Recently, the Dartmouth community has spent so much time thinking about our own campus that many of us have lost sight of the real reason we are here. Judging from alumni elections and public analyses of Jim Wright's tenure as College president, it would appear that his job boils down to the management, to Greek life, to the Committee on Standards and to athletics. Those endeavors are not the crux of the job of the leader of one of the world's foremost academic institutions. President Wright's initiative to encourage young veterans to attend college, as reported recently in the New York Times, is the fulfillment of an Ivy League president's job: that of a visionary leader dedicated to taking on national and international issues through his institutional leadership.
Ivy League presidents are not micromanagers; they are leaders of academia. Woodrow Wilson left his role as president of Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey and eventually became President of the United States. Larry Summers of Harvard recently helped to establish a program to support scholars persecuted in their home countries. Richard Levin of Yale has advocated enlarging class sizes at Yale, thereby decreasing the exclusivity of top-tier educational institutions.
It is important not to let dedication to the College's community cripple the intellectual powerhouse that Dartmouth should be. Wright's tenure has not been marked greatly by innovation on issues that matter outside of Hanover. Many of the most notable aspects of his tenure have concerned student life and construction, both of which are admirable but not sufficient to constitute an outstanding presidency. Such a track record is not surprising given that so many alumni seem to care more about what Dartmouth is than what Dartmouth does.
While issues such as fraternity derecognition and the Student Life Initiative are important to Dartmouth students, focusing on the education of veterans should be more important. We should be debating ways that Dartmouth can contribute meaningfully to academia, the country and the world. Wright should still be attending to the internal well-being of the College, probably by hiring administrators to manage it. But in terms of Wright's legacy as president, his contribution to the world -- and how he leads Dartmouth to contibute to the world -- should be paramount. If onlookers are dead-set on judging the Wright administration on campus life or bureaucracy, he should disregard them, not because their opinions are wrong but because that sort of judgment would be a woefully incomplete method of measuring a president's performance.
Dartmouth is the College on the hill. From that hill, neither the institution nor its leadership should simply observe the world as a passive spectator. It should be bold enough to occasionally step down and take actions that will catalyze change in academia and society.
