In his speech to the faculty on Monday, College President James Wright identified three goals for the College to pursue in the future: moving toward need-blind admissions for international students; providing one leave term where there are no earning expectations for students; and providing that, for financial aid students studying abroad, the incremental expenses will be covered by scholarship rather than by loan. He also touched on a fourth goal, one that has been especially important to students, faculty and even trustees: alleviating existing enrollment pressures in the economics and government departments. All of these goals are worthy of pursuit, and their success relies on adequate funding.
Money for these ventures can come from one of two places -- donations or funds that are currently directed toward other College pursuits. Since the College only directly controls the latter, it must identify venues in which it currently spends money that are relatively less important than financial aid and enrollment pressures in the most popular departments. Perhaps funding should be cut from less popular departments, or from non-academic pursuits. Regardless, the issue of overcoming these major challenges necessarily involves the question of what is less important. If Wright has identified new directions for the College to move in, what are the pursuits that should now be left behind?
These questions are impossible to answer from an outsider's perspective. While Wright said he was inviting the Dartmouth community to come up with feasible answers to the problem of oversubscription, he himself is ultimately the only one who can perform the difficult task of assigning priorities to Dartmouth's many programs, and in doing so, begin the process of implementing viable solutions.
