College President Jim Yong Kim broke convention with his decision to address the issues of sexual assault and binge drinking at Monday's termly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ("Faculty praise Kim's topic choice for talk," Oct. 29.) While newly appointed Dean of the Faculty Mike Mastanduno said Kim was finding "ways to challenge faculty," and professors said they felt it was important for Kim to address these types of issues with the faculty, it seems to us as students that our professors already have enough "challenges" to face without the added task of attempting to tackle this broad student issue.
Confronting student health and safety should be at the top of the president's to-do list ("A Wake Up Call," Oct. 8), and it appears from Kim's constant discussion that he is making more than a good-faith effort to bring these problems up in campus-wide discussion. And while the faculty are certainly a large part of our campus arguably, one of two of the most crucial components, along with students they fill a different role on campus, making them inappropriate candidates to address these issues.
The distinguished body of faculty is perhaps the College's greatest asset. We want our scholar-professors deeply immersed in their respective fields and in the classroom and most importantly, engaging academically with students. Of course, as members of our community, professors must be informed of campus-wide concerns, as they often do have close ties to individual students, for whom they can be useful resources. But they are neither parents nor guardians. They are professional academics. The College employs a number of professional counselors and deans for a reason they are better qualified and better positioned to deal with these other issues.
While these concerns should have been included in the meeting, they should not have been the focus. The meeting should have spent more time addressing the implementation of benefit reductions and technological changes concerns raised by the Steering Committee of the General Faculty ("Steering Committee has annual meeting," Oct. 25). This was the first such meeting since Mastanduno's appointment; surely it would have been a logical time to assuage any apprehensions about and offer insight into his plans. By focusing on sexual assault and alcohol abuse, Kim left opaque plans for the impending expansion of departments, faculty hiring and coordination with the new Center for Health Care Delivery Science. There are many venues to discuss student life, but only one opportunity per term for faculty to convene en masse with Kim.
Ultimately, Monday's meeting illustrated a more profound problem for Kim. Although his administration has channeled energy into gathering data and examining the Dartmouth community, Kim has simultaneously overlooked important opportunities for authentic engagement with the community by favoring scripted and occasionally redundant speeches over true conversation. The dynamic created by having a cross-section of the faculty in one room is different from other venues from which to gather information. The meeting would have been an ideal time to listen and engage the people who are responsible for our scholarship and teaching about where to go from here.
Faculty support could advance Kim's plans for improving student health and safety. But as Kim himself has noted, these efforts will only be successful when they are implemented by the students themselves. We would all be better off to check our non-academic lives at the classroom door.
