In his inaugural address on April 6, 1998, President James Wright declared that "Dartmouth is a research university in all but name." He has repeated his claim many times since, much to the dismay of some students who view Dartmouth's undergraduate college as its only feature worth mentioning. These students have reason for annoyance. It is a little silly to think Hanover might be home to a great research university. In striving so eagerly for academic preeminence, President Wright has been chasing a lost cause. Dartmouth is not well-served by devoting exorbitant resources to building an international academic reputation. The major rural university is a paradox.
According to standard American usage, Wright is right. Dartmouth is a university. But in the eyes of the global academic community, it is not a particularly good one. There are two annual rankings of international universities that academia tends to respect, one by the Times Higher Education Supplement, a London newspaper, and the other by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The 2006 THES list ranks Dartmouth 61st, tied with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and up from 117th in 2005. The 2006 SJTU list gives Dartmouth a rank of "102-150," along with 48 other institutions. Dartmouth is the lowest ranked Ivy League school on both lists, and in first place on each list is, of course, Harvard. Virtually all of the top 20 schools on both lists, and the great majority of all schools mentioned, are located in or near a major urban center. Dartmouth is not.
It is not hard to see why an urban location might be correlated with high rankings for universities. Neither of the rankings takes an institution's undergraduate educational environment into account. Instead, great weight is placed on the scholarly preeminence of its faculty. And simply put, attracting acclaimed researchers to work in the middle of nowhere is hard.
Nonetheless, we try. In his Oct. 30, 2006 address to the faculty, President Wright said, "Nothing we do is more important than recruiting the best young faculty, supporting their development as scholars and teachers and then fighting to keep them!" This statement leads me to wonder very seriously: Just what kind of young and energetic newly minted academic wants to move to Hanover? This is no place for vibrant 20-somethings or early-30-somethings who have a ways to go before reaching serious adulthood.
Besides the Upper Valley's lackluster social scene, the area's intellectual vitality pales next to that of any major city. It is home to comparatively few intellectuals, and it has no significant network of non-university related academic institutions to support and facilitate scholarship. Such institutions as the New York Academy of Sciences provide urban academics with a valuable social network through which to meet peers and discuss their current work.
In the arts, Hanover is hopelessly deficient. The Hood Museum is all right, but next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is thoroughly underwhelming. Exposure to musical and theatrical performances here is intermittent and fragmented at best. In cities, the exposure is constant and nearly infinite in scope. To any academic interested in the arts for any reason, next to a city, Hanover must seem drab.
Finally, faculty might be attracted to cities for political reasons. Cities tend to be much more liberal than suburban and rural areas, and numerous studies have shown that the American professoriate is overwhelmingly liberal as well. If scholars take political climate into account when considering where they want to work, as many probably do, they should favor cities.
Due to its location, Dartmouth has a great competitive disadvantage in faculty recruitment. When it is evaluated as a university, with research output weighed very highly, this disadvantage is insurmountable. The lesson is simple. Do not try to compete with Harvard at Harvard's game, because if you do, you will lose. Dartmouth is a teaching institution at heart. When evaluated on this basis in more widely known rankings, Dartmouth's programs consistently rank very favorably, particularly its undergraduate college and its business school. But complex, contrived statistics about faculty citations and publications in certain journals fail miserably when trying to gauge the quality of education an institution can provide. Dartmouth's administration would thus do well to forget these statistics. This is Dartmouth College, after all.
