buy mealplans before 1999, and there is no evidence from that time of malnutrition or starvation among Dartmouth students.
Q #8: Why does Dartmouth continuously raise tuition and the cost of attendance at a rate outpacing inflation? Why is Dartmouth, in rural New Hampshire, competing with Columbia in New York, as the most expensive school in the Ivies? Living in the woods should be cheaper.”
Pretty good question, right? It could have come from a Dartblog reader. In response, the Dean gave multiple responses, none of which addressed the question. She noted: a) Dartmouth’s world-class education; b) the real cost of a Dartmouth education being half the “sticker price,” with the difference being made up by the endowment, gifts and other sources of revenue; c) that the College has a need-blind admissions policy; that families with income below $100k/year get free tuition and no loans; and d) that average student debt is only $16k, which is “significantly lower than a lot of the New England schools.” She even goes on about accessibility, increased resources, and diversity. But not a single word as to why the overall cost of a Dartmouth education is just below that of Columbia’s and higher than all of the other Ivies.
Q #14: Where will the College get the money to cover the surprise $41 million dollar cost of the Hanover Inn so as to minimize the impact on students?
With a little folksy charm, Dean John justifies the $25M overrun by observing that “for anyone who has build a house, as I have, you always run over on construction projects.” Maybe that’s true at the Pentagon, but it is not true in the real world, where projects can be on budget, or perhaps go somewhat over budget due to small, belated design changes — but not by a factor of almost 200%. Regrettably, the Dean doesn’t leave open the possibility of rampant errors in the College’s design and build process (the topic of an upcoming Dartblog post).
Dean Johnson then points out that part of the College’s new 30-year [$70 million] bond will “help cover the cost,” along with supposed new increases in revenue from the “new, improved Hanover Inn,” and she says that “we’ll look at the central budget to see where we can make up the gap.” She ends by warmly assuring us that “we won’t have that overrun impact the students’ experience at Dartmouth.”
If this kind of response were provided to financial analysts, they’d be rolling in the aisles. Just where is the money going to come from at an educational institution like Dartmouth — other than from things that impact students. Look at the cost cuts of the last three years: reduced faculty, fewer courses, DDS gouging, and on and on. Or put another way, if the renovation of the Inn had been done with no waste, there would be an additional $20 million or more available right now to make Dartmouth a better school.
All in all, Dean Johnson’s performance, despite/because of her coaching by Carol Folt, merits at best a D grade. Clearly the College’s next President is going to have to find a new Dean of the College, in addition to changing all the administration’s other top staff members.
Addendum: To be fair to Charlotte and Carol, they have no monopoly on dissembling. When Jim Jim referred to non-existent data and students’ safety in justifying the College’s money-saving closure of the swim docks, he showed that he could spin with the best of them, too. Let’s hope that our next President sets a tone of rigorous intellectual honesty, one that will be emulated by the senior members of the administration.
After being hired to head up New England College’s new Doctorate in Education program last September, former Dean of the College Sylvia Spears has left NEC to take a new position: Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Emerson College. Draw whatever conclusion you want from her eight-month tenure at NEC; Dartblog’s take is that she couldn’t cut it in a job where real people had to receive a real education. She’s now headed back to the safety (and unaccountability) of the diversity racket.
Going from Dartmouth’s Dean of the College position to Emerson’s Dean of Diversity is a drop in the hierarchy of a great many levels, like moving from the Red Sox starting rotation to pitching for the Class A Lowell Spinners. The move is definitive proof of how embarrassingly incompetent Jim Kim’s appointment of Spears was in the first place — as this space pointed out when Spears first became Dean of the College in August of 2009:
Sylvia Spears is in so far over her head in this job that she won’t even be able to see the surface. Has she ever hired or fired anyone in the positions that she has held? I mean, anyone at all? Does she have any management skills/experience? Has she ever prepared a budget and stuck to it?
Even by the lax standards of the academy, appointing Sylvia Spears as Dean of the College is incomprehensible to anyone with a modicum of business experience.
Interestingly enough, Spears was hired for her new job by Emerson President Lee Pelton, who was Dartmouth’s Dean of the College from 1991 to 1998. Pelton came to Hanover after being poached from Colgate University, the same career path followed by current Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson.
Dartmouth AD Harry Sheehy’s wife Connie — who has been working in Admissions at the College this year — survived a one-car accident on I-89 last week during rainy conditions. She walked away without injury from a multiple rollover at highway speed but was hospitalized for several days for observation. Connie is home now and doing well, no doubt thankful that her safety belt did its job and that she was blessed by more than good luck. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to Connie and Harry.
Claude Monet lived as luminously as he painted. His house, studio, and garden at Giverny, about an hour west of Paris, have been restored according to the color palette that Monet used in planning his expansive flowerbeds and lily ponds. He worked on the multi-building compound for most of the last 40 years of his life. From the house’s pale blue walls to Monet’s bright yellow dishes, there is no doubting the artist’s delight in lively colors. During WWI he painted one of his series there: images of weeping willow trees en homage to France’s fallen soldiers. Fortunately for us, we live in happier times, as expressed by the joyous irises that illuminated our visit on a recent spring day.
According to Professor of Medicine Gilbert Welch, some doctors joke that if you think there is nothing wrong with you, that’s because your specialist hasn’t done enough tests. Welch has carved out a name for himself in his effort to reduce wasteful, costly, and ultimately unhealthy procedures in American healthcare. He is a frequent contributor to op-ed pages across the country (see recent pieces in the LA Times and the NY Times, for example), where he never pulls punches with his incisive prose. An excerpt from a recent LAT piece:
Nine specialty societies contributed five recommendations each to the list [of medically unnecessary tests that should be actively discouraged] (others are expected to contribute in the future). The recommendations each started with the word “don’t” — as in “don’t perform,” “don’t order,” “don’t recommend.”
Could American medicine be changing?
For years, medical organizations have been developing recommendations and guidelines focused on things doctors should do. The specialty societies have been focused on protecting the financial interests of their most profligate members and have been reluctant to acknowledge the problem of overuse. Maybe they are now owning up to the problem.
And judging from the content of the list, testing is a big part of that problem. Only a quarter of the recommendations fell in the category of “don’t treat” — as in, don’t prescribe more chemotherapy for end-stage cancer that is beyond hope. The remainder fell in the category of “don’t test.”…
Most doctors will agree with the recommendations on the list. But the problem of overuse is less one of bad doctors (although there are a few); the problem is more one of good doctors working in a bad system.
The truth is there are many forces that push us to do more. There are the performance measures that typically give doctors good grades for ordering tests, rather than for not ordering them. There is the legal system that will punish us for underdiagnosis, but not for overdiagnosis. There are the demands from patients seeking to get their money’s worth from insurance after years of being taught to believe the best medical care is the most medical care. And there are the financial rewards: Most doctors, and/or the clinics and hospitals they work for, are paid more if they do more.
Welch’s biography gives lie yet again to the notion that research and teaching cannot successfully co-exist. His lengthy list of publications includes 36 books and articles that have been cited over 100 times by other researchers (ten of these scholarly works have been cited more than 250 times). And by all reports, Welch is an engaging teacher.
In addition, as we’ve pointed out frequently in the past with regard to professors like Andrew Samwick, Susannah Heschel, Danny Blanchflower, Barbara Will, Ron Green and Doug Irwin, people like Welch and most of the College’s top scholar/teachers also seem to find time to play an important public role. What is the administration doing to recruit and nurture faculty members of this quality?
Addendum: Anyone spending time between France and the U.S. has specific examples of over-testing that Welch could use in his articles. Mine include falling and taking a shock to my left shoulder that limited my mobility. During a five-minute exam, a French osteopath manipulated my shoulder in various ways and concluded that I had a mild case of frozen shoulder. Prognosis: My joint would heal itself in 12-18 months. Cost: €65 ($85). My second opinion at DHMC included four professionals working to pump fluid into my shoulder in the course of an equipment-intensive fluorescing X-ray. Prognosis: The same as in France. Cost: One can only guess, but it was a lot more than $85.
Word from the inside is that Paul Danos was going to be the interim-President but he withdrew his acceptance of the Trustees’ offer following a day of reflection. Too bad. The man is the kind of quiet, effective leader that the College needs (not a noisy, ineffective one like we had for the past three years — and, if you don’t already know, not a quiet, ineffective one like we have now).
Below is Danos’ recent report to Tuck alumni. Give a listen. He describes actual events, measurable results, and above all, there is no bombast about rankings and world-beating quality. As a friend once said to me, “The leaders of great schools don’t talk about who they are, they talk about what they are doing.”
In the video, among other topics, Danos talks about myTuck, the school’s new, in-house, Facebook-style site for its alumni. The site was described at length on Poets & Quants:
It was only a matter of time before a prominent business school decided to do its own version of Facebook to better connect alumni around the world. Not surprisingly, the school that will launch its Facebook-like network is Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.
Next month, the school will take the wraps off of an impressive and innovative effort to use a private social network to more effectively link its 9,100 alumni—already the most loyal and generous of any business school in the world—with each other as well as the Tuck’s faculty and current students.
“The most loyal and generous of any business school in the world.” Hmm. People used to say that about Dartmouth’s alums, back when alumni giving was at 70% each year — as Tuck’s is today. Isn’t it nice when independent publications sing a school’s praises. If an administration concentrates on materially improving an institution, it can count on others to do the horn-blowing.
Note: According to the Council for Aid to Education, which conducts a national survey of colleges and universities to document private giving, in 2011 Dartmouth ranked 17th in the nation with an alumni giving rate of 43.5%. The College does not seem to have publicly released its own update to this figure in several years.
Addendum: The other day Business Week had a laudatory report on how Tuck is using on-line learning to supplement student preparation for classes. Paul Danos is quoted as saying that “he believes his school is at the forefront of this trend, and he expects others will follow.”
While the College takes pride in extending generous financial aid to 57.4% of the student body, the other 42.6% pays full whack. That’s an amazing thing when you think about it. The average American family income is $49,445, yet a great many Dartmouth families can pull together $62,125 (according to the recent estimate below by the College) to send a son or daughter to Hanover for three terms.
As we have pointed out before, at the current rate of growth, in another ten years or so the total annual cost of a Dartmouth education will be a round $100,000.
Student Assembly President Max Yoeli’s recent excoriation of Jim Kim was inaccurate in one area:
Kim has focused his presidency on increasing fundraising, improving image and health care delivery, which are important priorities, but at the expense of adequately addressing the issues that impact daily student life.
[Emphasis added]
Was Jim Kim a good fundraiser? The numbers in the Dartmouth Fact Book don’t bear out Max’s proposition. Overall donations during the second full year of Jim Kim’s Presidency (2010-2011) did not return to the levels seen in 2007-2008, and that figure does not include any adjustment for the 8.5% inflation between those years.
In fact, “Total Alumni” giving (see above) dropped back over 10% from 2009-2010 to 2010-2011 to almost the depth of the 2008-2009 crisis.
In the same time frame, the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones, rebounded strongly from the trough at the start of 2009.
Word from the Development Office is that Kim seemed unwilling to be part of the multi-year efforts that it takes to land major gifts. He repeatedly begged off going on the road to court major donors, pleading a desire to spend time with his family.
Curiously, the latter consideration did not seem important to Kim during his recent worldwide “listening tour,” and it seems a fair bet that he will travel a great deal as President of the World Bank.
English Professor Barbara Will’s thorough documentation of Gertrude Stein’s collaboration with the Nazi/Vichy régime in France has been part of a political storm in New York, where “The Steins Collect” art exhibit in now on display at the Met. We wrote about Professor Will when she was in Paris when the Stein show was here — and we noted that Dartmouth has a Picasso painting in the exhibition. The New Yorker gives a summary of the brouhaha.
The D is running a four-part series on the Board of Trustees, and while the descriptions contained therein are more or less on the mark (with a few awful omissions), the young journalists have failed to engage in critical thinking worthy of a Dartmouth education. When Trustee Chair Steve Mandel makes a statement, a good reporter should ask a follow-up question or two. Let’s take a look at one example of a missed opportunity for a set of serious, probing responses:
