Alex Tonnelli's piece ("Step Two: Electing the Petition Candidates," March 9) perceptively describes the Wright Administration's "all is well'"public relations campaign. As President Wright recently said to the Chicago, Denver and Florida alumni clubs: "Let me give you my assessment. The College is in great shape."
Two Administration responses to my column ("Dear Old Dartmouth," Feb. 28) slot tightly into this P.R. strategy, but they present the message in different ways.
Provost Barry Scherr's column ("Continuing to Bring in the Best," March 9) leads off by accusing me of "showing a casual disregard for factual accuracy in describing what is happening at Dartmouth," but Provost Scherr does not offer a single example to support this charge.
His piece then moves on to numerically describe the extent of the class oversubscription problem. First, Scherr says that oversubscription is rare, occurring in only 10 percent of courses last year, and in about four percent of non-intro-language classes in the coming Spring term.
Note that his figures are only overall percentages, not ones weighted for class size, or taking into account the importance of certain courses in completing major requirements or the concentration of oversubscribed courses in certain departments.
In light of the Jan. 28 Verbum Ultimum editorial in The Dartmouth stating, "Students who need to take classes to fulfill their major requirements linger on lengthy waitlists for courses offered by small and large departments alike," I asked a thoughtful senior to conduct a poll of the people living in her off-campus house and in her sorority. She received a total of 23 answers from sophomores, juniors and seniors.
Of this group, 11 students had been turned away from courses that they had wanted to take and had to choose other courses in their place.
More interestingly, 16 of the 23 people in the group, most of them repeatedly, had been denied admission to a course, but were later accepted -- after much "begging," as one student put it -- when faculty agreed to remove the course cap. A student wrote: "I've been in classes that are supposed to be a 35-person discussion that turn into a sloppy 55-person discussion/lecture ... Talk to anyone who takes socy classes and they can tell you the same thing."
Scherr's figures seem to understate the problem: the number of students bumped from classes is far less than it might be because dedicated faculty members choose not to enforce numerical caps.
What is clear is that nothing is going to change any time soon. At a meeting of the Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley on March 15, Trustee Al Mulley Jr. stated that Dartmouth undergraduates are just going to have to learn that "you can't always get what you want."
Additionally, Scherr maintains (and President James Wright repeats this at alumni gatherings) that oversubscription has always been a feature of a Dartmouth education. However, look at how narrowly Scherr constructs his assertion: "There has never been a time when any student could take any course at whatever moment he or she wanted."
This tight phrasing leaves no room for us to understand, indeed it attempts to cover up, how a rarely encountered feature of past undergraduate life has become an omnipresent ordeal for today's Dartmouth students.
I discussed oversubscription with three of my 1979 classmates and 12 alumni from classes between 1980 and 1995. During their four years as undergraduates, only two of them could recall ever being waitlisted or turned away from a course -- and only a single course at that --- and only two others knew someone who had been waitlisted or refused entry to a class.
Obviously, these informal surveys are of limited statistical value, but they do point strongly in one direction. It would be interesting to hear more students' and alums' experiences.
Next up in response to my column was Kate Stith-Cabranes ("One Parent's Perspective," March 9), writing as a former trustee of the College.
Not revealed is that she is also a professor at the Yale Law School, and before that an Assistant District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where, among other responsibilities, she prosecuted organized crime figures.
Dartmouth's PR handlers must be gratified that this brilliant woman chose to appeal to the warm and fuzzy segment of the trustee election demographic. As a result, rather than giving us the opportunity to enjoy a closely argued, rigorous apologia for Wright's Dartmouth, her column is suffused with a gauzy defensiveness about her freshman son's first two quarters at the College.
Stith-Cabranes begins her column with a paraphrase of my piece that is shameful in its inaccuracy: "Citing anonymous sources, Asch claimed that Dartmouth students can't write, Dartmouth teachers don't teach and Dartmouth's academic leaders are indifferent to both. I could hardly believe what I was reading."
Oh my. As any reader can quickly confirm in The Dartmouth Online, I criticized very specific weaknesses of the administration and its policies; Stith-Cabranes' broad, unreferenced generalizations are in no way a fair-minded recapitulation of my column.
Stith-Cabranes later writes that my statement that Dartmouth has a speech code is "downright inaccurate." Here, too, she provides no evidence to support her accusation regarding a subject that is highly contentious, as Dartmouth Trustee T.J. Rodgers recently made clear ("Encouraged But Not Convinced," March 7).
Stith-Cabranes does acknowledge Dartmouth's current housing crisis, whose origins she places in the 1970s, even further in the past than I do. While I never heard a word about a housing crisis when I was a student between 1975-79, the fact that Stith-Cabranes sees this problem as being over 30 years old does not aid her defense of the Wright administration.
Responsibility for inaction on the housing problem should be laid squarely at President Wright's door. He was the Dean of the Faculty from 1989-97 and Provost in 1997-98. As well, his online resum says that he had previously "chaired a succession of key committees at the College, including a 1978-80 committee that reviewed the curriculum and year-round education."
Why did students have to wait until this year, the seventh year of Wright's presidency, to see ground broken for new dorms?
The Wright administration seems unable to acknowledge Dartmouth's weaknesses and its own mistakes. Whether our problems are reflections of national trends or simply local, the College is in a position to be a leader in confronting the challenges that it faces. We need innovation and progress, not drift and self-justification.
In 1979, Jean Kemeny wrote a book that she called, "It's Different at Dartmouth." The College needs an administration that will make those words true again.
