Trustees set budget, plan for the future
The Trustees, at their regular April meeting, approved a balanced budget of $165.5 million for 1986-87. That figure, including the professional schools' budgets, is up 6.5%. The undergraduate college accounts for $119 million of the total.
Next year's budget preserves need-blind admissions, with $10 million of the College's budget allocated for financial aid. It also addresses goals set by the Council on Budgets and Priorities, providing increases for foreign study, computing services, the Hood Museum, and the development office. President McLaughlin also announced that there will be a substantial increase in starting faculty salaries, which in recent years have slipped behind those of competing schools. The present entry-level faculty salary of $22,000 will be raised to about $25,000. To keep salaries for faculty already at the College in proportion, the entire pay scale will also be raised.
The Trustees also authorized the Tuck School to raise slightly more than $8 million for a construction and renovation project to accommodate an increased student body and faculty, and they authorized a $5million campaign to expand the physical facilities for the departments of mathematics and computer science. Otherwise, the president explained that structural changes were kept to a minimum for next year since the College is currently in the process of planning and setting priorities for the next 15 years.
A major factor in that planning process is the continuing assessment of the possible move of the Dartmouth Medical School. The Trustees heard a preliminary report from an ad hoc committee studying the curricular and budgetary ramifications of the Medical School's move to an out-of-town site with the Hitchcock Hospital and Clinic. The final decision on the Med School move was to be made in June, but McLaughlin characterized the Board's position as being supportive of an integrated medical center, but wary of financial considerations for the College.
The Board also continued its discussion of South African investments and recommended that the president appoint a coordinator to oversee and provide counsel on all College actions relating to South Africa. And the Trustees expressed their interest in working with the Committee on Organization and Policy on refining the College's disciplinary procedures. President McLaughlin noted that a major problem with existing procedures is that the president and the dean are part of the appeal process, so there is no College official who can "speak out quickly, clearly, and unequivocally" when events such as those of last winter happen.
I appreciated the opportunity to meet with alumni from different years. As a group, they are hardly the frightening conservatives pictured by campus liberals nor the unquestioning supporters imagined by the radical right." Glee Clubber Matthew Garcia '88, writing in The Dartmouth about the group's spring tour
