Where do we go from here? With President Wright leaving office in 14 months, the procedure for choosing his replacement merits close scrutiny. As is so often the case at Dartmouth today, the selection process will appear fair, but the details will tell the real tale. We should watch for a search committee biased in a certain direction and signals from Jim Wright to those picking the committee and to the searchers themselves.
In addition to the concerns articulated by Christian Kiely '09 ("The Wright Replacement," Feb. 14) about the priorities of the students on the committee, here are four other markers worth observing to see if the fix is in.
Will the committee's faculty members be among Dartmouth's highest achieving scholars, or will our most rigorous professors be shut out of this process, as they are too often excluded from the College's top administrative bodies? Will the trustees on the search committee include a petition trustee, or will they be picked from the block-voting loyalists chosen by Wright? Will alumni members represent a spectrum of views, or will they be party-liners from an Alumni Council that voted unanimously for a constitution that was rejected by 52 percent of alumni?
Finally, will the search be conducted by the Spencer Stuart headhunting firm, home of Wright hyper-loyalist Rick Routhier '73, a former head of the Alumni Council, or will the trustees run the search themselves?
In 1998, it was evident that Jim Wright would be Dartmouth's next president. He had been open about his ambition, and his prominence in the Freedman administration (dean of the faculty, provost, acting president) along with the public support that he received from President Freedman made him a shoo-in for the job.
Today, Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt seems similarly positioned to become Dartmouth's leader. Wright has pulled every possible lever to place her in the public eye: Webcasts, public speaking, an endowed chair, heavy publicity for a scientific paper that she recently co-authored and prominence in presidential speeches.
More importantly, in contrast to previous deans, Wright has made Folt a fixture at quarterly Board of Trustee meetings. Given that people too often confuse familiarity with merit, Folt would be the easy pick for the trustees, a group composed largely of MBAs often unwilling to make imaginative choices.
Wright himself would self-interestedly favor Folt's candidacy because she would undoubtedly continue his policies. Historians think about their legacy more than most people; Wright would have little interest in a dynamic successor whose creative energy would contrast sharply with the torpor of the last decade.
Fortunately, there are many other interesting candidates for the presidency. If the trustees want someone familiar with the College who has done good work beyond the Hanover Plain, they could select from various former Dartmouth administrators and professors who are now presidents at smaller institutions.
Frat-buster Lee Pelton -- dean of the College from 1991 to 1998 and now president of Willamette University -- might be attractive to trustees who want to revive the Student Life Initiative.
Bryn Mawr College President Nancy Vickers taught French and Italian at Dartmouth from 1973 to 1987. In her 11th year at Bryn Mawr, she might be looking for a new challenge. However, her tilt toward the trendy side of literary interpretation (her "Discourses of Sexual Differences in Early Modern Europe," for example) might make her a problematic choice.
Jamshed Barucha, the current provost of Tufts University, taught at the College beginning in 1983; he was dean of the faculty in 2001 before leaving Hanover. His free speech dust-up at Tufts last year, however, could put him out of sync with newly speech code-free Dartmouth.
Robert Oden, president of Carleton College and a professor of religion at Dartmouth from 1975 to 1989, has not lost his attachment to the College; he keeps a second home in Hanover. But after short stints leading the Hotchkiss School, Kenyon College and Carleton, does the South Dakota native want to move again?
Dartmouth is at a crossroads. The trustees have the power to choose a president who will bring in fresh administrators and make necessary changes to the College, or they can allow the present bureaucrats to shuffle one square forward in the hierarchy, leaving us exactly where we are today. What do you want?
