DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

As we noted last month, an important part of planning an institution's future is to decide what it won't do. Some budget cuts recently announced by Parkhurst show that the administration is putting its money where its mouth is and taking money from lower-priority programs. A college-wide budget committee headed by Provost John Strohbehn has cut the 1991 budget by 1.8 percent, or $2 million.

The College got a jump on the next fiscal year by eliminating 52 administrative and staff positions. The Dartmouth bureaucracy has grown 18 percent in the past eight years, double the increase in the Arts and Sciences faculty. Fewer than 12 employees will actually lose their jobs; the rest of the positions will be removed through attrition. In addition, 17 fall-time posts will be made part-time.

President James O. Freedman said that in making the cuts, the budget committee followed "certain key principles: that the core academic functions and programs would not be significantly affected; that no tenure-track positions would be cut; that admissions would remain need moot; and that the compensation pool would increase so that we remain competitive for 1991." The Dean of the College's office was hit hardest, taking a three percent drop under its base budget. Programs under Dean of the Faculty's purview, which includes most undergraduate academic departments, received the smallest cut .9 percent.

Athletics and student services which are under the Dean of the College's direction were hit relatively hard. Two positions in the Office of Residential Life were lost, along with an assistant dean's position in the dean's office and a counselor's position in Career and Employment Services. Health Services is losing one trainer through attrition. Athletics took nine percent, or about $175,000, of the overall College cuts. If the faculty approves, Dartmouth's physical-education requirement will be dropped. The College is one of four Ivy League schools that still have a PE component. Athletics Director Richard Jaeger '59 also announced that seven junior varsity programs, or one third of the total, will be eliminated, including men's squash, lacrosse, tennis, soccer, and golf, as well as baseball and women's tennis. After those JV sports are removed, the Big Green will have 15 left. Dartmouth will then be tied with Harvard in having the most jun-ior-level sports in the Ivy League. Several administrative positions will be dropped, along with some part-time seasonal coaches.

In the Hopkins Center, two current vacancies and a part-time position will not be filled. The Kiewit Computation Center is eliminating six service positions; in addition, growth in mainframe computers will be limited. Two jobs were axed from the Printing and Mailing shop.

Academics were not immune from the budget cutters. Noting that the number of foreign-study programs has grown in the past few years while the number of participants has declined slightly, Faculty Dean James Wright announced the elimination of study ventures in France and Spain. Students will still be able to select from a number of opportunities in both countries after the cuts, officials said. In addition, Wright proposed closing down the Faculty Club, which lost $40,000 last year.

While the administration has far outgrown the faculty in recent years, the Arts and Sciences budget kept pace with the budgetary expansion of the eighties. In a report to the faculty, Dean Wright said that the College has instituted new academic programs, increased the number of sabbaticals to which faculty are entitled, reduced professors' teaching loads, and increased recruitment of senior faculty. As a result, Wright said, "the Arts and Sciences share of the College budget has remained constant over the past decade."

Although the base 1991 budget has been cut, it still will exceed that of the previous fiscal year by $5 million, or 4.7 percent about the current inflation rate, or one-half the average yearly increase during the eighties. To help pay for the new budget, the Trustees approved a tuition increase of 6.4 percent.

College officials asserted that selective surgery was the only effective means of controlling spiraling costs. "Other solutions just defer the day of reckoning," said Freedman.

The big sports story this season is women's basketball, a team led by what is undoubtedly one of the sport's best coaches. On February 10, the team extended its winning streak to 14, giving Coach Jacqueline Hullah her hundredth win at Dartmouth (her win-loss percentage now stands at .675). She is almost certain to garner yet another Ivy League championship, her fifth in six years at the College.

We had the fortune of attending that game, when Coach Hullah's wins hit three figures and when a highly disciplined Dartmouth squad finished off Princeton 79-61 in a nearly flawless performance that has come to seem routine. When the women play, the atmosphere in the Berry Sports Center's Leede Arena is different from the fan-packed men's games. For one thing, children are a common sight; the women coach a basketball program in Norwich, and their young charges are some of their best fans. The crowd is smaller than at the men's games, and tends to be more polite fewer hopeful shouts of "air ball!" when the opposing teams takes a foul shot, and more genteel insults hurled at the referees after a bad call. The gentleness may stem in part from the presence of College Chaplain Gwendolyn King, a vociferous supporter.

President Freedman spoke simultaneously to 46 alumni clubs across the country last month, using satellite technology to broadcast his second annual State of the College address from Spaulding Auditorium. CNN's Bill Hartley '58 introduced the president, who spoke of his plans to increase the number of women and international students and to "maintain the vitality of our intellectual environment." During a 45-minute question period he said the money-losing Skiway will undergo an administrative review in spring and summer. And in answer to a question about faculty leaving the College, he said that Dartmouth has done its share of raiding other schools.

The latest student mini-flap involves the International Students Association, which voted to rename a building after Fidel Castro and then changed its mind a couple of weeks later. The ISA is headquartered in the Nathan Lord House named after Dartmouth's sixth president, who believed in the divine right of slavery. The organization's rules gave half of the 50 students present at the namechange meeting voting power, according to the daily Dartmouth. Students opposed to the Castro label took over a later meeting in mid-month; the group is now trying to decide on a more appropriate name for the house. Coincidentally, our February issue contained the obituary of the only Dartmouth graduate we know to have served in Castro's government. In 1959, Armando Chardiet Jr. '39 was a member of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations. Last year he wrote in his class's 50-year book, "The only major regret in my life is representing Fidel Castro's government in the UN."

Nota Bene

In last month's Journal we committed a slight error by saying that seven Trustees are "elected" by alumni. Actually, the Board officially appoints its own members; alumni merely nominate seven of them. On the other hand, no Board has ever been foolish enough to refuse to seat a candidate chosen by Dartmouth's graduates.

There will be only one candidate this year. The deadline has passed for nominating a challenger by petition.

If you read last month's "Dino Wars" cover story by Bob Sullivan '75, you learned about the high-spirited debate that Dartmouth's Earth Sciences professors have been conducting with their counterparts at Berkeley over the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now President George Bush has appointed one of the two members of the College's "Chuck and Chuck Dino Squad," Professor Charles Drake, to his 13- member Council of Advisors on Science and Technology The professor met the president at Camp David in mid-February, where the panel pondered the problem of global warming.

nation's first Ph.D. program in the rapidly growing field. Gazzaniga has won an international reputation for his studies of perception and cognition in "split-brain" patients epileptics who have had their two cerebral hemispheres surgically disconnected. Gazzaniga recently reported on the existence of what he called a master "interpreter" in the brain's left hemisphere, unique to human evolution, which organizes information even when it seems contradictory.

Dartmouth has a new director of admissions. He is Karl M. Furstenberg, vice president of admissions and financial aid at Wesleyan University. Furstenberg, 44, has headed up Wesleyan's admissions since 1977. When he comes to Hanover in July, he will work with the 5,000 alumni volunteers in recruiting and selecting undergraduates. And he will likely try to reverse a two-year drop in applications to the College.

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, author of the internationally acclaimed Things Fall Apart, is Dartmouth's latest Montgomery Fellow. HI

The administration puts its money (selectively) where its mouth is.