To the Editor:
Joseph Asch '79 is exactly right in saying that the College must balance teaching with research ("Teaching versus Research?" Jan. 19). I sympathize with any student who has suffered through a class "with a faculty member for whom the flame has gone out." But I sympathize equally with any student who has braved a class with a professor dedicated solely to the lab, for whom the transmission of knowledge to those less educated is a painful nuisance to be shunned.
I do not advocate an end to research at Dartmouth. No action could be further removed from sense. But virtually every Dartmouth faculty member is engaged in some kind of research already, and that is good enough. Improving Dartmouth's status as a research institution would essentially amount to getting more Dartmouth-affiliated papers onto the pages of "Nature" and "Science." That's irrelevant. We have research and we feel its benefits, no matter how prestigious our publications. Any attempt to seriously compete with the most prestigious research universities would be not only antithetical to the spirit of this institution, but also, due in large part to our location, doomed to failure. The administration must accept that our optimal teaching/scholarship balance contains much more teaching than Harvard's.
