May 13, 2005

Cool it.

Calls for President Wright's resignation are now in the air, how many hours after the Trustee election results were announced? The heretofore quiet blog Voices in the Wilderness has dropped all pretense of quietude, and one impudent young Dartmouth alum says it on Dartlog, to be echoed by other Dartloggers. When will the guillotine be wheeled in?

I'll just briefly dissect the charges:
Jim Wright, the author of the seminal work for the destruction of the fraternities, now says he supports them.
Maybe because the fraternities have become much more responsible, commendable institutions in the face of the Adminstration's challenge to them? Fraternities should die, anyway. (I'm in one.)

His administration has driven the athletic program to its worst record in memory, and his admissions director has badly embarrassed the college, our athletes and crippled our recruiting capability, but he now says he supports a strong athletic program.
Athletics really shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence as "Ivy League," at least not in the post-1950 world. Women's sports look like they're doing just fine to me. How about revoking Title IX, cons?

His administration has spent millions trying to develop graduate Ph.D. programs in the arts and sciences towards developing a research university, which he now entirely repudiates.
It takes research opportunities in the sciences to bring the kind of professors you want to teach at Dartmouth. This is quite a simple point to grasp.

His administration has driven legacy admissions to half the rate of our sister institutions (for example Princeton's most recent class has 12% alumni children, whereas Dartmouth had 6%), but now says he now "welcomes these applicants" (a nice evasion: but does he admit them?).
Good. Legacies are the dumbest of the lot. Wright's still gotta provide lip service to nepotism, though, 'cause as of now it brings in the dough (a very mutable status quo, in my opinion).

After adopting policies regulating unwanted speech, he recently had his minions withdraw these policies (see [FIRE link]) In short, can an administration that had veered one way and now veers back in the opposite direction possibly have any further credibility? And can it possibly lead effectively?
Did you see the news? FIRE now gave us the green light. Should Wright never have let his thoughts on the issue evolve? Flip-flops are for weak-kneed liberals, right?

And to make the point most clear, look at the record of fundraising of this administration. Dartmouth is now lagging badly behind its peers in both its undergraduate program and facilities as a result of poor fundraising. All one need do is look at the facilities of our peers to see the evidence of this. The point would be proved if Alumni Relations would only get the college to publish the information it most surely has, comparing the rate of growth of both annual giving and capital giving from alumni sources at Dartmouth, as compared with our peers over the last ten years. I have no doubt that if this were published, the evidence would be clear. Will the college do so? Under Wright, we sincerely doubt it.
Last I heard, that capital campaign was doing pretty damn well, and our fundraising was not at all lagging behind that of our peer institutions when you factor in that Dartmouth is just a wee bit smaller than, say, Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Brown or Penn or Cornell or Columbia. In fact per-capita we at the top of the list, I believe. Can you show me a causal relationship between Wright's leadership and a decline in alumni giving? Maybe that 9/11 dip in the economy is to blame?? Or, better yet, the Clinton adminstration?
I hope you can see how weak these claims are. The statement made by the election of RoboZywick is significant already, though neither got a majority; can we hold off on the purge? Go start your own college with David Horowitz or something.

1 comment:

  1. Well I'll respond to the more...colorful parts of your comment first. Because we love to entertain here at the blog, in addition to making perpetually vapid arguments. See especially my hilarious posts attempting to expose just a fraction of all the fallacies and misrepresentations of reality Joe Malchow has made in recent days.

    If intelligence has anything to do with a sense of humor, or being able to perhaps strain a few ounces of irony out of comments like my original ones, maybe I would not fare so badly against your thoroughbred, Nth-generation Dartmouth pedigree. Just a thought.

    And I thank you for your lack of interest in hiring me. Seriously. I think I'd rather go work as a slave labor in a third-world country. Would you or your corporation consider me then?

    Please, stick to your forte, enlighten us with your aguments, and take the Board Room insults back to Wall Street.

    It's clear you and I have different visions of what this College should be. And it's clear you guys made enough noise to persuade a solid minority of the alumni of this school that this vision was somehow good. I honestly doubt that Rodgers, Zywycki, and Robinson are the harbingers of a sustained revolution at Dartmouth. We'll see how well the majority rallies itself next time, having realized the stakes.

    And if some conservative revolution did happen at Dartmouth, it would indeed be an interesting experiment in the Ivy League. Something tells me your all-Greek College of Classics and Physical Education would implode as a top-tier academic institution.

    I have seen that graph of fundraising on your site before, and I'm aware of the dip in alumni giving that has occurred. I repeat my call for a demonstration that this dip was caused by the Wright adminstration, and I also reply that I'm not too concerned by the dip. Freedman and Wright institued significant and much-needed reforms at this college to bring it out of the Stone Age, and a certain amount of reaction -- yes, from the reactionaries -- is to be expected. I just hope more of the "silent majority" of non-Right wing alums realize what's going on and vote to stick behind the most important and positive reforms Wright has continued and implemented. Sure, the adminstration (and trustees) under Wright have made a few blunders, including the swim team fiasco and the way the SLI was mandated without more discussion. And students have expressed some discontent on these occasions. But we can all get past those moments, and learn from them, before resorting to extreme measures, yes?

    We'll weather the reaction by the stingy, withering bald men who have been trying to impoverish a progressive Dartmouth with their purse strings, and we'll produce new generations of leaders, granted entrance to the College on grounds of their merit and diversity, to take all their places on all the Board Rooms, and in turn give back bigtime to the good new Dartmouth.

    In fact, you better watch out for your own job.

    ReplyDelete