In his inaugural address this past Tuesday, College President Jim Yong Kim discussed the philosophy of a fellow Iowan, the late W. Edwards Deming.
"Deming emphasized constant measurement of results and continuous improvement," Kim told his audience. "But he believed that learning and innovation must be understood at their roots as a collective mission one that requires trust among many members of an organization."
Just days after Kim's inauguration, however, we fear that he and his administration are already losing sight of Deming's sound advice.
In a pair of announcements this week ("Spears says College will not adopt AMP," Sept. 24, "BlitzMail replacement delayed," Sept. 25), Kim's team sent back to the drawing board two policy initiatives constructed under the Wright administration, bringing each under yet another process of review.
The proposed alcohol management policy a repeatedly delayed set of guidelines on alcohol use at campus social events had been in development for over a year under the guidance of former Dean of the College Tom Crady, and was reportedly nearing implementation. While imperfect, AMP promised much needed changes to troubling aspects of the existing Social Events Management Procedures most notably the College's illogical keg policy and would have functioned as a good first step towards reasonable alcohol reform.
Instead of picking up where Crady left off, however, acting Dean of the College Sylvia Spears announced on Wednesday that AMP would be tabled and used only as fodder for the work of a new student advisory board apparently replacing the one that first designed AMP just one year ago.
We are perplexed that AMP, embraced by much of the student community last spring, has been shoved aside under the pretense of student criticism.
The replacement of BlitzMail with a new campus e-mail system also appears to have been set back by the Kim administration. Although the Dartmouth Task Force on E-mail and Collaboration Technology recommended that the College replace BlitzMail with Google's Gmail e-mail system in May, the group will now "step back, reflect and evaluate," according to Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president of information technology and the College's chief information officer.
Throughout his short tenure as president, Kim has frequently espoused the value of evidence-based inquiry and we would be foolish to disagree with this proven approach to policy making. Still, the College's new administrators appear to be unnecessarily delaying College progress by disregarding existing research seemingly betraying Deming's, and Dartmouth's, "collective mission."
If, as Albert Einstein suggests, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, what then do we call repeatedly asking the same questions and anticipating different answers?
