Opinion
Trustee Chair Bill Neukom was following the Administration's media playbook when he said in an interview in the January/February Alumni Magazine that Dartmouth graduates are "superbly prepared." In the area of writing, this statement is just not true.
A few years ago in Paris, in a moment of greater candor, President Jim Wright told alumni that student writing is a "national problem." The status of undergraduate writing was best summarized by Professor Warren Goldstein in the July/August 2005 Yale Alumni Magazine when he wrote: "There is no single topic on which faculty, nationwide, agree more than that student writing is atrocious and getting worse."
The Dartmouth Administration has not been blind to this problem, but its lumbering response has been all too typical.
After a 2002 outside review of the Composition Center, a review that one faculty member described to me as "scathing," the Center's name was changed to RWiT [Student Center for Research, Writing and Information Technology]. However, its organization and the role of its revolving group of undergraduate student tutors remained substantially the same.
Subsequently, work by a faculty "Committee on Writing" in 2002-2004 led to the creation of Dartmouth's new Writing Program, with a three-year budget of $400,000.
Writing Program Chair Tom Corman's first step was to change the names of English 2, 3, and 5 to Writing 2, 3, and 5.