Taking Inventory

When an academic department or program at the College undergoes formal review, few stones are left unturned - or closeted skeletons unrattled - in determining how well it is doing its job. Just about everything except, possibly, the specific gravity of the coffee in the departmental pot comes under scrutiny.

Obvious matters like scholarly output, physical facilities, the rationale of curricular offerings, and class size get a thorough going-over. But, in addition, says Robert Huke '4B, chairman when the Geography Department underwent review during 1973-74, the opinions of current and former students and colleagues in related fields come in for a share of attention. So do recruiting procedures, career patterns of recently graduated majors, faculty participation in town and gown affairs, even the extra-curricular interaction of faculty and students. In short, Huke explains, "They want to know what a department contributes to the College and the community."

Geography was in the first round of a campus-wide review completed just last year. In each case, a committee of experts in the discipline was invited to visit Dartmouth and evaluate the department or program for the responsiveness of its curriculum to developments in the field and to the needs of a liberal education, the effectiveness of its use of faculty and resources for maintaining and developing instructional quality, and the degree to which its organization provides faculty members with the opportunity to engage in significant research that will keep them professionally current.

The visiting committee - in this instance, five top-level academic geographers from Princeton, Northwestern, Columbia, Middlebury, and the University of Minnesota - is picked by the dean of the faculty from a list of a dozen or more names of faculty members from a variety of colleges and universities. The list is submitted by the department and augmented by the dean and the appropriate associate dean.

Well before their visit, the reviewers have in hand a wealth of background material prepared by the department and the dean's office - analyses of the department, its history, its organization, its curriculum; information on the faculty, their teaching responsibilities and their research activities; facts about the students, their interests, their objectives, and how they fare after they graduate. Included is a list of issues the instructional staff would like to raise with the review committee.

After two or three days on the campus, talking to everybody who is anybody and a few who aren't - conceivably, even sampling departmental coffee - the committee closets itself to draft a preliminary report before leaving town. A final polished version usually follows within weeks.

The recent reviews were the first "undertaken on a systematic basis" within the memory of Huke, a faculty member since 1953 and contender for the modern campus record for longevity as a departmental chairman. Years ago, he recalls, "we had a very informal review. A team of two, not even in geography, came up from Princeton and looked us over. Their recommendation was that we weren't getting enough support and that we needed two more people. . . . But nothing ever came of it."

The 1974 inventory of strengths and weaknesses was very useful to the department, Huke says. "By and large most of the recommendations covered things we knew very clearly, others perhaps that were suppressed. There was nothing really startling." As outcome of the review, the department has since tried to overcome a perceived curricular imbalance with new staff members, and more stress has been put on quantitative techniques.

But the greatest value of the whole procedure, in Huke's view, lies in the self-examination inherent in preparation for the review. "The whole faculty sits down, and you ask yourself, Where have you come from? Where are you now? Where do you expect to 'be ten years down the road? It's swapping ideas in a serious way, figuring out how you're measuring up to longrange goals."

"One thing came out of it, for me at least," he added. "After thinking it over, I began to put more emphasis on model-building, on the exploration of theory rather than as much description. Thinking about theoretical models with a multiplicity of applications, I've found new ways to express things. I think I'm a better teacher for it. I'm still having just as much fun, but I'm sure I'm a better teacher."