College Provost Barry Scherr who will step down on Oct. 26 announced this summer that the College would review the structure of the Dean of the College's Office prior to a national search for a permanent dean. That task has in many ways fallen to acting Dean of the College Sylvia Spears, who has said she will work to compare Dartmouth's Dean of the College structure to that of peer institutions.
"Here's the mission: Is this the right breadth, and are people in the right general area?" Spears said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "Does it make sense?"
The Dean of the College's Office at Dartmouth is unlike many of its counterparts in both its breadth and in the number of positions currently occupied in an interim capacity.
The office has seen widespread turnover in recent months: Former Dean of the College Tom Crady resigned abruptly in August. Former Dean of Undergraduate Students Rovana Popoff announced her departure from the College in September. Former Dean of First-Year Students Gail Zimmerman was laid off at the end of February, after the implementation of College-wide budget cuts. Assistant Dean of First-Year Students Meg Hancock's one-year contract was also not renewed for this year.
In addition, Director of Safety and Security Harry Kinne is serving as interim associate Dean of the College, replacing Marcia Kelly, who is serving as interim secretary to the Board of Trustees.
Dartmouth's Dean of College's Office also differs from similar offices at peer institutions in its size, function and structure. The office oversees over 20 different departments and organizations, ranging from the Academic Skills Center and Career Services to the Dartmouth Skiway and the Hanover Country Club.
The University of Pennsylvania's College Office, the equivalent to the Dartmouth Dean of the College's Office, fills some of the same roles but operates very differently from its Dartmouth counterpart.
Dartmouth's office oversees most aspects of student life, including athletics, dining, student advising and residential life, while the office at Penn handles "only a limited amount of student affairs," according to Penn associate dean of the college Kent Peterman.
"I think that the dean of college at Dartmouth is more of a dean of students," Peterman said.
Many of the aspects of student life that fall under the Dean of the College's Office at Dartmouth are handled by separate organizations at Penn, Peterman said. The vice provost for university life, and not Penn's dean of the college, handles tutoring, learning resources, career services, counseling and diversity issues. The office of college houses and academic services oversees residential life. Both of these groups report exclusively to the provost, Peterman said.
The college office at Penn also oversees advising, in conjunction with college houses and academic services, Peterman said.
Middlebury College's dean of the college office mirrors Dartmouth's more closely. The dean at Middlebury oversees "basically all of student life," including athletics, advising and residential life, Middlebury Dean of the College Tim Spears said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Middlebury's office, however, is changing its structure to streamline administrative duties, Spears said.
"When positions become vacant, even if they are senior positions, people are more willing to stop and say, Do we really need to fill this position?'" he said.
The dean's office at Middlebury has reshuffled its administrative duties this year, although it has not had to lay off staff. The administrative changes "reflect economic challenges we're all dealing with now," Spears said.
"There are inevitably comments about bloated administrations and bureaucracy," he said. "This has been a period of self-evaluation in a lot of institutions."
The changes have helped to create "a more efficient structure" for the office, he said.
Unlike Dartmouth's Dean of the College's Office, however, Middlebury's office does not currently have any interim administrators.
"It's not a normal practice [to have interim administrators]," Spears said. "It's fairly unusual to have someone in the acting mode."
Dartmouth's Spears said she believes having acting deans working in the office helps increase efficiency.
"There are fresh eyes looking at issues or concerns or problems," she said. "There is new talent, new ways of looking at issues."
While the structure of peer institutions will be considered as part of the review of the Dean of the College's Office, Spears said, it will be among many factors analyzed by administrators and outside consultants.
"It's always important to do benchmarking to what we call the Ivy plus' group," Spears said. "But that would only be one piece of data collection because, after all, we are a little quirky."
Staff writer Emma Fidel contributed to the reporting of this article.
