I’m writing this partway through my sophomore summer, and the thing I keep noticing about this famed term is that it feels like the version of Dartmouth everyone tells you about when you get here, the mythical version you stop believing is real by winter of freshman year. The campus empties out — with no freshmen, juniors or seniors, it is less than half of the usual crowd — and what’s left is just my class, all still here, all still finding each other. Each time I walk from my dorm to Collis I run into someone I know almost immediately. This isn’t because I’m trying to do so, but because of the inherent intimacy of the small campus. Your path keeps crossing with the same people whether or not you mean it to. People talk about sophomore summer as the term when Dartmouth feels most like itself. I understand now why they say that.
So when I read that the Board of Trustees has directed administrators to begin a “multi-year” planning process toward growing the undergraduate student body, I was, needless to say, disappointed. I couldn’t help but think about how much of what makes sophomore summer special is dependent on its size. I recognize that’s a hard thing to put in a committee report. “Preserve the passing moments when I recognize half the people I see on my way to lunch” doesn't show up on a spreadsheet next to tuition projections. However, it’s real, and it’s the kind of thing that gets traded away in a process that starts from the premise that more students is the goal and works backward from there.
It’s also worth saying that we've been here before. Now-former College President Philip Hanlon convened a task force during his tenure on this exact question in 2017. Its members debated expansion seriously for a year and concluded that the costs of housing, faculty offices, dining and student support would likely scale right alongside any new tuition revenue. Growth doesn’t pay for itself; it just moves the money around. Mark McPeek, who sat on that task force, while speaking with TKTK/at TKTK about the large amount of resources required to facilitate an expansion, said this year that the arithmetic that makes expansion look like a budget win stops working the moment you actually run the numbers. And in the nine years since that task force reported, the undergraduate population has grown by about 7 percent while the total cost of attendance has grown by more than 40 percent. If expansion was supposed to make Dartmouth more efficient, the last decade already ran that experiment.
None of the practical problems have gone away either. Despite plans to build new residential spaces, we are short on dorm space. I’ve had friends spend months stressed about where they'll end up living. The 2018 task force flagged every one of these issues by name. Its co-chairs, Elizabeth Smith and Rebecca Biron, both told The Dartmouth this year that those recommendations still hold, and neither sounded confident that the current process is actually built around them. That should worry anyone who cares about what a Dartmouth education is supposed to feel like, not just what it’s supposed to cost.
What I ask the Trustees to sit with is this: The thing you’re proposing to grow is not a generic research university that happens to be in Hanover. It’s a school whose whole appeal, especially right now, is that the community doesn’t feel anonymous. Every additional few hundred students is a small tax on that feeling, paid by every student and professor who came here because they wanted to be known, not just enrolled. I’d rather Dartmouth stay hard to get into and easy to actually experience than the other way around.
We already ran this study. It told us expansion costs what it grows. Doing it again nine years later doesn’t change the answer; it just spends nine more years of goodwill finding out again, at the expense of some future sophomore’s version of this summer.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
