When you root around at any length in Dartmouth's compensation plans, you find generosities larded on top of absurdities -- all of which cost the College many millions of dollars each year to no discernable purpose. How about this astounding perk, the likes of which I' [...]
The Valley News reports that Coach T. will be back for at least another season. President Kim announced Buddy's continuation as coach at the football team's season-ending banquet on Sunday.
When it was his turn to speak, Kim gave many in the room the news they wanted to hear, [...]
Today's new-look D has a piece long on generalities and short on specifics regarding the McKinsey report of several years ago. The PR folks seems to want to show that Dartmouth was ahead of the curve in bringing in consultants to re-order the sprawling' [...]
In the bad old days of Boeing Airlines, the company was known in Seattle as The Lazy B because of its slack work habits. To my mind Dartmouth has justly earned the sobriquet The Lazy D. To see what I mean on the ground, talk to students who try [...]
The estimable Bruce Woods of the BigGreenAlert blog reports that Northeastern University has terminated its football program with extreme prejudice after 74 seasons.
The Boston Globe has the full story.
Like Buddy Teevens and your humble servant, Northeastern's Athletics Director Pete Roby is a member of' [...]
The Grafton County Superior Court in North Haverhill has scheduled an oral argument for 9am, Friday, Dec. 4, on the Trustees' motion for summary judgment in the lawsuit pitting several alumni against the College on the issue of the validity of the 1891 Agreement. The Agreement mandated parity on the' [...]
Every fall our corporate benefits expert approaches us with the bad news, and each year the conversation is remarkably similar:
"If you want to keep the same level of benefits for your employees and your family, the premium will go up 35%."
"We can't afford that."
"OK. Here is what other carriers are'" [...]
From Today's Valley News:
Hanover Inn Agrees to Pay Catering Staff $29,000 in Back Wages
After state labor officials received a complaint that the Dartmouth College-owned Hanover Inn was underpaying employees, the inn agreed to pay almost $29,000 in additional compensation to members of its catering staff and a small fine [...]
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' [...]
