Sylvia Spears and Hiring at Dartmouth

Joe Malchow posted an intriguing (if also slightly self-important) report on the hiring of Sylvia Spears as the next head of the Office of Pluralism and Leadership yesterday.

Or rather, I should say the prospective hiring—Joe emphasizes that Dartmouth hasn't officially announced Spears as the new OPAL dean, rendering her status somewhat mysterious, or at least Joe thinks it does. I find Joe's speculations duplicitous—that Dartmouth is "squelch[ing]" reportage of her appointment because it a) is "embarrassed to have played into the hand of petition Trustee candidiate [sic] Stephen F. Smith, who has vigorously criticized the administration for allowing a swelling bureaucracy to grow arterial lines when it ought to be hiring more professors"; b) is "listening to its current employees, who are raising questions about the advisability of the new hire"; or c) is "holding the announcement in abeyance until the next instance of racial or cultural strife, to be released as a quick remedy." I think Joe has watched "Wag the Dog" a few too many times; the idea that the PR office is eagerly awaiting some racialized situation to announce a hiring is, well, the type of paranoid fantasy I've come to expect from Joe.

But I find the post duplicitous because, like most of Joe's writing about Dartmouth issues, it's pretty clear what Joe wants to say in his post, but he puts on a show of being the serious reporter and just delivering the facts, unsettling as they may be. What Joe really intends is that you come to the conclusion that Ms. Spears is unqualified for a superfluous position. I suppose he doesn't say so directly because innuendo is more effective in this type of thing than direct statement, but I don't feel as if the point is likely to be missed.

As I've said before, when conservatives start talking about there being too many deans, they mean, "why do we have diversity personnel?" But the interesting thing about this is that if you tend to believe that diversity deans are not worth much to the College, then someone whose credentials actually qualify them for the position are therefore unqualified for being hired. That is, Ms. Spears's career seems to have qualified her very well for a position like the OPAL dean, but that actually disqualifies her, in their eyes, from joining the Dartmouth administration.

Likewise, the fact that Ms. Spears is Native American is part of Joe's effort to discredit her—"the plain connection between her hire and last year’s unpleasantness, prompted by campus American Indians feeling unsupported by the administration and loudly communicating that view to the press and the ether around Dartmouth Hall. The message? Complaints bring about new employees." Again, what might be a qualification if you believe in the necessity of addressing minority issues—in this case, Native American issues—is turned into a reason why Ms. Spears doesn't deserve a job at Dartmouth. If you think the Native Americans' claims are illegitimate, then any person who might be qualified or well-positioned to address those claims is also made illegitimate. If you think this way, Ms. Spears's race is a good reason why she shouldn't be hired.

So it comes to this—if you think continuing to staff positions related to or in support of diversity on campus is a good idea, Joe has just given a few good reasons why Ms. Spears is a great hire. If, like most readers of Dartblog, you think diversity deans are superfluous and perhaps even evil, you'll understand that Ms. Spears should never be hired.

I don't like this type of argument—playing to one's readers' presuppositions and prejudices while pretending to argue to a different point or not to argue at all. But Joe goes beyond this dissembling bit of preterition; he also actively misleads.

Although the title of the post is "The New Woon," Joe repeatedly phrases things so it seems as if the College is adding a position to accommodate Ms. Spears and therefore is adding salary. "Complaints bring about new employees" suggests that the search that ended in offering Ms. Spears a job was brought about because of last fall's events. That's untrue. Tommy Lee Woon resigned, so someone needed to be hired to replace him. Joe also claims that, by hiring Spears, "Dartmouth has added $80,000 or more to its payroll when it could have added far less on the margin by simply promoting." I would be very surprised if Ms. Spears is being paid $80k more than Dartmouth was paying Woon. And as for promoting from within, unless Joe thinks that the promotee would be getting paid the same amount as she did in a lower position and not be replaced, I'm not sure how much money Dartmouth would really save by internal promotion. I could be wrong there, though—I'm not an econ major. Joe also refers to Dartmouth "grow[ing] arterial lines when it ought to be hiring more professors." Hiring someone to replace Woon is not administrative growth. Joe's efforts to associate Ms. Spears with administrative growth is misleading and disingenuous.