With the ubiquity of ad hoc committees on this campus, it's understandable that students feel that such committees have lost their saliency.
One that will inevitably form over the coming months, however, will exist as a rarity -- it will actually address an issue that has direct implications for generations of Dartmouth students to come. It will be charged with the weighty task of choosing Dartmouth's next president.
While the committee to choose President Wright's successor will undoubtedly be made up of trustees, faculty members and even a few students, selecting these members is an important task in and of itself. In the true spirit of diversity, which is so widely espoused at Dartmouth, committee members should not be chosen simply because they will rubber stamp the agenda of the majority of the Board of Trustees but because they will offer different opinions on the current status quo and the direction Dartmouth should take in the future.
Lost in the brouhaha over social spaces, gender inequity and petition trustees is the fact that Dartmouth is first and foremost an institution for higher learning.
This is to say that above all else, the president, trustees and other individuals who have direct authority over the governance of Dartmouth should make the classroom experience at the College their overwhelming priority. Fundraising -- a necessary evil -- should come in a close second, while everything else should assume its place in line.
When selecting a new president, the committee should consider candidates based on their demonstrated ability and desire to place academics first. Dartmouth needs a president who is willing to evaluate the true educational efficacy of the D-Plan, deal immediately with the shortage of professors in departments such as government and economics and cut the bureaucratic red tape that blinds administrators to any alternative that isn't spelled out explicitly by College regulations. And ideally this president will come from the real world, where offices don't close for an hour and a half for lunch everyday.
While I understand that there are important aspects of the "Dartmouth Experience" that take place outside the classroom, an inordinate amount of time and resources are now devoted to relatively inconsequential aspects of life at Dartmouth. Certainly not all of this is the fault of the current president, and some of it is perpetuated by students and administrators alike. Nevertheless, it needs to change.
In my time at the College, I believe I have received two e-mails from President Wright addressed to the Dartmouth community: one concerned the alumni governance debacle and the other was a very spirited condemnation of a series of incidents involving perceived mistreatment of Native Americans on this campus. These discussions would be fine if they didn't dominate the campus dialogue and detract from necessary reforms. What I don't recall ever receiving from President Wright is a pledge to immediately deal with the sparse resources in the economics and government departments through whatever means necessary.
We need a president who is willing to tell things as they are and not just give the politically correct version of things out of fear he might offend someone. The name Larry Summers comes to mind, but unfortunately he is both overqualified and unavailable.
Our new president must be willing to come in and clean house on day one, without expending millions of dollars for a McKinsey & Co. report to tell us that our administration is rife with bureaucratic bloat -- oh, really? We need a leader, not a politician.
