Dartblog

Government Professor Alan Stam, who left these climes several years ago to improve the University of Michigan, wrote the below piece at the time when the College was riven by the revelation that Dean of Admissions “King Karl” Furstenberg had written a letter on College stationary to the President of Swarthmore condemning varsity athletics (“football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours.”) Furstenberg announced his retirement the following year — to the great relief of Dartmouth’s coaches.

Stam later observed to me that he had been told that reprints of his article graced the office walls of college and high school coaches across the country.

Dartblog has already praised President Kim”s resolve in protecting all of the College’s varsity sports teams from budget cuts, and it is worth urging here that club sports teams be similarly protected. The number of club teams has soared since my day in Hanover; athletes less gifted than our varsity recruits still seek the joy of wearing green, and the communal pleasure of playing on a competitive team. Herewith Professor Stam’s memorable column:

In its Dec. 17 editorial that expressed support for Dartmouth Dean of Admissions Carl Furstenberg, the Valley News opined that, “(I)t’s hard to grasp the rationale for excluding that budding poet or philosopher in preference to a recruited athlete if providing a world class education is your mission.” Hard indeed. That is, if one falls prey to a couple of dubious assumptions.

First, to assert that recruited athletes have less value we must assume that recruited athletes cannot be budding poets or philosophers. Second, even if the first is true, we must also assume that budding poets and philosophers add more to other students’ education than do the athletes on campus. Not having access to the private information that one would need to actually base such judgments in fact, I can rely only on my own experiences, both as a varsity athlete in Cornell University’s rowing program and as a tenured professor in Dartmouth’s Government Department.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — The IOC will investigate the behavior of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal by swigging beer and champagne on the ice.

“I already have files on several of these girls,” Chief Giaccone was reported to have said. “Cigars is the least of it. I will seek to have their victory annulled and their medals returned to the IOC if it turns out that any Keystone Light or Korbel was involved in their celebration. This kind of behavior leads to utter lawlessness. Trust me, I know.”

Dartblog will follow this unfolding situation closely.

The Reverend Kent Dahlberg recently described a survey that Williams College does of its alumni five years after Commencement to gage their perception of a Williams education. Dartmouth should do the same, and while in that vein, here are a few more surveys that the College could conduct on a regular basis:

• Varsity team members should be polled each year on how effective their coaching has been. Our incoming AD should judge our coaches on more than their won/lost records. We need to understand how successful coaches are in developing and motivating their players.
• Incoming athletes should be surveyed on the strength of Dartmouth’s recruiting efforts. Athletes in past years have told me that the quality of recruiting varies wildly from school to school and team to team. Do we know how our competition is doing and how well we are doing in comparison?
• We should send admissions staffers to take campus tours at competing schools to see how they present themselves. Look at the entire admissions process. Secret shoppers are a business-world standard; we should follow suit.

President Kim is entirely correct that we must measure the effectiveness of everything that we do. But we should also compare what we do with the actions of our competitors. Over the long term, let’s try to be perfect; in the short run, we should make sure that we are the best.

Addendum: Reverend Dahlberg sheds further light on Williams’ alumni surveys:

My understanding is that Williams surveys its alumni every five years throughout their lives and careers (vs. simply one time five years after they graduated). So the school’s leadership is assessing how the liberal arts education they provided is serving its recipients or “customers” at age 27, 32, 27, 42, 47, 52, 57, 62, etc.

Another Addendum: Although the current athletes with whom I spoke have not filled out questionnaires, it seems that the Athletics Office does provide questionnaires for sophomore and senior athletes. And one alumnus has written in to say that he has done a number of questionnaires since graduation — a privilege that I have not heard of from other alumni, nor had myself. I stand corrected.

I got more than a little blowback regarding my post about the departure of Dean of Residential Life Marty Redman. The good Dean has many friends and supporters, though he also has many people who were critical of his performance — as Joe Malchow’s amendation showed.

But the main point of my remarks was that President Kim continues to pare down the bureaucracy and trim the ranks of President Wright’s Old Guard. The Kim administration is actively looking for new ideas, and new energy to put them into place. That’s good for Dartmouth.

I understand that Friends of Marty might be upset — and I apologize if he and they are offended — but our new President has larger aims than the continuance of business as usual. On October 26th at an open meeting on the budget crisis, President Kim referred to the tension between our “culture of caring” and “our greatest values.” Which of the two categories is more important to you?

Tris Wykes of the Valley News has a balanced and candid profile of the Dartmouth swim team program, coached by Jim Wilson. The piece’s use of statistics is refreshingly complete, and it reprises some of the themes that Dartblog has highlighted over the past months, to wit:

Wilson said he [had] sometimes wondered [while Kark Furstenberg was Dean of Admissions] whether staying at Dartmouth was worth the struggle to get prospects admitted. The coach said only two swimming recruits might be included in one year’s freshman class, while the next might include nine or 10. Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions from 1990-2006, was viewed by some in the college’s athletic community as difficult to work with, especially after a 2004 controversy that revealed his disparaging views on the Big Green’s football program.

Ceplikas said admissions outcomes are “much more predictable now,” not just for swimming and diving, but for all of Dartmouth’s athletic programs.

Such unaccustomed candor. Much welcomed.

Ex-Trustee Michael Chu ‘68 had a column in The D yesterday that, I must admit, leaves me more than a little mystified. Can anyone explain his concept of governance?

A trustee needs to arrive to all Dartmouth issues with a truly open mind, where the opinions of other trustees have equal weight in a sincere attempt by all to distinguish the enduring good of the College.

At its core lies the conviction that ultimately Dartmouth is better served by the Board’s collective wisdom rather than your own views. I now believe adhering to this is the highest expression of my love for Dartmouth.

At first, I thought that Mr. Chu was expressing the Leninist notion of democratic centralism, which Wikipedia accurately defines as follows:

Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party. The democratic aspect of this organizational method describes the freedom of members of the political party to discuss and debate matters of policy and direction, but once the decision of the party is made by majority vote, all members are expected to uphold that decision. This latter aspect represents the centralism. As Lenin described it, democratic centralism consisted of “freedom of discussion, unity of action.”

But Chu seems to eschew the notion that one should have views of one’s own. Perhaps Trustees should place their hands on one great Ouija Board, a kind of group-fed oracle, out of which wisdom will flow? Or should Trustees keep their thoughts to themselves, for fear of being deemed divisive — today’s pejorative of choice in Hanover?

Or maybe Chu is the product of the kind of 1960’s-style education that Ayn Rand described as “learning to smell the scent of the pack” — wherein one seeks to learn where the majority is going, and then follows happily along?

I mean, really, what can Chu mean by placing himself among those who, as he writes, “believe the future of a jewel born in 1769 is best assured by mobilizing the collective wisdom of the family”?

I hesitate to call the intellectual product of a Dartmouth Trustee incoherent, but I won’t hesitate for too long. I can’t for the life of me understand the mechanics of the executive decision-making process favored by Michael Chu.

Some members of the Executive Committee of my class are circulating a note in support of my opponents in the upcoming Alumni Trustee election. Its content gives a good sense of where governance at Dartmouth might be headed:

Both candidates were selected by the Dartmouth Alumni Council’s Nominating and Alumni Search Committee in a thorough review of dozens of qualified candidates. We believe in this method of candidate selection since it gives dedicated alumni from diverse backgrounds ample opportunity to assess the abilities of candidates to both add compelling value to the existing Board of Trustees and effectively work with the existing Trustees and President.

This election is important as it provides us with an opportunity to break from the divisive political process that has characterized our most recent elections. The new Association of Alumni rules that establish the election process for Dartmouth’s alumni trustee elections now permit the Alumni Council to nominate only one candidate for each open seat. [emphasis added]

Do you believe in this method of candidate selection, too? The Alumni Council’s Nominating and Alumni Search Committee is made up of only seven or eight people, plus the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, who is an ex officio member of the committee. This small committee interviews and chooses candidates for the Board, and then these candidates are presented — without prior identification or opportunity for review — to the Alumni Council for a ratification vote, which takes place immediately (and is almost always unanimous; this year one Councillor out of 90 dissented).

It appears that my classmates feel that the best way to “break from the divisive political process that has characterized our most recent elections” is to dispense with elections altogether. They want to let their little committee choose a single candidate for each open Trustee seat, have that candidate summarily approved by the Council, and avoid any discussion with those 69,000 pesky alumni out there who might have other ideas.

If I recall correctly, in the last century there were a good many nations that tried this kind of thing in their national politics, but very few of them do so today.

Paul Mirrengoff at Power Line has endorsed my candidacy for Alumni Trustee. I am grateful for the endorsement, and even more appreciative of his thoughtful analysis. Go to Powerline to read Paul’s thoughts with links here, or see the text below:

A word to our Dartmouth readers

Power Line
February 22, 2010
Posted by Paul at 8:45 PM

Dartmouth is holding elections for two trustee positions. Voting begins on March 10.

The Dartmouth power structure has selected Morton Kondracke and John Replogle to seek these position. Kondracke, the well-known journalist, will be unopposed. Replogle will face our friend Joe Asch, who gathered the petitions necessary to run against the establishment’s hand-picked candidate.

For me the Asch-Replogle race is a no-brainer, and I hope our readers will see it that way too. Joe Asch would bring a critical eye and a profound knowledge of all things Dartmouth to the Board. Replogle, as far as I can tell, is basically another corporate CEO who would jet in and out of the Upper Valley without adding anything distinctive to the Board. Indeed, as I’ll argue below, there is reason to think he will detract from the quality of the Board.

President Kim has been scrupulously non-judgmental in describing the incompetence of the adminstration of he who must not be named. Of course, Kim has been right to do so; there is no profit in casting blame. But to his credit, our new leader has also not flinched from telling the truth about the last/lost decade — even if he has chosen to do so somewhat obliquely.

Regarding the structural deficit that has driven the current wave of cost cutting, Kim was clear about the source of the problem in his public presentation about the budget on Janury 15 (listen from 19:33-20:12):

“And the point is, it’s a structural problem. It keeps recurring unless we reduce expenditures or have new sources of revenues. It wouldn’t be a gift of $100 million that we are looking for, it would be a gift of $2BN we’re looking for. If someone were willing to give us a gift of $2Bn, that will generate $100M per year, then we’re ok.”

Translation: Our financial woes only stem in part from the $836M decline in the endowment in 2009. The real source of our financial problem is that the Wright Adminstration was spending money as if the endowment were more than a billion dollars higher than it actually was at its peak.

Sam Buntz ‘11 should file away his “Bored of Trustees” column in Friday’s D under the heading of “Things That Will Deeply Embarrass Me Once I Have Learned How the World Works.” His piece opines that the controversy over elections to the Board is irrelevant to him: his implication is that the College should dispense with such squabbles altogether and simply allow people to get on with their work. One must wonder what he thinks about elections for federal and state government offices.

What Sam misses is an understanding that civilizations, countries, companies and colleges in their present form are a compendium of myriad past decisions large and small. Perhaps he thinks that the present financial crisis at the College is simply due to a mysterious drop in the endowment, and does not stem from the Wright administration’s bloating of its personnel count by over 40% in the space of ten years. Or he might believe that course oversubscriptions just happened, and had nothing to do with the declining percentage of the College’s budget devoted to the faculty, and poor past decisions made about allocating faculty members between departments.

The world around us is there because people of greater or lesser ability made specific, conscious choices. Someone gifted chose to build Baker Library; someone with less of an eye left us with Berry. Someone decided to add more deans, and then stood by as future Nobel Laureate Mike Gazzaniga ‘61 left the College for U.C. Santa Barbara. Someone decided to give tenure to philosophy professors who had been deemed unworthy by their own department, and thereby led to the gutting of a first-class area of the College.

Someone decided to end parity on the Board of Trustees — telling a generation of alumni that their voice did not matter. Try asking many of them for a financial contribution now.

Yes, Sam, there is a reality out there. The College’s reputation, and students’ actual experience, will improve — or decline — over the upcoming days, weeks, months and years because of decisions made each day by President Kim and the Board of Trustees. Who we have as our President and who sits on the Board is of real importance. Even you, Sam, will acknowledge that our country and our College have had better and lesser Presidents. Does Bush equal Obama? Does Wright Equal Kim?

The same observation holds true for the Board, which sat idly by over the past decade as the College slid both in the rankings and in the reality of students’ daily experience (try to find someone from before the Class of 1999 who was turned away from a class; you may be able to do so, but it will take you a good while).

The world is not a static place. Decisions made today will change our world tomorrow. Who makes those decisions, and what they are, matter a great deal. And that is true even if Sam Buntz ‘11 is blithely happy with his life right now.

The D ran a story on Friday (“Police policy affects Trustee race dynamic”) that focused largely on Dartblog’s successful reporting about the Town of Hanover’s now-stillborn ramping up on its alcohol policy. Reporter Greg Berger ‘12 noted the spike in our readership:

In the six days following the [new alcohol policy] announcement, Asch posted 13 comments about the issue on Dartblog — nine of which he published within one day of the announcement.

As of Feb. 11, Dartblog had seen a 75 percent increase in visitors to the site. Of those readers, 4,100 of 14,350 viewed the site using the Dartmouth network, Joe Malchow ‘08, the web site’s founder, said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.

“Alumni readers of Dartblog continued their reading patterns during the Giaccone imbroglio, while student readers increased their activity exponentially,” Malchow said.

Greg is slightly too modest to state the obvious: this month virtually every current undergraduate studied Dartblog to find out about the Town of Hanover’s new alcohol initiative.

I don’t quite know how to react to this, so I will make it a Sunday post because it goes so far against the grain of Sunday reading. An Israeli trainer, Alon Stivi, is giving a new defintion to the term civilian defense. This story describes training for students to prepare them to react to situations in which a Colombine-style gunman is marauding through a school.

Should we be doing this at Dartmouth, in high schools, and even grade schools? Should we be teaching passengers to storm the cockpit of an airplane hijacked by suicide-bent terrorists?

I am all for preparedness in most situations, but I have a nagging sense that this is going too far. Perhaps you could think about the question for a moment, and then return to the quiet that we enjoy around here on a Sunday.

The excellent Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (soon to be on-line) reports that the current annual rate of tuition, room and board at the College, at $49,974, is the second most expensive in the Ivy League after Cornell. Does that make sense to you?

Why would the two rural Ivies be more expensive than schools located in high-cost urban areas like Cambridge, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Providence and New Haven — and fashionable, suburban Princeton? Certainly the cost of land, construction and security in Ithaca and Hanover is lower, and the wage scale is more reasonable out here in the country, given the moderate local cost of living.

JOE MALCHOW offers a thought: Cornell’s pricing is inflated by government subsidy—monies paid by the New York public to the university, vanishing into the maw of the party of the second part, and being merrily paid once again by hapless parents. The buoyant effect on tuition of public aid is well documented, but Cornell suffers not only from the Stafford effect but from Albany’s generosity too. Cornell also faces the unfortunate position of being run, in part, by public employees, with all of the languid labor, bad bidding processes, and ruinous employment restrictions attending same.

Our Obama has a solution for these sad circs, of course. He has proposed expanding federal “Pell” grants for college students, supposing that a transfer of money from taxpayers to universities will prompt the universities to charge commensurately less for their product. Although this line of reasoning is opposed to the gravitational forces of our world, one must have faith in the president.

“When someone is 42 years old and their marriage is not working out and divorce could be on the horizon, they don’t call their chemistry professor for advice.” — Dartmouth Coach

The value of participation in team sports seems to be in the national news (NYT: The Well: As Girls Become Women, Sports Pay Dividends); and locally, President Kim has drawn a line in the financial sand in protecting varsity teams from the current budget cuts. The D quoted him as stating that “athletics should be part of an overall Dartmouth College strategic plan.”

Surprisingly, the emphasis in most articles is on the sporting activity itself and team camaraderie. Coaches get short shrift. In fact, in the above-cited NYT article, coaching is not mentioned at all. Yet when you give it a moment’s thought, the Dartmouth coach’s comment at the start of this post makes a lot of sense. From recruitment through four years of growth, successes, slumps and injuries, Dartmouth coaches stick with their student-athletes and help them perform at the highest level. The results of their work are measurable in the short term on the field, and become apparent off the field in the long run as well.

I could go on about this, but Michael Lewis says it best in a memorable article (Coach Fitz’s Management Theory) about his high school baseball coach, Billy Fitzgerald. An excerpt:

Then Fitz leaned down, put his hand on my shoulder and, thrusting his face right up to mine, became as calm as the eye of a storm. It was just him and me now; we were in this together. I have no idea where the man’s intention ended and his instincts took over, but the effect of his performance was to say, There’s no one I’d rather have out here in this life-or-death situation. And I believed him!

As the other team continued to erupt with joy, Fitz glanced at the runner on third base, a reedy fellow with an aspiring mustache, and said, ”Pick him off.” Then he walked off and left me all alone.

If Zeus had landed on the pitcher’s mound and issued the command, it would have had no greater effect. The chances of picking a man off third base are never good, and even worse in a close game, when everyone’s paying attention. But this was Fitz talking, and I can still recall, 30 years later, the sensation he created in me. I didn’t have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do.

Addendum:

Me (wryly): “So I hear that you are writing a book about the psychology of coaching college-age athletes?”

Dartmouth Coach: “It would take more than a book.”

It is both bracing and pleasing to see Professor of Economics Danny Blanchflower tee off on economic policymakers: he often cites their multiple failures over the past decade and their inability to profit from experience. Microeconomist Blanchflower’s columns in the New Statesmen and other publications are must-reads for UK academics and businessmen.

Amazingly, the good professor seems more concerned with speaking the truth than taking care not to hurt delicate egos. Below is an excerpt from his most recent column in which he reviews the thoughts on policy contained in a Valentine’s Day letter to the Sunday Times by twenty academic macroeconomists:

This is just the economics of making things up as you go along. They have no basis in economics for any such claim about timing, period. Further, economics has zero to say about whether, if there is tightening, it should be by £5 or £50bn. This is just political opportunism dressed up as economics.

Even though the authors of the letter suggest that there is a “compelling case” for acting swiftly, they provide no basis for such claims, compelling or otherwise. How do they know, for example, what the economic situation will be in, say, six months’ or 12 months’ time? What if there is evidence that the economy has gone into a double dip; would they just ignore that and proceed regardless? What if unemployment got much worse than is forecast? How do the 20 know that won’t happen?

These are imprudent judgements. I tell my students that they should always be mindful, when making a policy prescription, that they should concentrate not so much on the advantages if they were right, but, most importantly, on the costs if they were wrong. The 20 economists’ statement merely shows a lack of understanding of the world as it is.

I wonder if people in the world of economics think of Danny as a divisive figure?