Dartblog

Taking an early victory lap, Jim Kim’s Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking is trumpeting a marked reduction in drinking by students who have gone though its BASICS (Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students) program. In addition to a report in Dartmouth Now and an off-line article in the Valley News, the Boston Globe has dutifully described the College’s innovative efforts to have anthropology students study student drinking. Sheesh. It’s not as if the topic has not been addressed by competent researchers in the past.

The BASICS course works as follows:

The program is designed to help students examine their drinking behavior in a judgment-free environment and pairs online self-assessment with an interview with a counselor in the Dean of the College division. Students are invited to participate in BASICS within 72 hours of an alcohol incident and are expected to complete the program within two weeks.

Great. Students get counseled on the dangers inherent in demon rum and the like. You can be sure that they learned a lot that they didn’t know before. And the results, according to the College?

Data from intervention work with about 100 students who violated the College alcohol policy last fall—many of them needing medical assistance—show that their alcohol consumption has been cut almost in half within 90 days…

“We have had some remarkable data that indicates our efforts have been well worth it thus far. Next term, we look forward to our expanded use of BASICS,” said Brian Bowden, coordinator of Alcohol and Other Drug Education Programs.[Emphasis added]

“Data” is a wonderful word, isn’t it? So scientific sounding. Jim Kim trots it out as a conversation-stopper whenever he can. But do you smell a rat? I do, too, and so did Carl Marlborough at the Dartmouth Review, who described the whole scenario in some detail.

It turns out that the “data” in question comes only from students themselves: undergraduates who have completed the BASICS course are asked about their post-course drinking habits in several follow-up questionnaires. And lo and behold, the students give the right answers on the test! After all, they know in advance what the professor is looking for. Marlborough quoted one student as follows:

“Who actually tells the truth on those things?” laughs one ‘15 who was required to take part in the program. “They think that I drink three beers a night now.”

Of course, this white lie works for everyone. The students thereby signal that they need no further intervention, and the Dean of the College’s Office and the President can boast “Mission Accomplished.”

This is the way that things are today at Dartmouth. Appearance is everything; reality be damned.

Addendum: The College’s press release also notes another new anti-drinking initiative, one that will certainly foster close relationships between Undergraduate Advisors and their charges:

Also new for spring term is a pilot project in which undergraduate advisors (UGAs) in Russell Sage residence hall seek out and report underage drinking. Previously, UGAs addressed such behavior after it was reported to them. For the first several weeks of the term, UGAs issued warnings. From the end of April, Russell Sage residents violating the alcohol policy will be required to complete BASICS.

How nice to know that the senior in the room next to you has the power denounce you for an offense. Unless, of course, you are accommodating in some way.

As we have noted, the College has for many years required fraternity pledges to sign a detailed form promising that they will not engage in hazing. A whole lotta good that’s done. Agreeing to the form’s terms has had all the gravity of a waiver of risk at a bowling alley — which is to say that it was an object of ridicule among the brothers. Few, if any, students actually read the document.

Now, as part of its reinvigorated anti-hazing efforts, the College has produced a new Hazing Form for Dummies. No finer example of drafting by committee is to be found in the land:

Not very muscular language, n’est-ce pas? You don’t see much fire and brimstone/fear of god material in there, do you? Me, neither. In fact, the form seems to pay more attention to protecting the College’s reputation than it does to the real dangers of hazing.

A brother writes in with a little background info:

Just when you thought the administration couldn’t get more pathetic, they have managed to outdo themselves again. I just came from a meeting where I was told that we needed to sign a “new” hazing agreement. This agreement doesn’t contain anything that I haven’t signed at least three times in the past.

The golden line in the new agreement is this: “I recognize that some activities I have heard of may cause potential embarrassment.” Once again the College is showing its true colors.

Joe, I am not sure people can understand how much the Greek community looks at these forms as a joke. I have seen houses get their pledges blacked out then ask them to sign the anti-hazing forms. Usually someone shouts, “Sign this or we will haze you!”, which is followed by an outburst of laughter by everyone involved.

Addendum: Meanwhile, in other news, the NYT reports that “Criminal charges will be filed on Wednesday against members of the Florida A&M; University marching band who were involved in the hazing death of a fellow student last fall…”

Addendum: A thoughtful — and literate — reader writes in with a comment:

Regarding your post today on Dartblog, quoting the “Anti-Hazing Pledge” - it’s very good that you printed this drivel! It shows better than anything else what the administrators are like. But it struck me that you could make your point still better by pointing to its disgusting English. For if you excise all the gobbledygook, and reduce each of its three paragraphs to plain English, you get just this:

I understand that hazing is a big worry at Dartmouth. It can hurt people, and damage the reputation of the house and the College. I understand that doing it might be bad. I like tradition, but I have heard of practices that embarrass or hurt people, or make it harder to study. I understand that that Dartmouth students are above this.

I agree to criticize what we do. So I will learn the hazing laws and teach them to others. I will try to find activities better than hazing. I will challenge those who haze.

I sign this as a pledge.

Patricia Lee ‘12 and Chris O’Connell ‘13, the co-chairs of Inter-Community Council, had a piece in The D yesterday asking for more student representation among the soon-to-be-named members of the Presidential Search Committee. What to think of their request?

Hiring well is a real challenge, as any experienced manager can tell you. It is as much art as science, and experience counts a great deal. If you do a lot of hiring, you’ll make many mistakes — from which you learn, at least in theory.

In the last Presidential search, Molly Bode ‘09 was the sole student on the Committee. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Jim Kim at that time, and she has been working in the President’s Office ever since. That’s hardly a reference. Undoubtedly Jim Kim put stars in her eyes, and she didn’t have the background to see through his now-familiar schtick. (Curiously enough, two other Search Committee members later received important appointments from President Kim: the Director of the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, Al Mulley ‘70; and Vice President for Alumni Relations, Martha Beattie ‘76. How cosy.)

Much as I’d like to support Patricia and Chris, I can’t see my way to agreeing with them. The Search Committee doesn’t need more students: it needs high-achieving College faculty members who know Dartmouth well after many years of experience; it needs outside academics who can recognize a shoddy bill of goods when they see one (purportedly petition Trustees Law Professor Stephen Smith ‘88 and Economics Professor Todd Zywicki ‘88 were strongly opposed to Jim’s Kim’s appointment for this reason — they weren’t wrong); and it needs corporate line managers (not hedge fund guys) who have a track record of intelligent senior management selections.

The Committee that brought us President Kim was made up of fourteen members: six Trustees, three faculty members from the undergraduate Arts & Sciences, one faculty member from each of the professional schools, a former head of the Alumni Council, and one student. My recommendation would be that the Committee be expanded by adding three experienced, widely respected A & S professors; their addition would be a fair reflection of the dominant size of the undergraduate student body at the College (almost 70% of students in Hanover are undergrads). These professors could also serve as conduits for student opinion, as sought by Patricia and Chris, and they would subsequently be advocates for Dartmouth’s new President with the faculty, whose private disdain for Jim Kim knows few bounds.

E-mail messages continue to pour in about computing problems at the College:

It seems that everyone at the College now has a Gmail account to go with their College address. A little insurance, I guess.

Meanwhile, a senior faculty members makes a larger point — from her Gmail account:

Joe,

The new cloud Blitz, one of the Kim administration’s other innovations, seems to have been down much of the day. Blitz itself hardly ever did this. Is Kim taking the cloud, too? As soon as Jim Kim leaves, we should immediately liquidate the following of his ‘accomplishments.’ In rapidly ascending order of importance:

• The “slurpee” waste containers
• Cloud Blitz
• Numerous administrative appointments

We’ll keep the library coffee shop, where we can gather and toast his departure.

Yours truly.

Beyond people who leave the College in a shower of laudatory press releases, like Senior Vice President for Advancement Carrie Pelzel, other senior folks are on their way out with little fanfare: Brian Lally, who was Chief Advancement Officer at DHMC, left late last year in order to become Associate Vice President for Medical Development and Alumni Relations at the University of Michigan; Roddy Young quit his job as Dartmouth’s vice president for communications after ten months to move up to DHMC in a similar capacity; and Director of Real Estate Paul Olsen retired quietly at the end of last year (reportedly after disagreeing with the College’s wild spending on the Hanover Inn).

With the departure of Jim Kim, and with Chief Financial Officer/Executive Vice President Steven Kadish and his wife Vice President for Campus Planning and Facilities Linda Snyder widely expected to follow Kim in a southbound convoy (Kadish/Snyder never sold their home in Boston; they knew a shortterm gig when they saw one), the College is experiencing a huge hollowing out of the administration. I for one don’t feel a high degree of confidence that David Spalding could soon be the most experienced administrator in the executive branch — if he isn’t already looking for a new job himself.

On the academic side, IP/Provost Carol Folt has staffed the academic deanship with long-time loyalists of noted indecisiveness (translation: they will do Carol’s bidding). Personable personalities are all well and good, but don’t count on them for hard decisions in hard times.

In the Dean of the College area, students can fill you in on the sterling qualities of Charlotte Johnson and April Thompson. The prosecution rests.

So what kind of institutional leadership will greet our incoming President? Or perhaps a better question can be asked: what kind of leader will want to come to a school with such a weak supporting cast?

Addendum: As this space has lamented before, if Jim Kim had taken as much care in hiring senior administrators as he did in choosing Harry Sheehy as AD, he’d have left Dartmouth in better shape when he quite predictably jetted off in search of his next prestige job.

Addendum: Rapid turnover in a young administration is a clear indicator of poor management. President Kim and his Boston cronies may well possess a great well of feeling for the world’s poor, but by multiple reports, they were not at all easy people for whom to work.

While the College’s golf team was narrowly edged out of the Ivy League Championship by Penn, Peter Williamson ‘12 earned the individual championship. His victory was his second consecutive Ivy title and the third of his career. He is only the second player in Ivy League history to win three individual championships. Congrats!

Williamson has many talents on the golf front: he has been working for a while on a plan to upgrade the College’s links.

Different strokes for different folks: while the College’s website and its Dartmouth in the News feed have as yet made no reference at all to either the hazing controversy or Janet Reitman’s Rolling Stone article, and while President Kim (remember him?) made no public comment about hazing for almost two months after the story broke (he had better things to do, as we have now learned), according to the Boston Globe, other schools approach their embarrassing incidents differently:

For Boston University, it has been an awful four months: The college has seen an undergraduate badly injured in a fire, the arrest of two hockey players on sexual assault charges, two episodes of what appeared to be extreme hazing, and a student practical joke gone so badly awry it drew international media attention.

Last week, in by far the most serious and troubling event, a graduate student was slain off campus.

But even as BU courts the 19,589 high school seniors it has admitted for next year - who must decide whether to attend by Tuesday - the university is not downplaying the bad news. In fact, president Robert Brown is making sure parents know about recent events.

“We want to make sure they’re getting the facts accurately,” Brown said Thursday in an interview, his first extensive comments on the string of incidents. “You know, I’m a scientist. The facts are what they are.”

The university also faced an awkward dilemma the day after Rao’s slaying: 1,000 admitted students were descending on campus for open houses….

Kenn Elmore, the dean of students, stood in front of the groups and said hello. Then, like Brown, he brought up Rao’s death before anyone could ask about it.

“It would be unusual for us after such a terrible incident to not even acknowledge it,” Elmore said. “I wanted them to see that it does affect the community, to give them a sense of who we are.”

Even BU’s website has prominently featured straightforward stories about every negative incident on campus this semester.

Perhaps BU’s PR consultants are giving BU different advice than the leaders at the College are receiving. Or maybe BU doesn’t employ PR consultants; they might just be motivated by old-fashioned notions of honesty. Now there’s a curious idea, don’t you think?

The varsity baseball squad has won yet another Rolfe Division Championship. How does the northernmost and smallest Ivy school — one that had a dysfunctional athletics department for ages under Josie Harper — win the baseball title year after year? Coaching, folks, good coaching. Bob Whalen not only is a great recruiter, teacher and manager, but he supports his players for decades after they graduate. If we can win an outdoor sport whose Ivy League season ends in late April, we can win any sport at all — as long as our AD puts the the right people in place to attract and train scholar-athletes.

The Men’s Fencing Club just won their first-ever national championship, too — with a team on which half the students had never fenced before coming to the College.

What a pleasure to report good news.

Try as I might, and even on a fine spring day, Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial leaves me unmoved. The site’s large gray blocks are evocative of a graveyard, and perhaps, more distantly, of rows of concentration camp barracks or even a funeral mound, but beyond the spare, hopeless expanse, they seem to say little. Tourists sit on the blocks to rest, and traffic swirls by on Ebertstrasse.

The infinite sadness of the Holocaust has always meant for me the loss of vibrant souls: fathers and mothers, children, doctors, workers, professors, seamstresses and jewellers, writers — of people with a sense of ironic humor and a higher commitment to justice. I lament the murder of the six million more deeply when I see the portrait of a promising writer, who died of typhus at age 15 at Bergen-Belsen, than when standing on this Berlin sidewalk.

The exhibit under the memorial endeavors to make up in humanity what the overhead monument utterly lacks, but the criticism of the monuments’ distancing, abstract nature still stands.

Addendum: In a 1938-39 program called the Kindertransport, approximately 10,000 Jewish children were allow to leave Germany without their parents to live with British foster families. Among that group were four future Nobel Prize winners. The rest of the world will be forever impoverished by the loss of six million souls.

Addendum: A reader writes in to commend a recent article by Professor Michael Lewis of Williams College on regrettable modern tendencies in the design of monuments and memorials.

Professor Susannah Heschel achieves prominence wherever she goes. We met up with her in Berlin this week, where she is spending a year as a Fellow at the élite Wissenschaftskolleg, also known as the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin. Her research topic is interesting:

I’m writing on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam: Starting in the 1830s, European Jewish scholars flocked to the study of Islam. By the 1920s and 30s, they dominated the field at German universities. They established the field, demonstrating parallels between teachings of the Qur’an and rabbinic texts, and praising Islam for preserving Judaism’s strict monotheism, rejection of anthropomorphism, and adherence to an ethical religious law. They argued that Islam was a tolerant religion under whose auspices Jews flourished intellectually and culturally (“Golden Age of Muslim Spain”), and began to build synagogues in Moorish architecture. After Hitler came to power in 1933, some of these scholars went to Palestine, others to the United States, where they created new institutions of Islamic scholarship.

We’ve posted about Susannah before. Like Dartmouth’s best professors, she produces fine scholarship, works closely with students, and plays an important public role. But more importantly, especially since the retirement of cape-sporting English Professor Peter Saccio, nobody on the faculty cuts as dramatic a figure.

Addendum: A loyal reader writes in with a comment and some commentary:

Loved the Heschel piece… I think it is FINE to praise the style of a Prof. At Charles Stinson’s memorial yesterday (where the still dashing Peter Saccio sat in attendance) Prof Stinson was praised by many, including past students, for his warmth, honesty and consistent personal STYLE.

Funny how often a sense of style is interwoven with a sense of justice and fairness.

Also, interesting to hear former Phi Tau members praise him for being there with them to fight when they were down (first consistently CoEd frat and openly accepting of Gay students) AND, more interestingly, to take a stand FOR the Greek system, in general, and against the trends of a current administration on the grounds of justice and fairness.

In a news report on WCAX-TV, Dean Johnson asserts that all is well at the College, as it has always been. The administration continues to be on top of hazing. That’s reassuring.

The New York Post reports that Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner’s father-in-law was indiscreet at a New York eatery:

Food critic Albert Sonnenfeld, whose daughter, Carole, is wed to the country’s top money man, stunned strangers at Bar Boulud Thursday night when he claimed President Obama’s nomination of Dartmouth College president Dr. Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank was part of a plan to allow Geithner to take over the Ivy League school’s top post, reports The Post’s Jeane MacIntosh.

Seated with five other couples he didn’t know, Sonnenfeld indiscreetly claimed Geithner has since changed his mind. “They offered him the presidency of Dartmouth. But now he doesn’t want it,” said the gabby granddad. “He wants something else.”

However, a spokesman for Geithner denies the story:

Geithner spokesman Anthony Coley told us, “Interesting theory about Dartmouth, but to paraphrase Kissinger: ‘It has the disadvantage of being made up. ’ “

So who the heck is fibbing here? Someone has to be.

Addendum: In an interview on CNBC with John Harwood, Secretary Geithner asserted that the above incident was made up out of whole cloth by the folks at the table with his father-in-law. Hmmm. Such vivid imaginations.

I couldn’t quite find a full denial in there from Secretary Geithner about whether he wants the Dartmouth job or not. We’ll have to wait and find out.

As we pointed out yesterday, my favorite Foltian project, the Strategic Planning Initiative, should be stopped immediately. Grown-ups have better things to do with their time. Like what?

Here’s a suggestion: the faculty members on the various strategic planning committees (SPSC, F-SPAC, SE-SPAC, SPLACO, SPCAI, and the eight Working Groups) should re-engage with students and develop a comprehensive list of students’ needs. From a position of objectivity — i.e. they would not be made to look incompetent by describing students’ grievances and their own suggestions, for none of their actions or inactions contributed to the problems in the first place — they could lay out a set of problems, and perhaps even suggest a menu of solutions that our next President could review to get up to speed. Professors also have the advantage of institutional memory: many of them recall the College from a time before certain deleterious changes were made by out-of-touch administrators. And they know students personally, and therefore can elicit candid admissions about the ups and downs of student life.

Here’s a first-cut list of topics that could be considered:

● Course Oversubscriptions: despite Carol Folt’s assertion to the contrary, this problem is no more than 12-14 years old, but it besets almost all students. The faculty knows this, and they have ideas on how to improve students’ access to courses.

● Lack of Non-fraternity Social Space: Listening to students here will produce one suggestion over and over: more local sorority houses.

● Dormitory Living Continuity: Older faculty remember when dorms were social spaces, too, because students had the option to return to their “home” dormitories, in which real communities flourished.

● Flexible Dining Plans: Student discontent is pervasive. If the faculty listen to them, students will find allies.

● Effective Training in Writing: Put two faculty members together and eventually they will lament how poorly most students write. Let’s get a handle on the problem.

● Effective Training in Public Speaking: Ditto the above.

● The Extent of Hard Drug Use (Cocaine): We can debate drug legalization all day long, but the presence of a drug culture that influences inexperienced students should be a concern to everyone.

● The Extent of Prescription Drug Abuse (Adderall): Ditto the above.

● The Extent of Sexual Assault: Too many faculty members know too many students who have regretted things that they have done or have had done to them. The faculty knows their students; will they get involved?

● The Extent of Hazing: Ditto the above.

● The Extent of Binge Drinking: The faculty does not need to work too hard to understand this problem. Anyone teaching a Thursday morning class knows what they are facing here.

Of course, this list is not exhaustive, but if responsible faculty members can define some of Dartmouth’s problems, a new President will get a sense of future challenges.

Addendum: A regular correspondent writes in with a further agenda item:

● Ever-escalating tuition fees and associated costs.

and another reader suggests:

● A complete review of the College’s financial health.

as does another:

● What can be done so students can follow a coherent plan of studies, so that they don’t just end up with an “education” consisting of various niche or boutique courses, and huge gaps in what anyone would consider to be essential to being an educated person.

IP-Provost Carol Folt has never had an original idea in her life as a College adminstrator, and there is absolutely no need, especially at this point in time, to have the strategic planning machine further prove that proposition. We’ve written about strategic planning efforts before: how in the academy they are considered to be useless exercises, and how in Hanover their recommendations are promptly forgotten. However, now that we are in the process of choosing a new President, the last thing the administration needs to do is waste time and money developing a plan that will almost certainly prove uncongenial to our new leader. Certainly the Trustees are not about to tell the next President that Interim-President Folt’s strategic plan is all wrapped up, and all the new occupant of Parkhurst has to do is execute Carol’s program. Come on.

Beyond that, there are other fundamental problems with the whole shebang. First of all, is the strategy that will be defined anything more than a vague set of aspirations? Or is it a confirmed set of steps that the College will follow? Will the faculty vote to approve all or part of it? One thing that the leaders of Bain & Company learned in consulting is that recommendations that don’t have serious, ongoing follow-up are are often as not forgotten. To date, there seems to be no indication that the product of all of this committee work will be anything more than a pretty binder that is not binding on anyone.

This point leads to a second observation. If the College’s senior-most and highest achieving faculty members were involved in strategic planning, we’d stand a chance of getting serious ideas that would be acted upon. Is that the case here? Good for you for recognizing a rhetorical question and already knowing the answer.

Of course not. The members of the Faculty Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (F-SPAC for hip insiders) include 17 faculty members (plus Professor Anthony), but only nine are from Arts & Sciences. Of those nine, six are just associate professors. And why is this a problem? For two reasons: the first is that associate professors should be working to establish national reputations in the hope of earning full professorships; they are in the most critical and productive part of their scholarly lives. The second reason is that these professors are vulnerable to the application of pressure from senior administrators (yes, this means you, Carol), and therefore their independence is open to question. A more experienced group of professors — for instance, one that included even a single full professor from the sciences — would do a better job. They are not worried about being promoted.

But the latter arguments are just gilding on the the lily that was my initial point. Let’s stop a flawed process that is stillborn anyways. There are better things to do.

Addendum: Undoubtedly inspired by President Kim’s recent world-wide listening tour, Carol Folt will be in London to talk to the Dartmouth Club on Thursday, May 24. Watch Carol make the most of her time in the sun. Useless expense be damned. After all, we can expect the next President to make the same journey soon enough.

Addendum: A senior member of the faculty comments:

Carol will certainly not let this hobby horse of hers die, and there have been lots and lots of people working on it (all to no effect so far, it seems to me). But it was a doomed enterprise anyway, and the new president will accept the report with “enormous gratitude” and then place it on a shelf with its predecessors. As of yet it has no faculty buy in, and I’m reasonably confident that everyone will soon want to wash their hair of any Kim-Folt reminders.

The offering prospectus for the College’s recent $70 million bond offering contains interesting nuggets: additional borrowing could be in the offing, and more importantly, we learn the real cost, $71.2 million, of the Visual Arts Center:

Recall that Leon Black, the donor for the Visual Arts building, committed only (a relative term) a gift of $48 million to the project, staggered over a number of years. That leaves a $23.2 million hole between Center’s $71.2 million cost and Leon’s $48 million.

However, another piece of financing legerdemain by the administration merits comment: in the past, the College, as all the other Ivy schools still do, did not consider a building’s financing to be complete unless both the construction cost and an endowment for ongoing maintenance were in place. Annual maintenance was budgeted at approximately 4% of the cost of a project — so in this case, at least another $40-50 million would have to be set aside to fund the ongoing cost of the building.

No such funding is in place now. As with the College’s other mega-projects like the Biology building, the Visual Arts Center will be an ongoing drain on the College for many years. Although Presidents with an edifice complex are the impetus for such unaffordable construction, our inattentive Trustees should accept the blame for signing off on these institution-sapping follies.