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The Dartmouth
July 26, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Kim stresses faculty engagement

10.27.09.news.faculty
10.27.09.news.faculty

In his inaugural address to the general faculty, College President Jim Yong Kim addressed concerns about the College's economic woes, highlighting the importance of the "active engagement" of the faculty in all aspects of the College as Dartmouth faces a second round of budget cuts. Kim, speaking in Alumni Hall on Monday, said that the College should seek to maintain its interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching while "working across boundaries" to implement positive change that reaches beyond the local community.

"My goal here today is not to lay out a detailed, finished plan of how we'll proceed to lift the College to that next level of excellence," Kim told the gathered faculty. "What I want is to hear your ideas."

In an interview with The Dartmouth, Kim said that he wants to operate under a system of "co-governance" with the College's faculty in seeking to make decisions about the institution's trajectory.

Kim said in his speech that he believes that the College cannot be defined as solely a liberal arts school or a traditional research university.

"Dartmouth has created its own institutional model," he said, emphasizing the opportunity this model affords students to transcend traditional divisions between undergraduate and graduate programs.

In the latter half of his speech, Kim addressed what he referred to as "the elephant in the room" Dartmouth's financial situation.

"In talking about this issue, I want to strike a balance between genuine optimism and deep concern," he said. "Both are justified, and we need to call on both to find effective solutions."

Kim said the College will strive to reduce expenses, increase philanthropic donations and pursue new programs that provide additional revenue to compensate for the decline in its endowment.

While he emphasized that it is impossible to predict the College's future financial situation with certainty, Kim said he is confident that the "roots of Dartmouth's greatness" will remain untouched.

"We will succeed, and I believe the College will emerge strengthened from this test and the resulting changes," he said.

Speaking with reporters after the event, Kim said the College must explore the cost structure of all of its programs to ensure that it operates at maximum efficiency.

"At this point, I'd have to say that everything is on the table, at least for investigation," he said.

In a question and answer period following his speech, several professors voiced concerns that the College's previous round of layoffs primarily affected service workers and other lower-paid staff members while highly paid administrators remained somewhat insulated.

Irene Kacandes, chair of the German studies department, said that Dartmouth should learn from the past layoffs.

"I think the perception by very, very many people on campus and outside of the campus were that the most vulnerable members of our community were being hit the hardest," she said.

Kim dedicated much of the initial portion of his speech to praise for Dartmouth's professors.

"I have seen how your teaching opens students' minds, and how the effects of your research are extending out and connecting Dartmouth with a world where people are hungry for the solutions that your scholarship can bring," he said.

Kim lauded the $168.4 million of sponsored funding secured by the College of Arts and Sciences, Dartmouth Medical School and Thayer School of Engineering during the 2009 fiscal year, as well as professors' success in publishing and obtaining competitive research grants.

Kim added that strengthening ties between Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is "critical" to improving DMS.

Speaking just over a month after his inauguration, and less than four months since his start at the College, Kim stressed that, though he has learned a lot about Dartmouth, he is "still in learning mode."

"In fact, I tend to stay in that mode permanently especially with faculty," he said.

In seeking to measure the success of higher education at Dartmouth, Kim said he intends to rely on professors to gain insights that can be broadly applied to the College as a whole, adding that he will not use any one metric to determine the success or efficacy of a professor's work.

In response to a question from English professor Thomas Luxon about the "study group" Kim organized to consider higher education reform innovations from across the country, Kim clarified that the group's aim is not to take on "curricular reform" a misconception he said was fueled by The Dartmouth's coverage and stressed its informal nature.

Government professor Linda Fowler said she was pleased with the turnout at the meeting.

"Today's turnout was the highest I have seen in my 14 years at Dartmouth," Fowler said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. "I think the faculty appreciated [the] President's favorable remarks about our efforts as teachers and scholars, as well as his candor about the state of the return on the College endowment."