Board of Trustees Chair Ed Haldeman '70 and presidential search committee head Al Mulley '70 have invited the entire faculty to meet with them this Friday to discuss the search for Dartmouth's next president. But how useful will this session be? Do Haldeman and Mulley really believe that professors will stand up in public and give unguarded opinions about the reforms Dartmouth needs? Parkhurst has a reputation among many faculty for punishing its critics, and nobody wants to be on the outs with the administration. Yet frankness is what the trustees need most now because the two sides in the trustee-alumni conflict are separated by a disparity of information.
Unlike the petition trustees, who are active in learning about the College, non-petition trustees seem to base their understanding of Dartmouth on the presentations that the Wright administration prepares for their quarterly meetings. Given that the trustees can dismiss the president, it does not take much imagination to conclude that these presentations show the College in the best possible light.
In this respect Dartmouth's Board differs little from the boards at other schools. As U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jose Cabranes (formerly a trustee at Fordham, Colgate, Yale and Columbia universities and husband of former Dartmouth Trustee Kate Stith-Cabranes '73) recently wrote: "This sort of presentation gives the appearance (but only the appearance) of substantive interaction between the faculty and the trustees."
Cabranes called these presentations "little more than the academic equivalent of a dog and pony show ... enervating tours of the horizon (the academic version of essays on 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation')." One would think that Dartmouth's trustees would want to move beyond such sterile exercises and, for example, seek information directly from the faculty. However, the non-petition trustees do not make the effort.
I did a poll last month of 26 professors and asked how often they had met with a trustee either in a one-on-one discussion or with other faculty members. Twenty-one faculty members from 12 different departments responded to my questions. Astonishingly, none had ever met privately with a non-petition trustee. One professor wrote: "I have never been asked to meet individually or in a small group with a serving member of the Board, nor do I know anyone who has." Five of the 21 respondents had attended social gatherings where trustees were present, and one felt that he could ask for a meeting with a trustee if he had a pressing issue, though he had never done so. This state of affairs brings us to the nub of the alumni-trustee conflict: Our non-petition trustees have too few independent sources of information. As a result, they are uninformed.
Even if non-petition trustees don't take the time to talk to faculty, many alumni do. And alumni then pass on to friends what they hear about the College. In fact, much of the content of the columns that I have written in The Dartmouth over the past seven years has come from faculty.
Professors, more than any other campus group, have a broad perspective on Dartmouth, one that comes from interactions throughout the institution and long experience with previous presidents and deans. If all of our trustees could tap into this information, they might come to an understanding of why so many alumni are concerned about the direction of the College.
Allow me to offer a proposal to our out-of-touch trustees: At your future quarterly gatherings, each one of you should set aside a day to talk individually with faculty members picked at random. Promise them total confidentiality and meet with them in their department office. If you can win their trust, you will learn things that you will never hear in a public forum.
By early next year, every tenured Dartmouth professor could meet with a trustee. After that, you could move on to exit interviews with departing professors and then to meetings with tenure-track and adjunct professors, coaches, administrators and individual students. You may be surprised when you hear views that depart from the administration's "all is well" message. However, I hope that your surprise is not too great; after all, the majority of alumni have been expressing many of the same sentiments in recent elections.
Meeting individually with faculty will also prepare you to choose the College's next president. If you begin to talk privately with faculty now, then by next spring you will know infinitely more about Dartmouth -- and the basis for alumni discontent -- than you have learned over the years from Parkhurst's self-interested spin.
