Jacob Baron ‘10
“The best way to make classes smaller is to offer more classes. That means hiring more faculty. Dartmouth’s public relations people recently weighed in on this issue on the ‘Ask Dartmouth’ website. In discussing ‘how [the faculty has] grown over the past few years,’ a nameless bureaucrat confidently reassures us that ‘the Dartmouth faculty has grown significantly over the past decade.’ Moreover, ‘both [College] President [James] Wright and Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt have made it a top priority to increase the faculty still more.’ Good. The bureaucrat gets numerical: ‘The number of tenure-track faculty . . . in the Arts and Sciences has grown from 336 in 1998 to 372 in 2007. This is an 11 percent increase.’
“I laughed when I read that statistic. An 11 percent increase over a decade is an absurdly slow rate of growth. Do the math: it works out to 1.1 percent annual growth over the nine hiring cycles during that period. In absolute terms, it’s a net gain of only four professors a year. Is that the best Wright and Folt can do in pursuit of this ‘top priority’? But if you count non-tenure-track faculty, the numbers are much better! There we see 380 to 429 over the past decade, which works out to an annual growth rate of . . . 1.3 percent. Five professors a year.”
(Bracketed material and ellipses in original.)
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
