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October 30, 2006
I am very pleased to join you for my annual report to the faculty. This
occasion provides me with an opportunity to review the state of the college, to
reaffirm the good work undertaken here, and to remind us all of our priorities
going forward. I would like to take a moment to recognize Dean Carol Folt on
her appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Following the
strong recommendation of the search committee, I was very pleased to be able to
appoint her to this position, and I look forward to continuing to work together
to advance the work of the faculty.
The newly admitted class of 2010 is among the strongest and most diverse
ever admitted to Dartmouth - a testimony to the good work of Karl Furstenberg.
I would like to take a moment to recognize Karl for his good work. For the past
17 years, Karl has admitted class after class of outstanding students. Provost
Barry Scherr has organized the committee to find a replacement for Karl, and
Peter Hackett from the Theater Department has agreed to chair this committee.
Karl will be a tough act to follow!
Provost Scherr is also chairing a search for Jim Larimore's replacement as
Dean of the College. Barry has held several open meetings to receive input from
the community on what qualities are most critical. We need someone who will be
able to work effectively with faculty as well as students, who will be
extremely visible on campus and eager to assume leadership in working with
faculty and administrators in protecting our sense of community, and, finally,
someone who is a good manager - the Dean of the College area is a significant
one that includes a range of activities from the health services to athletics,
from academic skills to student life. I know the Provost will be updating you
periodically on both searches.
I have also asked Barry Scherr to examine how we have organized our
diversity efforts. The departure of both Ozzie Harris [Director of the Office
of Institutional Diversity and Equity] and Tommy Lee Woon [Director of the
Office of Pluralism and Leadership] provided us with an opportunity to review
both positions, approximately five years after they were created, to consider
if any adjustment in responsibility is in order to assure that we meet our
ambitions. The purpose of the committee is to examine what we have done and how
we might improve upon that model. They are looking at how other institutions
are organized to see if there is anything that we can learn from them. One of
my top priorities has been to ensure that the Dartmouth campus is open to
people from all backgrounds. Diversity is an essential component of any
educational environment, and Dartmouth has a strong legacy in this regard - one
that we need to protect and build upon. I expect to have the results of that
review shortly and we will initiate searches for these positions. But
regardless of any adjustment in the responsibility of these two officers, there
can be no change in the fundamental fact: every member of this community
needs to assume responsibility for advancing the College's commitment to
diversity.
You may recall that I established three committees last spring to follow up
on the recommendations from the McKinsey team that was here to look at our
administrative structure: one on culture and communications, another on hiring
and retention, and the third on the budget process. All three are close to
concluding their work, and I hope to be able to move forward with their
recommendations by the end of this term.
You should have received a copy of my letter to the community that we sent
out earlier today. In it I discuss two issues of importance to Dartmouth: early
admissions, a program we will continue, and our institutional mission. Let me
discuss the latter for just a moment.
This summer and fall I have spent some time thinking about our mission
statement. I have met with a number of different groups - including faculty,
students, and staff - to discuss what it is that distinguishes Dartmouth when
it is at its best. I have enjoyed these conversations and I was struck,
although perhaps I should not have been surprised, with how often people
returned to the relationships that bound them to Dartmouth. There really is a
profound sense of shared community here. Every group also mentioned our student
focus and our commitment to academic excellence. I expect to be able to share a
new statement with the community and to ask for feedback during the winter
term. And I hope the Board of Trustees will sign off on it at the March
meeting.
It has been a privilege to dedicate several new facilities this term - the
new residence halls in the McLaughlin Cluster (Berry, Bildner, Byrne,
Goldstein, Rauner and Thomas Halls as well as the Occom Commons, named by an
anonymous donor for Samson Occom) and the Fahey and McLane Halls on Tuck
Mall.
We also dedicated the McLean Engineering Sciences Building at the Thayer
School at the end of September. And later this week we will dedicate Kemeny
Hall for the Department of Mathematics - the mathematicians have already moved
in and classes are underway there - and Haldeman Center for the academic
centers - the Leslie Humanities Center, the Ethics Institute, and the Dickey
Center. These are all wonderful spaces that add immeasurably to the quality of
the educational environment. We have already commenced the process of
preparing Bradley and Gerry for demolition, and I am looking forward to seeing
them gone.
As faculty, you continue to excel in both your research and teaching. I was
delighted that we appointed Rick Granger as the Neukom Professor of
Computational Science and that we have pushed forward with that initiative. We
also welcomed several other new faculty in the professional schools and the
Arts and Sciences, including seven senior hires. I had dinner with many of them
earlier this term and was so impressed with the quality and enthusiasm of the
people who are joining the faculty. In the long run, nothing we do is more
important than recruiting the best young faculty, supporting their development
as scholars and teachers, and then fighting to keep them!
We are close to meeting our goal of a 10 percent expansion of the Arts and
Sciences faculty, although start-up costs for faculty in some fields remains a
challenge. There are several other initiatives underway in the Arts and
Sciences, including a search for a new chair in Digital Humanities. The Writing
Program and the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning are now well
established and have really begun to make a difference. And we have seen
increased strength in the enrollment of graduate students in the Arts and
Sciences.
Our faculty excel as scholars and embrace fully the culture that marks this
College, one that values teaching and mentoring students. I was extremely
pleased with the undergraduate student satisfaction data from last year's
senior class, where 98 percent of those who participated said they were
satisfied with the accessibility of faculty outside of the classroom. It
doesn't get much better than that. Your commitment to our students is one of
the things that really distinguishes a Dartmouth education. Students were also
satisfied with their overall educational experience, the classes in their
major, and the improvement they had made in many areas. It's clear that our
students are attracted to Dartmouth in large part because of the opportunities
you provide to work with them. They want more such opportunities and we will
need to look for ways to make this happen.
The Tuck School has had another outstanding year - business schools have
multiple different rankings, and year after year, Tuck ranks among the top
schools in the world in these rankings. This is an extraordinary accomplishment
given their size relative to their peers. But Tuck has kept its focus on its
MBA program and in attracting the very best of what Dean Paul Danos calls
faculty who are "thought-leaders." They have done it well. We
recently broke ground on a new living and learning building that will house
some of the MBA students but will also provide more academic classroom,
conference, and office space. In addition, Tuck continues to be imaginative
with a range of other programs including an executive program for women
returning to the workforce. They are a leader in doing this.
Joe Helble is in his second year as Dean of the Thayer School and has
already had the pleasure of opening a new building. The McLean Engineering
Sciences Center is just a marvelous addition to the campus. The research and
teaching lab spaces are wonderful, and I look forward to seeing the Thayer
School reach new heights. It is already among the most competitive in winning
sponsored research awards on a per capita basis. Dean Helble is engaged in a
process with the faculty to identify two areas of concentration (one of which
is engineering and medicine and the other is under discussion) so that they can
leverage their size to the largest extent possible.
At the medical school, Dean Stephen Spielberg has made some excellent
faculty appointments and has formed some new partnerships - most notably with a
university in Tanzania as part of their Global Health Initiative. This is a
joint collaboration with the Dickey Center for International Understanding and
includes the development of an extended health program in Tanzania, discussions
on global health issues, and new courses on global health that will become part
of undergraduate curriculum. The Center for Evaluative Clinical Studies program
continues to be a national leader in assessing health care practices and in
contributing to important national policy discussions. We take pride in
their work-and in the accomplishments of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
Under our normal procedures, Dean Danos and Dean Spielberg will undergo
reviews this year, having completed four year terms. Provost Scherr is
currently organizing these.
This past year, the Board of Trustees set up a working group to look at our
graduate programs in the professional schools and the Arts and Sciences.
Michael Chu chaired the group and Barry Scherr along with Paul Danos, Joe
Helble, Steve Speilberg, Carol Folt and Dean of Graduate Studies Charles
Barlowe were all involved.
It was good for the Board to spend time on this issue, and I know that they
were impressed with the quality of these programs and of the faculty involved
with them. We did commit to devote more Board time on graduate issues and the
Board will spend time at this meeting at the Thayer School. The Board was also
very interested in how the graduate programs complement and supplement the
undergraduate program and, again, were encouraged by knowing just how much
interaction there is with undergraduates. We need to do all we can to fully
leverage our size and quality.
The College is in good shape - there are a lot of exciting initiatives
underway. And we have a lot more to do.
The Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience is past its midpoint, and we are
on track. But we still have a lot of work to do to fully fund all of our
priorities. The remaining major priorities include continuing to raise funds to
support the faculty; supporting curricular and non-curricular programs;
endowing more of our financial aid program; and continuing with our facilities
agenda. Vice President for Development Carrie Pelzel and her colleagues
have done an excellent job and they, along with leadership volunteers and
donors, are committed to meeting our objectives. And so am I.
As the newly opened facilities come on line this year we will need to draw
on reserves to cover an expected budget deficit. The operations and maintenance
of these buildings will hit the operating budget before we have in all the new
funds needed to cover them. We had anticipated this shortfall and have a
strategy in place to bring the budget into balance over the next couple of
years.
As for the projects still in planning, we have not yet completed fundraising
for them. These include the Life Sciences building for the Arts and Sciences, a
Translational Research building and a CECS building out at the DHMC site, the
entire complex to be called the C. Everett Koop Center in recognition of Dr.
Koop's contributions to health care in this country; the Tuck Living and
Learning Center; a visual arts building; two dining halls; and the Burnham
soccer project. Some of these, such as the Tuck building and soccer, will move
forward quickly, as we have already raised the money for them. The others
provide more of a challenge - a challenge that we are eager to take up. The
Board is committed to advancing these priorities.
It is the case that the cost of these facilities has increased as a result
of fuller program planning and the escalation in the cost of construction. We
will need to think about how to control costs and to fully leverage our
revenues to enable us to complete these projects. We have to be aggressive and
careful moving forward to meet our agenda - aggressive in leveraging our
resources and cautious in not taking inappropriate risks. The Board of Trustees
and I recognize our responsibilities in this regard.
But we are surely not poor and we are asking our friends and supporters to
support a very ambitious capital campaign goal. Let me share a few observations
about our capacity, our means, and our aspirations and needs.
The size of the Dartmouth endowment has more than tripled in ten years (from
$902 million in June 1996 to $3.1 billion in June 2006). We earned a 15 percent
return last year, compared to the benchmark of 11.8 percent, which placed us in
the top quartile of our comparative universe. We rank 22nd among the 746
institutions in terms of the size of our endowment and 16th in the country in
endowment per student, for institutions with more than 1,000
students.
These are the common metrics and we do well in them - but there is about all
of this if not a fallacy at least a tone and framework that makes me a bit
uncomfortable. I am not a banker accountable for investment success and capital
growth that keeps up with or exceeds my competitors. I am a teacher, an
educator, the president of an institution that has a wonderful history, an
enviable reputation, and a challenging ambition to educate the best of this
generation to be responsible, productive citizens and leaders of the next
generation.
Dartmouth's endowment is composed of multiple different funds that are used
to support the College's work, consistent with donor restrictions. These funds
need to be protected so as to be available to the College for future
generations. Despite common definitions that consider an endowment
fundamentally as a bank account, it is my view that more comprehensively
Dartmouth's endowment also includes the physical property and aesthetic legacy,
the intellectual strength and energy, and the culture of excellence and
responsibility of which we are the custodians. And while the largest bank
account in the world may enable a great many things, it would not alone assure
the heritage and the mission that is our responsibility. The capital endowment
needs to be directed to maintain and enhance the true endowment, the strength
of the College.
There has been recently a fair amount of public scrutiny of higher
education, and particularly of the wealthiest institutions with very large
endowments that are also undertaking multi-billion dollar capital campaigns.
The criticism is often unfair. Some of the largest of these institutions are
marshalling their resources to confront and solve the world's most vexing
problems.
Some critics argue that wealthy institutions have been too conservative in
spending their financial capital. It is, to be sure, a careful balancing act to
spend enough of the endowment to ensure our strength without jeopardizing
future generations. And it is possible to be too cautious and to assume all or
too many of the risks today while passing on the advantage of investment
growth. This may protect the financial legacy that future generations will
inherit while failing to protect the intellectual legacy they will receive. The
former is easier to recover than the latter.
But let us then return to our current objectives, our sense of purpose and
of mission. I believe that American higher education is one of the great
growth engines of the modern world. The higher education community has assumed
a comprehensive multi-front assignment: to solve the world's problems.
We need recognize the elusiveness of this goal even while acknowledging that
no privileged institution can ignore this social need. Our comprehensive
ambition has evolved over the last one hundred years from the more narrowly
focused traditional purpose of educating young people to be informed and
learned citizens and of providing an environment that encouraged faculty to
reduce that which was unknown.
During the progressive period of the last century, universities, the public
ones at any rate, became more focused on their civic purpose, to assist in
addressing public problems and to educate responsible and productive citizens,
following up naturally on the land-grant mission of many of them. During
the Second World War and the following Cold War, federal research dollars
sponsored a remarkable expansion of basic research in the physical sciences and
engineering, dedicated to national goals. This expanded further during
the 1960s with even broader bio-medical funding and with universities extending
their sense of civic purpose to one of more comprehensive social
responsibility, including at the core a fundamental shift in providing full
access to all for a college education.
This has been a wonderful story - and American higher education has reason
for real pride. These economic and social forces have clearly enriched
Dartmouth as well and that has had an impact on our sense of institutional
mission and purpose.
Dartmouth is an exceptional institution. We are smaller and more focused
than most of our direct competitors. Our per capita research strength compares
with the top American universities, our commitment to student learning and
development is recognized as exemplary, and our deeply rooted culture of
service and responsibility is among the strongest. While Dartmouth alone cannot
solve the world's problems, we embrace the responsibility of providing here an
environment that supports faculty engaged in their own work that will
contribute to the knowledge that will address the world's problems.
And we recognize our mission to provide an education that will provide
tomorrow's leaders with the intellectual tools and the will to solve the
world's problems. As President John Sloan Dickey said, "the world's
problems are your problems." We meet our goal of providing an educational
experience that enables and encourages our students to meet their
responsibilities, I believe, by focusing on priorities that build upon strength
and values and that provide an enviable learning environment.
This capital campaign is about enabling Dartmouth to meet this goal. There
are several related elements to this:
1) We must recruit and support Dartmouth faculty who are engaged in the
scholarly research and creative work that is defining - and stretching - the
boundaries of their fields, faculty who are confronting the basic and most
vexing problems, and who have a commitment to sharing their passion with their
students as teachers, as mentors, and, when possible, as collaborators. To
achieve our hopes in this regard we need to continue upon our work to expand
the size of the faculty. This generation of students seeks - and the next
generation of leaders requires - opportunities to take on independent study and
research projects with faculty.
2) We must recruit students who are among the most accomplished and
promising of their generation and to provide them the advantages of a Dartmouth
education, regardless of their financial background. We need to sustain
and to expand the College's historic commitment to a student body diverse in
background with a shared commitment to a culture of collaborative learning.
3) In order to advance the work of faculty and students, Dartmouth needs to
provide facilities and support that sustain a world-class learning
environment. We recognize that out of classroom support for the arts,
athletics, student organizations and social and cultural activities are fully a
part of the learning environment for this residential community.
4) Dartmouth needs to protect and enrich our historic culture, while
continuing to encourage its relevance to the demands of the 21st century:
welcoming a diverse community from diverse backgrounds; emphasizing teamwork
and collaboration; encouraging initiative and creativity; promoting a sense of
institutional and civic responsibility and leadership.
5) We need to protect the scale and size of Dartmouth and to encourage even
more opportunities to cross lines of disciplines and of schools. Our
disciplines are important intellectual centers, but their impact is the greater
because of their recognition that the world is not bound by academic
disciplines. The world's problems will be met only by those who can truly
collaborate beyond departments and boundaries.
If we do these things, we will meet our historic mission of educating men
and women with the potential to have a positive impact upon society. Our
faculty will continue to be recognized as leaders whose work does address the
major issues of our time, and Dartmouth will provide the finest education in
the world. If this is an audacious ambition, it is one that is rooted
deeply in the College and it is one that can be accomplished.
As we situate our place in American higher education, there is another
historical development that we need to acknowledge and to consider. In
the years since World War II higher education has played increasingly a
certifying role - access to professional fields, to desirable employment, and
to prestige is determined by the degree of the applicant. In this process,
field of study is influential, especially at the professional level, and
reputation of the degree-granting institution is often determinative. Obviously
a Dartmouth degree is a valuable certification and we all take pride in
that. But I am also uncomfortable with any sense that this is our purpose
- we need to explicitly understand that the most valuable thing we can provide
our students is a Dartmouth education.
A Dartmouth education is one that encourages students to be creative problem
solvers, to work in a collaborative environment, to develop their keen
analytical skills that are grounded in the best work of their field of study,
and to have a clear sense of ethical values and social responsibility. It also
means, of course, being able to think clearly, to write and communicate well,
to be global in outlook, and to be fully grounded in the liberal arts from
technology to science to social science, to the humanities and the creative and
performing arts.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has undertaken a number of curricular
initiatives in recent years, but it may be a time for us to consider again the
way that we structure our degree requirements and the place that the major
field of study has. What does constitute fully grounding in the liberal arts?
To initiate consideration of this, I have asked Dean Folt to engage the faculty
in a discussion of the relevance of our current curriculum and to consider
where there are areas for improvement and opportunities for innovation. I do
not take this step lightly-after all, I chaired the last two curriculum reviews
that we have undertaken. I recognize that done well this will require a
great deal of time-but I also know that here are few things more crucial for
the faculty than the process of considering and discussing what they hope to
accomplish through the requirements they set for the students. What will
constitute a Dartmouth education for the next generations? I look forward to
engaging in this conversation and to being informed by your perspectives.
Finally, I would like to make a comment on the current debate over the
alumni constitution vote. While this has played out on the campus more than we
might anticipate for an alumni debate, I think the energy of this discussion
affirms the deep and passionate engagement of many alumni with the College.
They do care. Nonetheless, I will be very pleased that the voting will be
closed this week and then, regardless of the results, we can all focus our
energy on advancing the priorities of the College.
Despite all of the rhetoric being tossed about, I want to assure members of
this community that this should not be a matter for distraction. I continue to
be focused on our priorities and you can be confident that the Board of
Trustees is resolute in their support of your good work.
Thank you again for all you are doing. It is a privilege and an honor to
serve with you.
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