The Challenges
Dartmouth believes it has a unique formula that can lead American higher education. The platform is singular, vigorous and profoundly ambitious. The next President will have the opportunity to articulate Dartmouth’s vision and to harness the College’s inherent resources. As the President turns to the work, the challenges are clear and the opportunities are many.
Articulating the Leadership Opportunity in the Context of Dartmouth’s Mission
The Dartmouth President serves all the constituencies, the students, the faculty, the alumni, the staff, the community and the national academy. The disparate audiences need to hear the vision for the College, connect it to Dartmouth’s historic mission and believe that it will be executed vividly. They need to understand the combined scholarly and teaching nature of Dartmouth’s mission and to believe that their own commitments are part of the Dartmouth solution. They need to feel viscerally the success that Dartmouth’s formula achieves in the competitive world of the academy.
Dartmouth’s students and faculty have created an unusual partnership, a partnership of personal discovery. The College teaches its students the creativity, confidence and teamwork available in an intellectually challenging environment, widely admired in the traditional Dartmouth culture and essential to leadership in the modern age.
The 17th President of Dartmouth should articulate the College’s vision enabling students, faculty, alumni and the wider national audience to grasp what Dartmouth will retain and what Dartmouth will change. That definitional and aspirational vision is the first task of the President, to articulate Dartmouth’s already emerging future to its community and its national audience.
Making Strategic Choices
At Dartmouth, every resource counts and every choice must express the core values. The College chooses to support excellence in teaching and scholarship. In the context of the American academy, it aspires to “do it all.” Its size helps. The College can manage the usual trade offs with less compromise. It can select a few faculty from a very large universe. It can pick the areas of graduate study that express its unique strengths and reject those that do not. It can select themes and programs and inspire entrepreneurial players, with calculated investments. To retain and strengthen its position as a leading institution of higher education, Dartmouth must systematically make strategic choices, managing budgets with great care and allocating resources to their best and highest use, a complex task in a small community. The setting will highlight both excellent results and those that fall short. Presidential leadership makes choice and change possible.
Recruiting, Retaining and Inspiring the Finest Possible Dartmouth Faculty
Dartmouth competes for faculty with all the best liberal arts colleges and all the finest research universities in the country. As research universities in the U.S. turn toward their neglected undergraduates and begin to tinker with curricula and to emphasize pedagogy, Dartmouth is an attractive place to raid. It has the faculty who understand both missions.
Choice counts most with faculty. Dartmouth has grown the faculty, raised salaries and increased support. The investment has made a difference. In the tenure of the next President, Dartmouth, once again, will need to stretch, to set its academic standards high, to pay competitively, even generously, to focus position by position and to provide the level of support that attracts and retains the very best.
The College must compete vigorously for that narrow band of faculty, those ambitious, world class scholars, who will help to define their fields, who reflect the diversity of the student body, but who believe that their best work will find inspiration from a very personal form of teaching.
The next President will make the broad strategic choices about faculty size and dimension and find and allocate the resources. Dartmouth’s strength, its core academic reputation depends on this next generation of presidential leadership.
Attracting the Strongest Students to the Dartmouth Vision
Recruitment
Dartmouth attracts an excellent and broadly diverse student class. Its reputation for teaching and student experience and its stature among the great colleges and universities attracts an outstanding applicant group.
Nonetheless, Dartmouth can always do better. It has developed an especially attractive mission and culture that is not always widely understood. It competes vigorously with its more urban Ivy and Ivy-equivalent peers. By sharpening Dartmouth’s message, by accentuating personalized learning, by emphasizing the advantages of its own location and its unusually strong international commitments and by continuing its impressive success in enrollment management, the College should attract ever more talented and imaginative undergraduate and graduate students, who will leave Hanover as Dartmouth men and women committed to lead and serve.
Financial Aid
Dartmouth is proud to be need-blind in its admissions and to have constantly increased the level of financial support available to students. In the current environment, with the national focus on the cost of tuition and on the growth in university and college endowments, its most heavily endowed competitors have drastically reduced their reliance on student debt and substantially increased the level of family income they will consider for financial aid. Dartmouth responded this year with a significant expansion in financial aid that replaced student loans with scholarships, expanded need-blind admissions to international students and instituted free tuition for students with family incomes less than $75,000. In the term of the next President, Dartmouth will continue to face consistent competitive pressure around financial aid. The College is well endowed, well invested and the alumni are responsive. The President must make the case.
Building the Professional and Graduate Schools and Integrating their Efforts across the Campus
Dartmouth’s three very fine professional schools and the 17 graduate doctoral programs have each used a focused strategy to succeed. They are small, vigorous places with sharply defined identities. The Tuck School of Business is a leading business school in the country, one of the top 10 in a field of nearly a thousand, a position widely envied and exceptionally difficult to achieve. Tuck has emphasized world class scholarship, has provided unusual research support to its faculty and has developed the revenue essential for its efforts. In the next few years, Tuck will carefully calibrate its investments and its size, begin to selectively teach undergraduates and reach for even greater prominence. It is on a steep trajectory, is an excellent asset for the whole campus, is a particularly vivid example of the Dartmouth story and will need a President who supports its remarkable endeavors.
The Dartmouth Medical School works in a critical alliance with an independent hospital and an independent faculty practice plan organized as a clinic (neither of which are owned by the College). A special Trustee Working Group, authorized by the College Board of Trustees and those of the Hospital and Clinic, and including membership from each, has begun to chart a new set of expectations and relationships among the three institutions. These are essential arrangements. The Medical School has done remarkably well since its expansion in 1972 and has grown its research portfolio impressively, but the next generation of success will depend on robust and well articulated leadership and governance structures as well as strong working relationships among the leaders themselves.
As the country approaches some form of health care reform, there is an extraordinary opportunity that could be realized by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s (DHMC) relatively rural location and the strong allegiance of a geographically defined patient population.
The Board expects that the next President will attend carefully to the relationships between the School and its clinical partners and will provide personal leadership in these critical discussions. The size of the Medical Center, its importance to the community, its reputation as a leader in health care cost and quality, its critical role in the quality of science, College-wide, and the complex nature of the governance relationships, guarantees that this issue will figure prominently on the President’s agenda.
The Thayer School of Engineering has been exceptionally well led and has a clear strategic plan. It is remarkably prominent for a deliberately small school and is recognized as fostering a particularly innovative and entrepreneurial environment. It has chosen its focus, recruited an excellent faculty and teaches both graduate and undergraduate students with great success. Its enrollment of women in graduate and undergraduate programs remains well above national averages. It intends to grow carefully, to invest in precise fields of endeavor and to link its activities more firmly to related work in the other professional schools and the Arts and Sciences faculty.
Dartmouth’s 17 doctorate level graduate programs are engineering or science based. They take advantage of the quality of science at the professional schools and reach across the boundaries of Arts and Sciences, Medicine and Engineering. Some of the most successful initiatives have come from broadly integrated programs that are framed around a problem area and draw on several disciplines. Given its position nationally, and the limited scope and scale of graduate studies, Dartmouth needs to field an exceptionally focused and excellent set of doctoral level programs. The next administration should conduct a careful strategic review of graduate education and should substantially strengthen its position.
With all three schools and the graduate program, the Board believes that there are large opportunities for cross collaboration across schools and with the Arts and Sciences faculty. The next President will have the opportunity to lead an impressive integration across boundaries that already has considerable momentum.
Enhancing the Dartmouth Student Experience
Dartmouth creates intense bonds for its students. Its playing fields, drama, film and arts programs, its outdoor life and its fraternity and sorority system all contribute to the personal growth of its students and to a lifelong affection for the place. The Dartmouth student experience grew historically from the ambience of the place. The outdoor setting, the beauty and intimacy of the campus and its strong traditions all contributed to the recruitment and training of great students. With an increasingly academic, ambitious, coeducational and diverse student body, it needs a complete set of facilities and programs that both support and challenge its students. The College has attended carefully to residential and social life over the last few years, constructing new residence halls, adding greatly to athletic facilities and providing additional space for student social and extracurricular activity. Those agendas are incomplete. There is a constant demand for additional, informal social spaces for students available day and night, and the need is especially great for Dartmouth women. Much has been done, but the agenda requires persistent, careful attention.
Completing an Ambitious Facility Plan and Taking the College into the Next Generation of Master Planning
In President Wright’s tenure, the College raised historically large sums and renovated and built an unprecedented set of facilities. A life sciences building is under construction and a new arts complex is on the drawing board; substantial fundraising has occurred for both projects. In addition, new dining facilities are in the planning phase. The next President will inherit a large facilities agenda of great importance to the College that will require presidential leadership.
The College believes that it has largely, though not entirely, fulfilled the ambitions of its successive Master Plans. In the course of the next Presidency, Dartmouth will probably need to continue the evolution of these plans, with careful attention to maintaining the walking campus and preserving the ethos of the College while allowing for new demands for high tech classrooms, more complex laboratories and improved facilities for student life. This will require a careful analysis of which functions should remain at the core of the campus and which can move easily to a periphery.
Celebrating the Culture of Philanthropy at Dartmouth
President Wright has made a fundamental personal commitment to fundraising and has provided constant leadership to the campaign. Given Dartmouth’s success, its competitive aspirations to recruit faculty, provide increased financial aid and build out the remainder of the campus Master Plan, constantly improved fundraising will be essential to the next President’s agenda for the full duration of his/her term. The College relies gratefully on the commitment and loyalty of its generous donor community of alumni and others. As the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience near its end in December of 2009, strategic planning for the post campaign will be a top priority to ensure that fundraising continues unabated.
Dartmouth has a remarkable culture of philanthropy, as evident in its high alumni participation. The next President will need to validate it, celebrate it and enhance it, making the case for very large, transformative gifts that will sustain the College’s competitive position.
Alumni Relations and Governance
Dartmouth has lived through a particularly tumultuous time in its governance, leading to reforms that offer a unique opportunity for Board development and expansion and the promise of more effective governance in the future. At the time it launched the search for Dartmouth’s 17th President, the Board of Trustees had 18 members including the President of the College and the Governor of New Hampshire (ex officio). Of the 16 remaining positions (increased from 14 in 2004), eight had been filled by “Charter Trustees” nominated and elected by the Board of Trustees, and eight had been filled by “Alumni Trustees” nominated by alumni through a nomination and election process that is open to direct-to-ballot petitioning and who are then elected by the Board of Trustees. Alumni Trustee candidates nominated by the Alumni Council were defeated by petition candidates in the balloting for the last four Alumni Trustee nominations and each of these petition candidates was then elected by the Board. In September of 2007, the Board completed a governance study and as a result, authorized an increase in the number of Charter Trustees from 8 to 16 and mandated changes in voting procedures for Alumni Trustee nominations.
In October of 2007, the Executive Committee of the Association of Alumni voted to file a lawsuit against the College claiming that the Board of Trustee’s vote to change the proportion of Charter and Alumni Trustees and mandate changes in the Alumni Trustee nomination procedure violated an 1891 agreement between the Association of Alumni and the College. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed in June of this year when a new Executive Committee, which unanimously opposed the lawsuit, was elected by the Association of Alumni with 60 percent of the vote. Thirty-eight percent of the alumni body participated.
The President will arrive in the midst of a Board development process that has begun with addition of new Charter Trustees in September of 2008 and will eventually add a total of eight new members. With continued careful recruitment, Dartmouth will have the opportunity to greatly strengthen its governance body and to reach out to its alumni.
The next President of Dartmouth will need to articulate a comprehensive Dartmouth vision for all of its constituencies. Success, in some part, in the next presidency, will depend on a broad new consensus in the Dartmouth family consistently communicated by the President and widely, if not universally, understood and accepted by the Dartmouth community.
