Well, it was announced yesterday that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will be the Commencement speaker for the Class of 1998 this June, and let me be the first senior to say the following: Who cares? Yes, it must be very distressing to many of us seniors that for the second straight year we failed to secure a "celebrity speaker" (Weren't you wowed by Finnish Prime Minister Paavo T. Lipponen last year? Didn't think so). But in the grand scheme of things, the Commencement speaker isn't all that an important part of the graduation ceremonies.
I'm sure we're bound to be very jealous of all the other schools that will have big stars speaking at their graduation ceremonies, just like we were last year when Penn got Bill Cosby, Harvard got Madeleine Albright and we got Lipponen. But does the star power of the speaker really mean that he or she is guaranteed to offer those memorable, life-changing words that we'll carry with us for the rest of our lives? Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich '68 spoke at Commencement 1994 and the President of the United States himself spoke here in 1995, and I doubt more than a handful of the graduating seniors from those two years remember a single utterance either of these men made.
No, for my money Doris Kearns Goodwin is fine. I won't really be paying much attention to her anyway. I'm much more interested in what our retiring College President, James Freedman, will have to say for himself on June 14. It is, after all, Freedman's 11th and final Commencement address, and surely both his friends and foes will be hanging on his every word, trying to find that perfect phrase in his speech that they will use to define him as a human being. I mean, in 1987 the president mentioned some stuff in passing about translating Catullus and playing the cello and now, 11 years later, Dartmouth students, faculty and alumni are still all talking about it.
That's right, it's Freedman's last hurrah, and I expect him to go out with a bang. Which brings another topic to mind. By the time graduation rolls around the other half of the senior administration will probably already have announced their resignations. But if that happens it will, of course, be entirely coincidental. It will have nothing to do with the fact that it seems like more Dartmouth administrators have resigned in the past seven months than there were people who jumped off the Titanic.
Freedman's been here since 1987; Provost James Wright has been an administrator since 1989; Lee Pelton has been dean of the College since 1991; and Vice President and Treasurer Lyn Hutton and Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco have almost 25 years of Dartmouth administrative experience between them. None of them will be in their current positions when the 1998-99 academic year begins in September, except maybe Wright, who could conceivably be re-elected Provost by the new president -- if the next president isn't Wright, that is. Yet we are told that these resignations have nothing to do with one another. As it currently stands, Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg and Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia are pretty much the only senior-level administrators who have been in their current positions for more than six years.
Of course, when the president of a college or university resigns, it is natural for administrators to reassess their priorities and determine whether they want to stay on for the new administration or move somewhere else, as Dean Turco told The Dartmouth on Monday. The College is trying to put on its best public face -- Wright called the administrative shuffle a "normal turnover of an institution." But when five senior administrators, including the four top jobholders at an institution, announce their resignations within seven months of one another, forgive me if I say that impresses me as far from normal.
It seems clear that administrative confidence in the direction the College is likely to head under a new administration is not terribly high. This is not to fault any of these administrators who have resigned, as each of them are pursuing important opportunities for themselves. But this situation does not bode well for at least the short-term future of Dartmouth College. When the new President is named this month, he or she will immediately have to oversee several major searches for new administrators. Hardly an auspicious way to start a presidential administration. It's the equivalent of the U.S. President being inaugurated and still not knowing who his Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense are.
The Classes of 1999, 2000 and 2001 should therefore be prepared. Dartmouth College could be a very different place as quickly as a year from now. New leadership often means a very fresh perspective on things. And we're not talking about a cosmetic change at the top of Dartmouth College, here; we've got major overhaul on the horizon. It'll be interesting to see how the new president handles all this, and what his hand-picked administration will look like. In the meantime, brace yourselves. Or at least start taking bets on who will resign next.
