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/

Notable Quotes
  • Administrative Working Group Report

    "Dartmouth's increasing complexity over the past couple of decades has had a noticeable impact on the administrative and organizational structures of the institution.... Specifically, many employees do not understand who makes decisions, what the decision-making structure is, or how decisions are communicated.  Nor is it always clear how programmatic planning at the divisional, departmental, and individual office level ties into the priorities identified by the President and Trustees."

     --January 2007 Report from the Working Group on Administrative Communications and Culture, page 9

  • The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

    "If [Stephen] Smith is elected, it would mean that fully half of the eight alum-elected trustees will have been elected via the write-in process, each on a free speech platform. Energized, in part, by the issue of free expression on campus, Dartmouth’s alums have been making their voices heard. It is a very unique and very encouraging development."

  • Trustee Peter Robinson ‘79

    "The College must rededicate itself to its central mission, providing the best undergraduate education in America. More professors, fewer deans.

More notable quotes