Dean of the College Lee Pelton compared higher education hiring practices with free agency in baseball at a discussion with seven students in Sanborn Library last night.
Citing the example of a Harvard economics professor who had been offered an annual salary of $300,000 by Columbia University, Pelton addressed the question of whether attracting famous professors to improve a school's ranking is "a good or a bad thing."
Pelton, who will take over as president of Willamette University in Salem, Ore., this fall, said he remembered a time when his generation knew every name on the baseball team's roster, which stayed the same over a long period of time. "I think people took comfort in that," he said.
"The sense of team identity has disintegrated as the players can move around more quickly. My bias is that this is not a good thing," he said.
The same tendency present in baseball has been characteristic of higher education in the last two decades, he said.
He attributed this development to two factors: the growing system of star faculty members and the reemergence of public intellectuals.
Certain institutions used the star-system to their benefit, he said, giving as examples Emory University, Duke or Boston University. Boston University, he said, was a "sleepy distant cousin to its neighbors in Cambridge" before it hired big-name faculty members. Since then, he said, its academic reputation has risen dramatically.
These star faculty members, attracted by high salaries, serve to raise the institution's rankings, attract the best students and to "adorn the institution," he said. By attracting very well-known public intellectuals, the institutions are leaning in the direction of buying an academic reputation, he said.
He called this a good investment from the university's point of view, as the school can expect "high returns in terms of grants or the quality of students."
Pelton called Dartmouth a "hybrid institution, as the faculty think of themselves as teacher-scholars." Dartmouth is unique, he said, because it competes for faculty and students in a marketplace of research institutions.
Discussing the effect of the 'star faculty' trend on the College, he said students come to Dartmouth for the quality of teaching by a committed faculty.
He said the reemergence of faculty members as public intellectual figures is another main factor directing the trend in higher education.
"It's a good thing, but these people do get paid a lot of money," he said.
Three or four decades ago, he said, some professors taught but also had a public persona, as their writings were published in popular newspapers and magazines. For reasons he said he did not fully understand, these public intellectuals had disappeared.
They are now making a reappearance, he said, mainly because of the tremendous influence of the media and the Internet, and their reappearance is related to the faculty star system.
At the end of the discussion, Pelton told the students to "keep this institution on its toes" and not to let it "diverge from its path."
