I'll start with a thought exercise: you are the owner of a widget store. For years and years, the golden widget has been one of your most popular products. You only keep a few golden widgets in stock, and they sell out each time you put them on the shelves. In fact, customers come in and ask for more golden widgets, even when there aren't any available. So now you're deciding how to change your widget store.
Do you: (A) respond to the demand by offering more golden widgets? If you came up with this answer, congratulations -- you are not brain dead. Or do you: (B) eliminate golden widgets entirely, run off the man who makes the golden widgets and convince yourself that you never liked golden widgets anyway. If you came up with this answer, congratulations -- a career as a Dartmouth administrator awaits you.
This past week, speech professor Jim Kuypers announced his resignation ("Speech prof resigns, blasts faculty deans," April 22), which effectively marks the end of Dartmouth's office of speech (a golden widget, for the analogy-impaired). Kuypers, all by his lonesome, has been the entire speech program for the last decade. He teaches two courses per term on various aspects of the theory and practice of rhetoric, and his speech classes are filled beyond capacity. Students languish on waiting lists trying to get into a speech class, despite the fact that speech courses do not contribute to any major or minor program.
But instead of responding to students' demands for speech classes, or Kuypers' regular requests for additional faculty and more College support, Dartmouth has chronically neglected and marginalized Kuypers, his program and his discipline. For years, the College had a stock response to requests for expansion of the speech program: there isn't enough money, but we're working it -- ask again later. To put it gently -- actually, forget putting it gently. That argument is ridiculous. The notion that a college with Dartmouth's resources, a college which hikes tuitions annually, squeezes alumni for every last buck and yet continually discovers new holes down which to dump its money can't afford two or three professors to teach a high-demand subject is just dishonest.
Dartmouth's neglect of speech has been by choice, not by necessity -- this College has plenty to spend on its priorities. It's clear that the office of speech just isn't on that list. The demise of the speech program bears a frightening resemblance to the elimination of the human biology department two years ago. That department, which students regularly rated at or near the top of their favorite programs, was eliminated when the College declined to pay the $61,000 per year it would have taken to support the department after its initial grant expired.
Also, in his public resignation letter, Kuypers said that Associate Dean for the Humanities Lenore Grenoble told him that "the study of speech is a technical pursuit that would be appropriate at a technical school but not a liberal arts college." The idea that one of the heads of this school would show such contempt for a professor's subject area, and such ignorance about rhetoric (which is, after all, the original liberal art), just boggles my mind. The only reason that rhetoric -- which has a rich theoretical and historical aspect, in addition to its practical applications -- might be considered a "technical pursuit" is that it has a performance component. In that case, studio art, theater and music are all "technical pursuits" as well, but no one seems to question their place in the liberal arts curriculum.
Grenoble's other claim that "public speaking skills, like writing skills, are taught indirectly through other departments," is equally bizarre. Even though writing skills are taught "indirectly" in many departments, the College still offers English and creative writing classes because the command of written language is a rich, complex and important skill.
The command of spoken language is no different -- it is just as important to success in life, and just as worthy of its own study. Plus, given the small number of Dartmouth classes that require in-class presentations or prepared speaking, I question just how effective this "indirect" instruction really is. Now years of neglect have finally driven-off the College's last speech professor. Since the College has announced no plans to hire a replacement, it looks like Dartmouth has finally succeeded in doing through attrition what it tried and failed to do by fiat decades ago: it has eliminated the study of rhetoric. Students will be the worse for it.
I have given up trying to understand the priorities of the College's current leadership, but the demise of the speech and human biology programs bodes poorly for Dartmouth's commitment to its students and the liberal arts. I hope that students, professors and administrators (the "administration," after all, is not a unitary actor but a collection of individuals, most of whom are not even involved in these decisions) will join in condemning these actions. After all, let's take a moment to complete the earlier thought exercise: if you were a customer at that widget store, what would you do? Take your business elsewhere? If you came up with that answer, congratulations -- you just might be on to something.
