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President Wright delivers his tenth annual report to the general faculty (photo
by Joseph Mehling '69)
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October 8, 2007
It is my privilege to join you here for the purpose of providing my annual
report on the state of the college. I was surprised to realize that this is the
tenth time I have done this!
The occasion of my tenth report provides an opportunity to look back, the
instinct of a historian-but it is a crucial time to look ahead, the job
description of a president. But before I reflect briefly on the path we
have traveled and describe our ambitions going forward, current circumstances
require a few comments on one issue.
As you know, in September the Board of Trustees approved a number of
governance changes as a result of a comprehensive review conducted over the
summer, which included receiving a great deal of feedback from alumni, faculty,
students, and others. The Board decided to expand the Board by increasing the
number of Charter seats, to establish some new guidelines for alumni nomination
of trustees, and to expand the Board committee structure to include committees
on academic affairs, student life, and alumni affairs. They believed that
these steps were essential in order to continue to strengthen Dartmouth. I
fully support their actions.
Much of the debate since then has been predictable, even
understandable. I know and respect many alumni who disagree with the Board
action. I have less understanding of those who have fought this debate in the
national media over the summer, holding this good school up as a divided place
that is unsure of its direction. I have trouble understanding those who
seek to tie the College up in the courts now. I particularly regret the efforts
of some to engage students in this controversy. Dartmouth students should
enjoy being students and I am confident that they are capable of making up
their own minds about the quality of their experience. They always have
been!
It is crucial for everyone to understand that Dartmouth is not divided in
our values and sense of purpose and we are quite certain of who we are and what
we aim to be. As President, my focus is on your work, on our ability to recruit
and to sustain faculty, on our ability to continue to recruit here the best
students in the country and provide them an exceptional experience, and to
protect and to always seek to enhance the intellectual and fiscal strength of
the College.
In preparation for this meeting I reread the previous nine annual reports I
had presented to you. Over the years I have emphasized our goal of recruiting
and supporting an exceptional faculty who are committed to teaching and my
commitment to a culture that encourages interdisciplinary work through our
programs and at the boundaries of departments and schools. I have annually
described diversity as a historic commitment and as a critical element in our
learning environment. And I have regularly emphasized the out of classroom
experience as part of the learning culture here. The mission statement with the
core values and legacy that we developed last year pull all of these elements
together. At their September meeting the Board affirmed their support for the
work of the faculty, for the synergy at Dartmouth between research and teaching
and for the intellectual value of the graduate programs. And two weeks ago
I reaffirmed the College's commitment to the diversity of the community.
Over the last nine years we have advanced our goals through underlining our
budget priorities, through the early results of the capital campaign, and
through the commitment made by you and by many colleagues, students, alumni/ae,
and friends. We have been consistent in our ambitions and resolute in
accomplishing them.
Let me summarize briefly some of what we have done together.
Faculty growth:
The FTE of A&S faculty has grown from 380 to 430 over the past decade.
In terms of authorized tenure-track positions the numbers have gone from 352 to
411. This has allowed us to reduce the student-faculty ratio down to 8 to 1
today. This is the US News and World Report calculation and according to them
we have come down from 12:1 in 1997-98. This is at best a marginally
useful comparative metric-for it is also a misleading one. It calculates the
ratio based on total teaching faculty and total student enrollment. There
is little doubt that among the schools with whom we compete, Dartmouth would be
a leader in terms of faculty in the undergraduate classroom.
The Professional school faculties have also grown. Tuck has increased from
37 faculty lines to 55 and Dean Danos expects to add a few more. Thayer has
increased from 33 to 38 and again would like to continue to grow a little more.
DMS also has increased its faculty significantly.
Even more important than this pattern of growth is the quality of the
Dartmouth faculty. We continue to attract our first choice of faculty and we
will continue to work hard to do this as well as to then retain them. I can
affirm as one who sits on all tenure, promotion, and reappointment cases, that
Dartmouth faculty excel as teachers and scholars-professional colleagues in the
field and the Dartmouth students consistently affirm these things.
Faculty compensation:
While we have added faculty we have also paid attention to faculty support
and compensation. We have increased the Arts and Sciences start up budget from
under $1 million to over $5 million today, and we have met the compensation
goals established by the Committee on the Faculty for the Arts and
Sciences. Compensation for Thayer, Tuck and DMS is also competitive with
their peer institutions.
Significantly increasing the size of the faculty and simultaneously
improving our average compensation relative to our competitors has been a
complicated and expensive task-and it has been an essential one.
Admissions:
Karl Furstenberg retired in June after 17 years as Dean of Admissions and
Financial Aid-he did a tremendous job, and I am confident that Maria Laskaris
will continue to build upon this even as she puts her own mark on this crucial
office. Over the last nine years the applicant pool increased significantly
from 10,600 to over 14,000 today. Selectivity has increased as the acceptance
rate went from 21 percent to 16 percent. Students of color increased from 20
percent to over 30 percent. The number of international students increased from
around 4 percent to almost 9 percent today. The percentage of students on
financial aid increased from 42 percent to 48 percent and the dollars spent on
financial aid have doubled from $24.5 million in 1998 to over $50 million
today. On three separate occasions we have enhanced the financial aid
packages.
The Academic Experience:
The academic experience has also become stronger. Classes under 20 have
increased from 57 percent of all classes offered to 65 percent. We have
increased the number of opportunities for undergraduates to work individually
with faculty across the institution and I am always impressed with the numbers
of undergraduates who work with faculty at the professional schools. This is
one of Dartmouth's distinctive strengths. Last year students received
1,000 credits for independent study or comparable projects.
We have exceptional students-national surveys reveal that out of their peer
group they have a greater interest in a solid general education and are less
interested in education simply as a means to make more money.
There is a wonderful synergy here-high academic expectations define the
students who come here and in a recent survey of non-tenured, tenure track
faculty, the quality of the students was at the top of the reasons these
faculty identified for being satisfied at Dartmouth. This is the essence
of the strength of the Dartmouth experience.
Student satisfaction with all aspects of their experience has increased. You
should be particularly proud at the 98 percent of students who say they are
satisfied with the accessibility of the faculty. Overall satisfaction with the
Dartmouth experience increased from 89 percent to 91 percent.
We do have some challenges here. Advising is one of them. This was an issue
that was pulled out in our last reaccreditation process and we made some
changes in the way we organized advising. We moved the office to the Dean of
the Faculty area and Dean Cecelia Gaposkin assumed responsibility for the
office. She has done a terrific job and we have seen some improvements in this
area-but we need to do more still. And we need to look at our major
advising.
We also continue to have enrollment pressures in some departments, most
notably Economics and Government. Dean Folt has added lines in both
departments. Indeed, Economics has grown by 50 percent over the past decade and
Government by 25 percent. Nonetheless, enrollment pressures continue and we
need to think about how to address them.
Facilities:
We have seen a significant expansion of the physical campus with the
addition of several buildings and the renovation of others. By the time we
finish the currently planned buildings we will have spent over $1 billion
dollars on the campus.
The new facilities include eight residence halls and two commons, large
scale residence hall renovation, the MacLean Engineering Sciences Center,
Kemeny Hall and the Haldeman Academic Centers, the expansion of Wilder, the
renovation of Silsby, Berry Library and Carson Hall, the addition of Whittemore
at the Tuck School as well as the Living and Learning center, and the Rubin
building at DMS. In addition to Whittemore Hall, we added graduate students
housing along Park Street and at Sachem Village. We have new faculty housing on
Park and Wheelock Streets. New athletic facilities include the construction of
the Floren Varsity Field-house and the Burnham Soccer Facility as well as
renovations to the Alumni Gymnasium and Memorial Field and Track.
We are aggressively moving ahead with planning and design for the Visual
Arts Center on Lebanon Street and hope to commence work on enabling projects
for this new home for Studio Art and Film studies in 2008.
The Life Sciences Building, about which I will have some additional comments
below, is also in the late stages of permitting. We hope to commence work
on the foundations for this later this fall if all of the permits are approved
on schedule. We are moving ahead the planning for the Koop Complex at the
Medical Center which will provide space for translational research and the
Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Work on the Class of '53 Commons up at the McLaughlin Cluster, will
begin pending final approvals and completion of plans. We are also
advancing our work on the dining hall that will replace Thayer hall.
And finally, work continues on Rivercrest, Sachem Village, and South Block,
which together will provide more housing options for graduate students and
employees. The work at Rivercrest, where we will build 280 units of employee
rental and for-sale housing in a variety of unit types including single family
homes, townhouses, duplexes and apartments, will begin next summer. This past
summer, we completed 125 rental units at Sachem Village for graduate students,
and once that project is finished next summer will have a total number of 255.
And on South Block, we have added 12 units of housing for faculty and graduate
students and will add an additional 27 units, including approximately 10 units
to replace existing Visiting Professor apartments.
Capital campaign:
Much of this has been enabled by the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience.
Carrie Pelzel and her colleagues have done a terrific job of meeting an
aggressive fundraising goal. The Campaign is on track and has raised
approximately $919 million to date.
We have had some wonderful recent gifts that advance our goals-the Peter and
Susan Williamson gift to the medical school was such a generous investment in
the future of the medical school. All of us take pride in having such a
remarkable faculty colleague as Peter Williamson.
And I am delighted to be able to announce today that the Class of 1978
Reunion Giving Committee, made up of Bill Daniel, Elissa VonHeill Hylton, Steve
Mandel, and Barbara Dau Southwell, has committed to meeting two goals by the
time of their 30th reunion next June. Now we need to understand that the
Class of '78 broke all previous reunion records in 2003 when they raised over
$14 million for their 25th reunion. They have agreed to do this
again! They have committed to raise the $40 million necessary to name the
College's new Life Sciences building and contribute at least $3 million in
unrestricted gifts supporting the student experience. This current commitment
raises the bar for class gifts to an unbelievable height. I am so pleased that
we will be able to name the Life Sciences building for the Class of 1978.
The Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center aims to be a national model of
sustainable design, expected to consume one-half of the energy of the
best-performing laboratories currently in use in the United States.
At 174,500-square-feet, the facility will have spaces devoted to
undergraduate- and graduate-level teaching and research, including classrooms,
teaching laboratories, and faculty laboratories and offices for the department
of biology. Among its notable features: a 6000-square-foot greenhouse, a
200-seat auditorium, a two-story atrium for "science in sight" gallery
displays, and a third-floor "sorghum and grasses green roof" to help keep the
building cool, a storm water management system that will reuse 1 million
gallons of rain water annually, extensive daylighting, and state of the art
energy management system. Pending approval from the Hanover Planning Board, the
foundation work will begin in November. Occupancy is planned for March
2010.
I am also pleased to announce that with the approval of the Board and of the
original donor to the program, we are going to be able to honor someone who
made a great difference in the intellectual life of Dartmouth and to
continue to support one of his enduring programs, I am honored to announce that
the Presidential Scholars Program will be renamed the James Freedman
Presidential scholars program. This remarkably successful program has 210
participants from the Class of 2009 - double our initial assumptions.
Perhaps this discussion of the Freedman Presidential Scholars program, which
brings together some of our finest students and our faculty in creative
collaboration, is a good point to simply pause and say that the State of the
College is excellent. But it is also a point to start poking into the
future. We are not yet finished and I would like to share with you a few
initiatives that I seek to advance during the remainder of my service as
president.
I do take seriously the obligation that we share to advance the mission of
Dartmouth and of underlining our core values. I take seriously the need always
to build upon the qualities and programs that define and distinguish the
Dartmouth experience. These start with our academic strength and a culture that
encourages student and faculty collaboration.
In 1998 when I needed to identify three areas of Dartmouth for self-study
and outside review during our reaccrediation process, I decided to focus on
those things that we thought of as fundamental to Dartmouth: undergraduate
research opportunities, internationalism/globalism, and computation. These
still mark us-as do qualities such as access, diversity, teamwork, leadership,
and responsibility. And we are enriched by a scale which permits and a
culture which encourages work across intellectual boundaries. Let
us consider ways to enhance these, to lead with strength.
Academic strength:
I would start, as always, by committing to underline and advance the core
strength of Dartmouth: faculty who are defining their fields and who have
a passion for sharing their intellectual passion with their students. We will
continue to grow the faculty but this needs to advance some clear strategic
goals.
Because Dartmouth stands out among our competitors in the undergraduate
courses taught by faculty, we need to continue growth and aim to increase the
percentage of classes under 20 to 70% of all classes. We do need to focus
on student access to courses, but as I have said in this forum before, faculty
expansion needs to be about strategic intellectual growth and not just on
meeting current enrollment patterns. I would encourage Dean Folt and her
colleagues to work with faculty to determine a strategic plan for growth. As
always, we need to focus on quality in allocating hires-and we need to engage
new and emerging fields and build upon interdisciplinary opportunities. I
believe we can take fuller advantage of graduate school faculty teaching
undergraduates and I am particularly interested in an initiative that Provost
Scherr and Deans Danos and Folt have been discussing regarding Tuck school
faculty offering courses. And we need to move ahead with our programs in
writing and rhetoric. The Faculty committee working on this and the deans have
some strong initiatives in place that we can advance.
Dartmouth has some exceptional programs in the graduate schools. We will
never be of the size and scale of most of our competitors in these programs but
we can build upon a model of excellence in the graduate schools as well as in
the Arts and Sciences. Dean Danos is moving ahead with a strategic planning
process to define where Tuck will be in 2012. Dean Helble has worked to develop
a culture of innovation at Thayer. And Stephen Spielberg is working on plans
around a new institute of health policy and clinical practice. I would invite
the deans and the faculty in the graduate schools as well as Arts and Sciences
to initiate a process to define those areas where Dartmouth can either continue
or can assert international leadership.
As we continue to grow the faculty, we need to keep focused on our
compensation goals-I want us now to seek to exceed the median for our
comparison schools. We need to find ways to better support startup needs,
ongoing faculty research and teaching initiatives, and to develop a plan to
enhance the Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund. In
recognition of the growth in size and strength of the faculty, Provost Scherr
and I have agreed to Dean Folt's request that we increase the number of senior
faculty grants that we award. This has been increasingly competitive in recent
years so we will fund three more senior fellowships to be designated by the CAP
this year for use in 2008-09. I am also interested in finding ways to
advance the initiatives that the Committee on the Faculty has been discussing
having to do with opportunities for spouses and partners, with parental leave
benefits, and with support for home purchases.
Sophomore summer:
This is a well-established program that is unique to Dartmouth. But we have
not taken advantage of the opportunity. I aspire to make this a showcase
of what Dartmouth can do. For over thirty years it has evolved but it has
not been strategically and intellectually managed by the faculty and the
administration.
I propose a basic conversation about what we might do with this
opportunity-we have a class in residence just after they have declared their
majors and at a time when there are fewer extracurricular demands on
them.
Students by all accounts enjoy the summer terms-and we want them to continue
to enjoy it. But let the enjoyment be expanded and enriched: for example,
could we schedule classes differently, including three week intensive units?
Could we provide for three course credit courses-providing for intensive work
in a field of study? Could we take fuller advantage of professional
school faculty teaching in summer courses? Could we include during the
summer a focus on themes that address the great issues of the day and provide
opportunities for students to consider how they can develop as
leaders? Can we find ways to integrate around some common themes the
remarkable resources of the Hopkins Center, the Hood Museum, the Dickey
Endowment, the Rockefeller Center, the Ethics Institute, the Humanities Center,
the Montgomery Endowment, the Tucker Foundation? Can we utilize during the
summer the experiences that our alumni/ae can bring back to the campus,
providing opportunities to bridge theory and practice.
I have asked Dean Folt to work with the faculty to develop initiatives that
build upon the unique opportunity we have to share the richness of learning and
the responsibility of the learned. We will proceed to raise funds that will
secure these initiatives.
Access:
The range and richness of our student body is a core strength of Dartmouth.
I am energized and sustained by students and their energy, creativity, and
accomplishments-outside as well as inside the classroom. This strength is
advanced because of the range and diversity that we see here due to our
financial aid programs.
I would like to enhance these in order that they also can underline and
advance some core strengths of Dartmouth. I would like to identify
resources that will enable us to do several related things: move to need
blind admissions for international students; provide for one leave term where
there are no earning expectations so that financial aid students will have the
same options as non financial aid students to take on internships or other
opportunities that do not provide consequential compensation; provide that for
financial aid students going on Dartmouth off campus programs the incremental
expenses will be covered by scholarship rather than by loan. These three
initiatives all aim at advancing our goals in internationalism/globalism and in
making certain that all of our students can take advantage of activities that
are at the center of the Dartmouth experience. Finally I would like us to
find ways to reduce significantly the loan expectations for financial aid
students. This makes us even more accessible-and it makes post-graduation
options more possible for all of our students.
Diversity:
This theme is woven through all of the initiatives described above, as it is
woven through those things that make Dartmouth the exceptional place it is and
seeks to be. But we need to make explicit the challenge and the
opportunity we have. Dartmouth is a remarkably rich community with a
remarkably rich legacy-and not only do we not take full enough advantage of
this, we too often allow it to be marginalized. We all share in the
benefits of having here a diverse community of faculty, students, and
staff. Consequently we all share in assuring that we continue to seek a
diverse community and that all of us engage in welcoming all who join us.
Let me close by thanking all of you for all you do to enrich the experience
here-and for making my work so rewarding. I would also like to extend a special
salute to my colleagues in the administration and staff. Dartmouth is blessed
with an administration and staff that cares deeply about the College, about the
experience of the students, and about the work of the faculty. They work
extremely hard and imaginatively to provide support for a community that has
become larger, richer, more complicated, to sustain a growing infrastructure,
and to control costs. All of this happens in a world that is more complex and
in an environment marked by regulations and by reports. I regret immensely that
some critics abstract these colleagues as "administrators," as a pejorative
description that is used as obstacle or antithesis to what we are about. You
know better than this. Try being what we are about without them. This old
faculty member is proud to be in the company of the staff and officers of the
college. As I am pleased to be here today in your good company. The
state of the college is strong-thanks to all of you who make it so.
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