Dartmouth Should Recruit Alumni To Be Faculty And Administrators

About 150 dartmouth alumni work for Dartmouth as administrators' or faculty. Dartmouth grads, in other words, hold about 15 percent of the professional positions. This is a number the College should trumpet, and it should do everything it can to increase it. But the opposite seems to be true. In order to get that figure, the Alumni Magazine had, to have a special computer run done; no one at Dartmouth seemed to know it.

And yet alumni include some of the best professors, the most stellar administrators. Standout teachers at Dartmouth include Assistant Religion Professor Susan Ackerman '80, historian Jere Daniell '55, Associate Dean of the Faculty Dick Birney '66. Internationally known split-brain research is headed at Dartmouth by Michael Gazzaniga '61, professor of neuroscience and psychology.

These renowned professors bely the tired stereo-typed of beer-swilling, nostalgia-ridden alumni (a stereotype our alter ego seems dangerously close to holding). In fact, they are living proof that the College exists to produce exacdy the kind of people who ought to be teaching and administering at Dartmouth—people who came to the chill north out of love and not mere professional opportunity, and who became leaders in their profession.

Too many academicians these days are loyal more to a profession than to an institution, which is why too many elite colleges tend to imitate each other, becoming intellectual Holiday Inns. Dartmouth alumni who come back to work for the College, on the other hand, work for a cause, which is Dartmouth itself. They serve as the institution's memory, and its conscience. And Dartmouth should begin an aggressive affirmative-action drive to recruit as many of them as possible.

"Those who miss the joy miss all," said President Ernest Martin Hopkins 'Ol, the exemplar of the alumnus who devotes his life to the College. How can you get the joy when your first motivation at Dartmouth is a paycheck?