Faculty retention at Dartmouth is "healthy" and comparable to retention at peer institutions, Dean of Faculty Carol Folt said at Tuesday night's Student Assembly meeting.
The Assembly asked Folt to speak in response to student inquiries and to educate Assembly members, Student Body President Molly Bode '09 said.
The recruitment of Dartmouth faculty by other universities is a sign of the quality of the College's professors, Folt said.
"If our faculty aren't being recruited on a regular basis from some place else, that's a major failure," she said.
At a small school like Dartmouth, faculty departures are also more noticeable than at larger universities, Folt said.
In an overview of the College's tenure-selection process, Folt said Dartmouth takes into account both research and teaching when making tenure decisions.
"They're going to have to have that dual role," she said. "They're going to have to think there's a synergy there."
Part of the tenure selection process includes letters from students who have taken the candidate's classes, a feature which is unique Dartmouth, Folt said.
Folt cited the results from students' end-of-term class evaluations as proof of the strength of the College's courses.
"[T]he preliminary results ... show that the overwhelming percentage of student responses, as well as the means and medians of all responses, are highly skewed to the top two categories for each question," Folt said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Student Assembly is attempting to work with Folt to make the results of the evaluations public, Bode said.
"That might take a while, but it's something we're working on in the long run," she said.
Many professors do not want this information to be available online, Folt said.
Folt also discussed the results of the U.S. News and World Report's rankings of the world's best colleges and universities from November 2008. Dartmouth was ranked 54th on the list, but some aspects of the rating reflected the College's "academic peer review score," rather than the true quality of education at Dartmouth, Folt said.
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that we call ourselves Dartmouth College," she said, explaining that international peer universities who participate in the review think of colleges as secondary schools rather than institutions of higher learning.
The small size of both the undergraduate and the graduate schools at the College may also have reduced scores from the international faculty and students, Folt said.
"A lot of American institutions have the bulk of their international students in graduate schools," Folt said.
Conrad Scoville contributed to the reporting of this article.
