Asch returns to Dartblog

By Madeline Sims, The Dartmouth Staff | 7/4/10 6:27pm

Zach Ingbretsen / The Dartmouth Senior Staff

After a brief hia­tus from writ­ing, for­mer Board of Trustees pe­ti­tion can­di­date Joe Asch ’79 has re­sumed his fre­quent con­tri­bu­tions to the Dart­blog web­site.

In an April 16 entry ti­tled “The Last Post,” less than a week after los­ing the trustee elec­tion to Alumni Coun­cil-nom­i­nated can­di­date John Re­plogle ’88, Asch an­nounced that he planned to de­vote his “time and en­ergy to things other than Dart­mouth Col­lege.” Dur­ing June and July, how­ever, Asch con­tributed 14 posts, many of which main­tained his tra­di­tion­ally crit­i­cal stance to­ward the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s poli­cies.

In his re­cent posts, Asch has ques­tioned Col­lege Pres­i­dent Jim Yong Kim’s “cau­tious per­son­nel prac­tices,” of tend­ing to hire in­ter­nally, and said that this trend may im­pede the search for a new ath­letic di­rec­tor, which is cur­rently on­go­ing.

“Rather than bring­ing in shin­ing stars from the out­side, peo­ple with suc­cess­ful track records who can re­vive our stag­nat­ing in­sti­tu­tion, Kim has con­tented him­self with giv­ing added re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to Wright-era holdovers like [Provost Carol Folt], Alumni Re­la­tions VP David Spald­ing, and [De­vel­op­ment Di­rec­tor Car­olyn Pelzel] — imag­i­na­tion-free, bu­reau­cratic con­nivers all,” Asch wrote in a June 10 post.

Asch also ques­tioned Hanover Po­lice’s ef­fi­ciency and ac­cused the force of em­ploy­ing too many of­fi­cers and fail­ing to pro­vid­ing ad­e­quate train­ing.

Asch’s re­cent com­ments fol­low a May 25 post en­ti­tled “Thank You, But No,” in which he said that de­spite re­ceiv­ing “dozens of re­quests to keep writ­ing,” he did not be­lieve it would be a worth­while use of his time. He ex­plained that his de­ci­sion stemmed from the neg­a­tive cam­paign tac­tics of op­po­nents in the trustee race as well as his over­all frus­tra­tion with Kim’s ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“[F]if­teen months after Jim Kim’s se­lec­tion as Pres­i­dent, and eleven months after his in­au­gu­ra­tion, I see, as do many mem­bers of the fac­ulty, that Kim’s lack of or­ga­ni­za­tional savvy will thwart what­ever ideas he may have about lead­ing an in­sti­tu­tion de­voted to the lib­eral arts,” Asch wrote. He added that try­ing to con­vince “Wright-era vet­er­ans” to take the ac­tion nec­es­sary to move the Col­lege in the right di­rec­tion was “im­pos­si­ble” and “not worth the ef­fort.”

Asch de­clined to com­ment on his de­ci­sion to re­sume post­ing or spec­ify how often he will post on the web­site in the fu­ture. “I will be writ­ing for Dart­blog when I am in the mood to do so, and when I am not, I won’t,” he said in an e-mail to The Dart­mouth.

Dart­blog founder Joe Mal­chow ’08 said that he was not sur­prised that “the suf­ferer of a neg­a­tive cam­paign” had cho­sen to turn his at­ten­tion else­where.

“Then again, blog­ging is re­ally just roughly writ­ten live jour­nal­ism, and that's a hard thing to quit,” he said in an e-mail to The Dart­mouth.