Dean of the College Lee Pelton and E. John Rosenwald, the chairman of the College's Board of Trustees, discussed what they believed to be their biggest mistakes in a panel discussion Saturday afternoon.
The discussion, held in 101 Collis, was part of the weekend's Ivy League Leadership Symposium, which featured panels and activities for student representatives from each Ivy League school.
Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia, who moderated the panel, said the discussion focused on mistakes so that student leaders could avoid making them in the future.
Pelton spoke about the difficulties he faced and the mistakes he made in securing support for the Report of the Committee on the First Year Experience.
Pelton said he made a mistake by not getting "up-front support."
"I got support in the middle of the process," Pelton said.
The report, released in the spring of 1994, recommended a number of changes designed to improve the first-year experience by restructuring the College's residential system, enhancing intellectualism and revising the orientation process.
The report stimulated heated debate on campus, especially about the proposal for freshmen-only residence halls, and caused Pelton to modify "the original vision I had" after more than a year of community discussion.
Pelton said he was tempted to incorporate the changes proposed by the first-year committee without any discussion.
"I thought about just doing it," Pelton said. "You don't rely on the Student Assembly for all [of] your advice."
The decision to change his proposals, "caused me a lot of anguish ... because I disappointed a lot of people," Pelton said.
But despite being forced to modify his proposals, Pelton said, "I don't think that I lost. I felt that the issue now for me is trying to communicate a modified vision."
Rosenwald examined the Trustees' recent abandonment of a policy aimed at reducing tuition increases.
"I regret the decision, and I expect to regret it even more in 10 years," Rosenwald said. "We cannot raise our tuition any further ... people will start voting with their feet."
"The price of our product ... is too damn high," he said. "The only way you can get away with charging five times as much as your competitors is by being five times better. I doubt that any institution in this room is five times better than an equivalent state university."
To combat rising tuition costs, the Trustees decided five years ago that "we would, on a gradual basis, reduce our tuition increases," Rosenwald said. The effort resulted in lowest tuition hikes in the Ivy League, according to Rosenwald.
But he said the Trustees changed their minds and set a new goal of being "number four of eight" in the Ivy League, because the College was "not getting any credit in the marketplace" and faculty members expressed their need for additional revenues.
Rosenwald said the experience taught him that "the job of leadership is to get ready" for future changes such as the rising costs of higher education.
"If you're going to build a seawall, don't wait until the storm's over Bermuda before you call the contractor," he said.
Mary Childers, the College's director of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, reflected on two difficult decisions she made before coming to Dartmouth.
The first instance, which took place in her first job after graduate school, involved a white dean accused of racism for firing a minority faculty member, Childers said.
Childers said after examining the faculty member's confidential application, she realized that he had plagiarized his application essay and deserved to be fired.
Since the application was confidential however, Childers said she could not defend her public support for the dean.
"I lost my credibility overnight," Childers said.
The second instance was her withdrawal from a program aimed at integrating Women's Studies into her school's curriculum.
She said she dropped out of the program because it ignored the contributions of women of color.
But Childers said she did not regret her decision to protest the exclusion of women of color from the curriculum.
"You have to have ideals. The bestiality of leadership ... is nothing compared to the bestiality of history."
The final panelist, local politician Liz Hager, the first female mayor of Concord and the first female chair of the New Hampshire state legislature's Appropriations Committee, discussed mistakes she made in government.
Hager, a self-described "Republican feminist," recalled her experiences campaigning for the Republican nomination in the New Hampshire 1992 gubernatorial race.
In losing the campaign to current New Hampshire governor Stephen Merrill, Hager said she learned that campaigning "has nothing to do with leadership" and more to do with marketing.
