President Wright has repeatedly expressed concern that the College has done a poor job communicating with its alumni. He explains away the legions of disillusioned and disaffected alums by saying that Dartmouth has failed to "get the message out." Nothing could be further from the truth.
Each month, alumni receive any number of communications from Wright's expensive public relations machine: the Alumni Magazine, the Dartmouth Life newsletter, the "Speaking of Dartmouth" compendium of press releases and online resources, and the various messages sent to alumni clubs and Alumni Council members. This multimedia blitz seeks to present a sanitized, "all is well" picture of the College.
However, Dartmouth's thoughtful alumni can see through this storm of self-congratulatory fluff; they have other, more direct sources of information about the College: alumni parents talk to legacies; young alums talk to student friends; alumni interview recent graduates in a professional context; they read The Dartmouth, the Valley News and Dartmouth blogs online; and they share what they learn with each other.
The information that they gather in these ways is the true basis for the alumni unhappiness at the present state of a Dartmouth education. Alumni actually know what is going on in Hanover, and to their deep disappointment, what they see is not pretty.
The overwhelming majority of alumni were never turned away from an over-subscribed class. I was never refused admission to a class between 1975 and 1979, not even once. Yet, today we read in The D of students offering cash rewards to buy places in crowded courses ("Majors in high demand face teacher shortages," Jan. 14).
Pre-mid-1980s alumni could have chosen to live for all four of their undergraduate years in the same dormitory. They are appalled at stories of students living in six or seven different dorms over four years (if there is space available for them at all!).
Due to this lack of continuity, today's dorms lack the vibrant intramural sports programs that used to fill the Green with touch football and softball games and bring dormmates together in many other athletic leagues.
The current state of student writing is "appalling" according to one prominent professor quoted in The D, yet classes are so large that the chair of the government department recently opined that many faculty might soon have to replace essays with multiple choice exams ("DEP tutors teach basic writing, grammar," Jan. 17).
In response to the decades-long decline in writing skills, College President James Wright created yet another committee, whose final report is due this September, after two years of research and meetings. Its recommendation will be a return to mandatory English 5 attendance, with both English 5 and freshmen seminars intensely focused on writing. Most alums went through a similar program, before Dartmouth's drift began.
More than a few alumni are aware that Dartmouth's vaunted new writing program, much boasted about in speeches and recent administration PR missives, at present consists of only a single computer science professor doing research into how to improve students' written expression.
Alumni ex-athletes have listened for years to coaches' despairing comments about the scant support that they receive from the Admissions Office. For many former student athletes, Karl Furstenberg's supposedly "private" letter to Swarthmore College's President Alfred Bloom did no more than confirm the existence of a longstanding Wright administration prejudice.
The College's bloated and expensive bureaucracy creates more disaffected alumni each day. I have heard from several senior Dartmouth managers about the lumbering bureaucracy's painful slowness in making decisions. I am not the first person to hear these freely voiced complaints -- alumni draw their own conclusions.
That, of course, is not all: students are punished for things that they say or write under the College's unwritten but actively enforced Speech Code; many of the College's dilapidated athletic facilities should have been upgraded decades ago; deans and their costly staffs proliferate like flies; professors seeking to bring world-class colleagues to Dartmouth are told that there is "no money" available; frat members live in fear of offending the hovering enforcement police; a draconian alcohol policy drives drinking underground; students complain that they have never in four years met a conservative professor; bi-annual faculty meetings, where the agenda is tightly controlled, now barely attract a quorum of 40 professors, in contrast to the intellectual free-for-alls of 300 or more professors that took place in the past -- the list of problems goes on and on.
These items don't appear in any of the administration's mailings, but does Jim Wright really think that the alumni are unaware of the College's slow decline? And yet, despite this sad list, in the College's classrooms and labs, on sport fields and in offices, it is wonderful to see that energetic students and dedicated professors and coaches still do extraordinary things -- as they have always done at Dartmouth.
The College obviously needs a change of leadership to bring about a change of direction. The alumni know that with the active support of an efficient and imaginative Administration, Dartmouth could once again meet its promise of being the finest undergraduate college in the nation.
In the coming months, the alumni will vote for two new trustees. Two petition candidates, Peter Robinson '79 and Professor Todd Zywicki '88, are running against a slate of candidates chosen by the College's usual procedures. The petition candidates, imbued with the rebel spirit and the ideals of last year's petition trustee T.J. Rogers '70, are clear about the needs of their College. Their election will be an important step toward Dartmouth's renewal as an undergraduate college.
Robinson and Zywicki will have the support of thousands of devoted alumni who love their alma mater and who know how great Dartmouth can be. These alumni fully comprehend, despite all the PR flak, where Dartmouth stands today after two decades of unconscionable neglect.
