Former Provost John Strohbehn, who left his post in June to return to teaching and research at the College, says the institution did not excel enough academically during his years as its top academic officer.
When his four-year position as provost came up for renewal last June, Strohbehn thought about whether to remain. "Some people want to be administrators," he said. "I never did."
A return to teaching "after four more years as provost would be much harder to do," he said.
Strohbehn said he believed there are others who could better perform the job of provost. The provost's performance should be measured by "the quality of the teaching mission ... and scholarship" at the College over which the provost presides, Strohbehn said.
While students at Dartmouth are "excellent" and the faculty "very, very good," the institution has lost sight of its "fundamental purpose," he said. "The fundamental purpose of colleges and universities is the life of the mind," Strohbehn said.
He accepted the position of provost with a vision of "what Dartmouth could become." Though Dartmouth remains "a good school," Strohbehn does not think he achieved the academic success he would have liked.
He cited studies that showed the average student at Dartmouth spends what he called a "not too good" 15 hours a week on schoolwork. Students should work hard in college, Strohbehn said, because at no other time can they "dig into things without constraints or jobs or other pressures."
He contrasted the students at Princeton, every one of whom must write a thesis, to those at Dartmouth, of which "a very small percentage do independent work."
"Every student at Dartmouth is bright enough to get a Ph. D.," he said, and he wants every one of them to have thought about it before they graduate.
But, Strohbehn said that while other "institutions have gone far away from the teaching mission" due to research, the College has maintained its emphasis on undergraduate education. "Balance there, is critically important, he said."
Strohbehn is currently on sabbatical at the Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, where he is studying "renewable energy issues having to do with global warming," he said.
"If global warming is going to have the effects that several respected scientists are forecasting, we should be doing more in that area," Strohbehn said.
He said his focus is not on trying to answer the question "Is the earth in fact getting warmer?" Instead he concentrates on the energy side of the issue, studying alternative energy sources such as solar power.
Strohbehn said he hopes to teach a new environmental studies course at the College next fall on the same issues he is researching at Princeton. He also plans to teach courses in electrical and electromagnetic engineering.
"If I had to go some place where I had to research all the time," he said, "I wouldn't do that." Choosing between research and teaching, he said, is "like asking me to choose, if I had two children, which one I like better."
