Worries of a President

"One would not want to be associated with a college at which the faculty's reach did not exceed its grasp."

In preparation for a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees, E. John Rosenwald Jr. '52, its new chairman, asked me to develop a list of issues that "keep the president awake at night" he called it "KPAN" and to share that list with the Board so that it could know what issues I worry about most.

By and large, I sleep well because the College is doing so well. Most colleges would love to be in the secure condition that Dartmouth is in. And yet there are matters that do concern me.

I worry about our responsibility to select, develop, and sustain pinnacles of excellence among our academic programs. More than 20 external reviews of academic departments and programs over the last three years have helped us identify areas that are especially strong. The question is how we go about preserving and enhancing those pinnacles of excellence that bring special academic opportunities to our students and significant intellectual distinction to Dartmouth. Doing so requires resources, of course, but it also demands that we make wise and difficult choices about how those resources should be allocated.

I worry, too, about maintaining our gratifying success in the recruitment of outstanding students. When I came to Dartmouth in 1987, the median SAT score of the freshman class was 1310. Last fall the median SAT score was 1350. That statistical advance surely says something important to high school students, high school counselors, and parents about Dartmouth's intellectual seriousness—about its aspiration to attract students of ability, ambition, idealism, and character.

Need-blind admissions is at the heart of Dartmouth's admissions process. It is the vehicle by which we increase our social and economic diversity, a goal of every Dartmouth president since at least William Jewett Tucker. Without the capacity to fully fund need-blind admissions, we would run the risk of becoming an institution for the children of the very affluent and of the very poor, while the great middle class of students would be frozen out.

Dartmouth is now one of no more than a dozen institutions nationwide still committed to need-blind admissions. Even a number of Ivy League schools, faced with budget deficits, have begun to deny admission to qualified applicants who cannot afford to pay their own way. I pray that Dartmouth never reaches that position.

I also worry about how we can continue to make Dartmouth more of an international crossroads. We already do a lot: seven percent of our freshmen this year are international students the highest proportion in many years. Sixty percent of our students spend a term or more in a Dartmouth study program overseas. The Dickey Center for International Understanding begins a new chapter with a new director, Martin J. Sherwin '59.

We recently announced that we are reviving the Dartmouth Conferences with Japan, which President Dickey presided over in the early 19605. Those conferences to be held in Hanover in June 1994 and Tokyo in June 1995 will increase Dartmouth's ties with Japanese leaders and academics. Despite these successes, I continue to worry about what we can do to make the international nature of this campus its curriculum, its faculty, its social life richer and more available to our students.

It is a sign of a healthy institution that its desires for innovative and expanded academic efforts exceed its means. One would not want to be associated with a college at which the faculty's reach did not exceed its grasp where there were more resources than good ideas on which to spend them. But a consequence of the initiative and creativity of Dartmouth's faculty has been that we have established important new academic programs that are not yet permanently funded. While the fact that our programmatic reach exceeds our financial grasp is a happy situation, I would sleep more soundly if the new programs that have proven their intellectual worth were permanently funded.

This, then, is the KPAN list that I gave to our Board of Trustees. In fact, I sleep reasonably well because I am secure in the belief that Dartmouth faces the future from a position of strength. We continue to be blessed with a distinguished faculty, a strong student body, and devoted alumni; fiscal soundness, a beautiful campus, and a capital campaign that gives high promise of being successful.

Our most important task, in my opinion, is the one that the Trustees settled upon in 1987 and asked me to advance—the task of strengthening the intellectual life of the institution and enhancing the academic stature of our programs. As we continue that important work together, I am confident that we will come even closer to achieving that ever-elusive ideal that I call a commonwealth of liberal learning.