Graduate programs and computer services topped the agenda Monday at a closed-door meeting of the Steering Committee of the General Faculty, which sets the agenda for the general faculty meeting slated for the end of the month.
Among other issues, the committee discussed the decline in applications to the College's graduate programs.
Graduate program applications dropped approximately 20 percent in the 2005 recruiting year, Dean of Graduate Studies Charles Barlowe told the Steering Committee, which includes College President James Wright, Provost Barry Scherr, Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt and selected deans and professors from throughout the College.
A significant drop in the international student pool accounted for much of the decline from the 2003-2004 academic year, when 1,891 students applied for a Dartmouth graduate programs, to 2004-2005, when the number slipped to 1,539.
Barlowe said that, since Sept. 11, international students have had a difficult time getting visas and that the process is most involved for students from China, India and the Middle East, where the graduate programs have seen the biggest declines in applications.
"It's a frustration," Barlowe said.
Domestic applications are also down, Barlowe said, in part because of what he observed to be declining nationwide interest in science graduate programs, which make up most of the graduate programs offered at Dartmouth.
"I think part of the concern is that [with] the current administration -- the Bush administration -- I don't think that science education is a priority," Barlowe said. "Or I don't think it's the leading priority."
Faculty members also addressed computing issues at the College during the Monday meeting.
Strengthening network security topped the computing council's priorities, which included the hiring of three new security officers and the adoption of more stringent user authentication procedures.
The proposed changes come after a hacker attack downed the computer system at the Dartmouth-Hitchock Medical Center for over a day last summer, and a serious security breach left sensitive student and employee information exposed to unauthorized users.
"Scary enough things have happened," computing council chair Thomas Luxon said in an interview with The Dartmouth Monday evening.
The uncertain future of BlitzMail ranked second on the Council on Computing's priority list. The Dartmouth-developed program, which preceded e-mail, has not been significantly upgraded since the late 1990s, according to the council's report.
Since then, newer, free e-mail clients have cropped up, boasting a number of features that leave BlitzMail behind, including the ability to write and read non-Roman alphabets, numeric symbols, encrypted messages and electronic signatures.
"Something's going to happen to BlitzMail down the road," Luxon said. "We're either going to commit to keeping a Dartmouth brand-name e-mail client because we think we do it better than everyone else, or we'll do it like the rest of the world."
Luxon said that students, particularly undergraduates, are committed to BlitzMail.
"What you like is the fact that the whole thing is utterly transparent," he said. "It pushes the mail at people. It doesn't just make it available to them."
Luxon said he is still on the fence about the future of BlitzMail.
"We're going to stew on that for at least another year," Luxon said.
Luxon said that, overall, curricular computing is some of the most important work that goes on at Dartmouth, but that the College's administration still needs to be convinced of information technology's critical role in academics.
"Somebody needs to stand up and say, 'Curricular computing is so close to the central mission of this institution, and it ought to get more support,'" Luxon said.