Mathematics professor Dan Rockmore, chair of the Committee on Priorities:
"I think, generically, [the faculty feels] like everybody here is working as hard as they can work, and they can't imagine how they would get their jobs done if we were reduced any more in support," Rockmore said.
Just because the' [...]
Audiophilia, check. Hello, photography. My latest expensive entry into a new science--this makes up for the quantitatively destitute nature of my daily, written work; I imagine that it keeps both halves of the brain agile--is optics. Like many a man who eventually let Leica into his wallet, I have always [...]
I have commented in past posts on the striking taste and texture difference between milk straight from the cow and industrial-dairy milk, and the superiority of unpasteurized apple cider over the pasteurized sort. And one day I might voice at length my regret that [...]
There was lovely quote from President Kim in today's D about yesterday's reorganization of responsibilities for campus planning, real estate, facilities, environmental health and safety, and sustainability:
"It just made sense to put all these responsibilities under the supervision of someone who is actually a professional in the field," Kim [...]
I wonder if John Rassias would get tenure today, or even be hired by Dartmouth. Though he is routinely trotted out as one of the College's superstars, his relations within his own department have not been easy. Why?
As we all know and love, for Rassias literary' [...]
I love the smell of leadership in the morning. President Kim continues to clean house: today's "reassignment" of responsibilities has as its target another charter member of the Wright Olde Guarde, Executive Vice-President for Finance and Administration Adam Keller, who is, shall we say, moving on to new' [...]
I have often been asked why it is that so many businessmen who run small and medium size companies are skeptical about the growth of government's role in our society. I think that the question is a pretty easy one; the answer breaks down into two parts:
Firstly, business people at' [...]
The budget process continues to resemble a group hug, with everyone invited to join in and, I guess, buy in. Provost/Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt and Kim Majordomo Steven Kadish seem to believe that everyone will pull together to make major sacrifices for the good of the institution... This [...]
Professor of Economics Andrew Samwick, who is the director of the Rockefeller Center, has been selected as the New Hampshire Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Professor Samwick wins my [...]
Dartblog's post the other day about Football Coach Buddy Teevens '79 has elicited multiple expressions of heart-felt support, including the following two missives from parents of players. They quite rightly put emphasis on Buddy's human and pedagogical qualities, which I insufficiently noted on Monday.
From: Bob Patek
E:mail:
Hi Joe,
I enjoyed' [...]
The NY Times reports on the engagement of my old employer, management consultants Bain & Company, to ferret out cost-cutting opportunities at educational institutions. You will recall that the Wright Adminstratin had McKinsey & Co. come to Hanover a few years ago to evaluate the size of Dartmouth's' [...]
For a while there the hounds were baying for Buddy's head, but the football team's strong showing at Brown and its two wins in its last four games seem to have shut them up. However, let's put the question out there again, but ask it from' [...]
Dear readers, one more picture from Saturday: a picture of the PoMo subter Corbu flim-flam Napa compound of the wine which presuming no one locates and auctions at Bonhams & Butterfields a case of Falernian possesses the very lowest quality-to-price quotient in all viticulture: Opus One--the wine that makes [...]
In light of the recent New York Times piece on ROTC in the Ivy League -- in which the College was not mentioned -- let's take a look at our ROTC program, of which I am a current member. I have previously written about ROTC [...]
One of the profound pleasures of watching college sports is seeing happiness on the faces of young athletes. There is a purity to this emotion that, at least to this observer, has no equivalent in professional sports.
Last night we went to Thompson Arena to see the end of the women's' [...]
The College really does have faculty who can do it all: conduct innovative research, be a wonderful teacher, play a prominent public role, enrich the overall intellectual life of the College, mentor students -- and accomplish all of these tasks with style. Professor Susannah Heschel [...]
In looking at stories on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the cratering of communism, I came across two wonderful accounts by Michael Meyer, who was Newsweek's bureau chief in Eastern Europe in 1989. He seems to have a reporter's nose for the small details of history, which often [...]
President Kim is behind the eight ball in trying to sort out the financial mess that he has inherited from Jim Wright. He is looking at many ways to cut spending, but at the recent faculty meeting, several faculty members implored him to spare the "vulnerable" from the upcoming [...]
Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France.
La Cambe, Normandy, France.
UPDATE: George Potts '60 directed me to a quotation from Colin Powell that seems appropriate for Veterans Day:
[F]ar from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men' [...]
There is more intelligent observation and background learning in a single David Brooks column than in your average daily newspaper. Take a look at his column in yesterday's Times entitled: The Rush to Therapy.
JOE MALCHOW, who has noticed the occasional improving column from David Brooks, prays that his readers' [...]
David Ehrlich. Dissipative Dialogues. 1982.
The Dartmouth reports on the retirement from the College of film and media professor David Ehrlich, the superb artist who taught my first-year writing seminar in the fall of 2004 and who, in the fashion of the Dartmouth professor, has kept up [...]
An undergraduate friend reports:
A few days back I was in a meeting between Sylvia Spears and a group of students. She was regaling us with a tearjerking anecdote about walking into a room full of colleagues right after she had been selected Acting [...]
We have reached a point in Hanover where Victorian gentility is the norm -- and candor is shocking. Therefore it is nice to be joined in seeking to tell the unvarnished truth by faculty luminary Danny Blanchflower, a household name in Great Britain, about whom we have posted [...]
Yesterday, I found myself in a rather unlikely place on a gorgeous fall day here in Hanover. But it was a matter of friendship.
I was at the Hopkins Center attending a Dartmouth College Gospel Choir concert. One of my best friends had to threaten me with the end of [...]
Forget the endowment. It has done extraordinarily well over the past two decades: right now, it is almost five times as high as it was in 1991.
In fact, there is only one number that really counts in understanding Dartmouth's current budget nightmare: staff salaries and benefits.
In the 1998' [...]
Lots of talk about the urgency of our budget difficulties from President Kim below and from the Trustees, but it looks like there is going to be an extended effort at "consensus management" rather than immediate and firm decision-making in response to the financial challenges facing the College.
Meanwhile, as [...]
We live in a time where people talk endlessly about change, but real change occurs all too rarely. An exception is happening today in the world of horsemanship.
The shameful secret is that this is largely a failed sport. The majority of new owners sell their animals [...]
Funny the things that stick with you over the years. One day in Music 1, Gabriel Chodos, the concert pianist who taught the class, was extemporizing over Wolfgang Mozart. We had heard various pieces of music and were duly respectful, and Chodos seemed to [...]
Hany Farid, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth, says the oft-reproduced photo of Lee Harvey Oswald is real.
But no word as to his opinion about the other shooters.
[...]The D's lead story yesterday proudly presented the statistic that Dartmouth's early decision applications were up 3% this year. The piece was a re-packaging of a College press release, plumped up with some quotations from Admissions Director Maria Laskaris.
What was missing was the critical eye: en effort to look [...]
You can still meet people in eastern Germany who are nostalgic for the old days: "Sure there were bad sides to the DDR," they will say, "but at least we were all equal." This attitude is more common than you think -- the antithesis of Jeremy [...]
One of my favorite moments on campus is when I raise my hand in a discussion group or class to answer a question but the prof calls on the shaggy student next to me, who duly proceeds to answer the question in a far better way [...]
The most common error that I see in the evaluation of people is the confusion of niceness and competence. "He's such a wonderful doctor" opines a friend who possesses not the slightest bit of information regarding her MD's training or past clinical success. "He has been" [...]
On Friday we took a look at the bind in which elite colleges finds themselves with regards to lowering admissions standards for the children of major donors. We promised a novel approach to the problem; today we deliver.
To summarize Friday's analysis, the question of whether to give admissions [...]
The Trustees will be in town this week for their quarterly meet-and-greet, wine-and-dine, move-and-quickly-approve meeting. They should do more.
The role of trustees does not include micro-management; interfering in the everyday life of the College is not in their brief (nor within their [...]
If you haven't been to an NHL game recently, let me give you one more reason to enjoy hockey at Thompson Arena. For motives that are quite beyond me, the powers in the NHL think that the fans of their sport have short little spans of' [...]
Though I did not participate in its construction, the worthies who built the Class of 1979 bonfire in the fall of our freshman year in 1975 deserve to be honored. Their stupendous bonfire was 100 tiers high -- so high that the College [...]
In a shocking reversal of trends, the College has actually managed to have a sustainable practice that it knew nothing about -- rather than pretend something is more sustainable than it actually is.
Common practice at the College is to highlight new, energy-efficient buildings despite [...]
The Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon picked up many of our themes regarding alcohol enforcement in a column he recently ran in the Valley News, "Internal Possession." Good for him.
However, he did miss the point that Phil Aubart recently made on the high cost of being Good Sammed [...]
Recently Joe Malchow breifly addressed whether Dartmouth's admissions office, or the admissions offices of elite colleges generally, I suppose, should give preference to applications from the children of major institutional underwriters. Joe raised the issue only in passing, but in view of the College's rather desperate financial situation of [...]
We can all agree on the ridiculousness of the effort a few years back by certain congressional Republicans to rename french fries as Freedom Fries. To my mind the only thing that tops that pointless gesture is the Dartmouth administration's effort to re-christen freshmen as first-year' [...]
England's well adored portraitor Jane Bown is eighty-four years old and having passed the greater lot of those decades in capturing beautiful black and white candids of English society, she is releasing her compendium. But The Guardian has just published a remarkable digital slide show of her photographs, [...]
... of those students, faculty, and staff of Dartmouth College whom "America's Oldest College Newspaper" has egregiously misquoted. It's a large and growing club. But unlike most other members, Dr. Kim was able to correct the record through a letter to the editor.
A tiny collection of superlative cafes have come out of this Venetian coffee company; the only one in the U.S. is in Palo Alto; lately it has been our spot for late-night work. Above, a clerk prepares a brilliant tenera in tezza--a steaming hot cacao mousse.
[...]The issue of compassion came up repeatedly on Monday at the General Faculty meeting. Who should bear the burden of the upcoming budget cuts? English Professor Donald Pease plucked at the heartstrings in evoking "our friends and neighbors, people with whom we have worked for many years." And several questioners [...]
I arrived on campus for the first time on September 12, 2006, move-in day for the class of 2010. Thankfully I had been able to drive myself from Minnesota in my own car because I had successfully petitioned the Dean of First-Year students for permission to have my car on [...]
Recently the D published a review of the different alcohol regimes afflicting long-suffering Dartmouth students, and this page opined that the student paper of record had omitted to ask the salient question: whether the various regulatory structures put in place by the administration over the past decade had [...]
Appearing on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, James Panero provides a little glimpse of the difficulties facing New York's arts institutions. A lot of what James talks about is applicable to academe, too--which application I covered in this piece. Panero covers the fiscals of arts in City Journal [...]
A quick response to a reader's comments on Part I. A member of the Admissions Department or First-Year Dean's Office informed me of the refund policy. And, I had not read the rest of the policy stating In any instance where it is felt that individual circumstances may warrant exception [...]
Well, I was dead wrong. President Kim's report to faculty was rich in generalities, but specifics were quite entirely absent. No decisions have been made on budget cuts, search committees to fill senior administrative slots, new programs and initiatives, etc. Alumni Hall was almost completely full; the largest turnout of [...]
As this column and its informing multitudes take in President Jim Kim's address to faculty today, we hear from the dusked coast that "smooth" budget cuts is no longer the prescription at Stanford:
Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, is drawing on his [...]
President Kim will deliver the Report of the President to the General Faculty today at 3pm, and it appears certain that serious cost cuts will be announced. Just what form these will take is anyone's guess, but if layoffs are involved, it behooves everyone to look at the state of [...]
The sweetest moment at today's football victory was when the team, coaches and students gathered together in a great mass in the center of Memorial Field and sang the alma mater. Dartmouth crowds sing well -- Joan Baez commented on it once when we sang Amazing' [...]
My favorite internet stories are ones where a group of people, who previously could not possibly have been involved in a market, become a dominant force through technology. New Zealand-based WineSearcher.com is a good example. This database site constantly trolls on-line wine retailers around the globe and allows you [...]
When the administration puts on a display of excellence, it is worth noting, and today there was one: Director of Admissions Recruitment and Communications Dan Parish '89 gave a 90-minute presentation to alumni about the college application process that made me want to apply all over again. He said' [...]
Beyond my thoughts of the other day, a couple of deeply flawed ideas about parking have been floating around campus for a while. Let's look at them:
Bad Idea One: Close the Central Campus Parking Lots: Let's face it, parking lots are ugly. If you've ever' [...]
At the Dartmouth Review, Sterling Beard reports on the latter-day storming of Parkhurst Hall--this time in quest of subtly strobing fluorescent lights and biodegradable stemware. For the college that maintains a goodly portion of the Appalachian Trail and whose verdant ken produces not a small [...]
Dear Women and boys,
The patriarchy begs you to touch the fire. But you shall hold firm!
Tribal Dancer out,
The Dean of the College (Acting, &c.)
[...]The Alumni Council Nominating and Alumni Search Committee is hard at work choosing a single candidate for each of the two open slots in the Board elections next spring and, according to the head of the Committee Tom Daniels '82, its members have reviewed over 400 names to date.' [...]
The Men's and Women's ice hockey teams will take to the ice soon and fans around town are excited as usual. These two programs are well run by Coaches Gaudet and Hudak, and the teams play in a first-class facility that makes attending the games great fun. Kudos to architect [...]
Dartmouth, in particular Jim Wright, has recently begun trumpeting its commitment to veterans. All of the hoopla began towards the end of my freshman year when Wright's initiative with the American Council on Education to broaden access to post-military education began receiving media attention. Soon thereafter [...]
The Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Richard Herman, who wanted little more than trickling tributaries of Chicagoan richesse to swell his institution's accounts in exchange for a greased-up admissions track for the seed of the wealthy, has resigned. He shall be replaced by someone who does it in [...]
Yesterday I opined that one consequence of the excess of administrators at the College is a severe parking problem, which prevents faculty members from easily frequenting their offices--therefore spending less face-to-face time with colleagues and students. The solution in this area, as it is to [...]
Only one of the three classic responsibilities of a College President is my topic for today. I have nothing to add about football; and according to all reports, this generation of students seems to have the second subject quite adequately covered; however, parking for the faculty [...]
From Joe Malchow:
New Hampshire's pernicious internal consumption law makes it a crime to be drunk, transforming olde timey police behavior--driving drunk college kids home, if they're stumbling about--into a venomous concoction of secrecy, conniving, and misallocation of municipal resources. (As Phil Aubart has noted, arresting [...]
Am I the first to notice the new ads in the Daily Dartmouth this term? They're advertisements for Dartmouth's graduate programs. I understand that the economy is down and that many students are looking for options after they graduate, but [...]
From Georgetown's Student Employment Office website comes a prayer for help from a ragged undergraduate who also is "a part time employee in the financial services industry," which means he adds drop shadows to Power Point presentations.
Shortly after I arrived at the College in the fall of 1975, I found a card in my Hinman Box inviting me to a meeting of Canadians at Dartmouth. I recall my reaction: a mixture of surprise and wonder. Why the heck would I possibly want [...]
Dissappointment, the annual mistress of Sorority rush has risen its head once again here on the hill. The gnashing of teeth began soon after the revelation that 98 women had dropped out of fall rush leaving only 227 women with bids by the time [...]
We were at San Francisco's BIX last evening, enjoying prosecco, cheese, and a bit of music. A full year of inhabitation in Northern California has unraveled to me no decent venue for proper lounging, but BIX comes closest. The trio playing midnight to one' [...]
A general groan arose from campus late last night as the fall LSAT scores were released and e-mailed to students. While I'm sure there are those who were pleased, the general sentiment seems to be a groan of despair as sugary dreams of Law School dissolved' [...]
In France, Jack and Anne Lazor of Butterworks Farm would be cult figures, the object of veneration by people enamored of extraordinary food, and the subject of books by Americans fascinated by traditional agriculture. In Westfield, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, they are just [...]
As always it is great fun to follow the exploits of Dartmouth's most visible faculty member: Economics Professor Danny Blanchflower. A profile in the U.K.'s The First Post yesterday includes the following:
Having left the Bank [of England]'s monetary policy committee in June this year, Blanchflower has become' [...]
I am asked this question all the time and, frankly, I am mystified by it. Parents all over America work on their kids' school PTA, and they coach in local sports associations, serve on zoning boards, send in letters to the editor about' [...]
Just when we had our hopes up. Given his choice here, it seems that President Kim is not as far along the administrative learning curve as we had imagined.
October 14, 2009
Dear Members of the Dartmouth Community,
I am delighted to announce that Dean Carol Folt will serve as Acting Provost (effective [...]
My good friend Austin Lord ’06 broke clear of the banking sector months ago, and recently took the decision to relocate to Portland, Oregon. On the way, on the long drive, he took some photographs.
Austin's recent series truly excels. It abides on the' [...]
After early missteps this summer on personnel, somewhat redeemed by Provost Scherr's recently discovered desire to return to academic pursuits, President Kim has a chance to make a strong statement in two weeks:
To: Members of the General FacultyFrom: President Jim Yong Kim
A meeting of the General Faculty is called for [...]
Whoever concluded that the conservative persuasion is boring never set eyes on Roger Kimball, the chief of Encounter Books and publisher of The New Criterion; the bow tie and pocket square, you see, marvel the eye as the man drops his truth obliquely, which [...]
-thumb-200x345.png)
A successful alumnus wants to have lunch and hear a report on the development of the College over the past ten years. Where to start? As a veteran manager he'll understand if I point to the effects over time of both drift and rot.
Organizations can survive [...]
Detail from Landing of Columbus, John Vanderlyn, 1836.
Schoolchildren in the thrall of schoolmarms with directives from some underground vulviform base where schoolteachers' unions congregate and gin up fresh mediocrities, now know everything about Christopher Columbus other than his historical significance. They can tell you' [...]
I chose to use the adjective solid-platinum to describe Dartmouth's employee benefits plan because I couldn't come up with an original modifier that referred to diamonds. But that is where we are. For every dollar of salaries and wages that [...]
This economic wretchedness has brought me to a series of Depression-era music. Some of the American Songbook's finest pages are dog-eared from the low 1930s, when the hotel dance bands of the twenties added sad whinnies from cupped cornets and long minor drags from fiddles. There is a healthy catalog' [...]
I don't know about you, but we get so many calls at home these days from various associations purporting to represent retired/active/nascent/disabled public safety professionals that I have to think that the whole thing is some kind of scam. The voice on the' [...]
After an amicable, off-the-record conversation yesterday with JR Santo, The Dartmouth's Publisher, Dartblog's hard-earned advertising budget will once again be allowed to flow into the coffers of the D.
[...]I sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of Dartblog in which some party had wrapped their luncheon.... I read these things at a vast advantage there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is called the business part of [...]
As Joe mentioned earlier, a while back I made the very bittersweet decision to graduate from Dartmouth this past June, a year before my time. I am spending what would be my senior year at the London School of Economics, pursuing the degree of Master of Science [...]
