ACTA's Must-Reads

« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »

Accreditation and the Brooklyn Bridge

This morning's Inside Higher Ed carries an article on Friday's American Enterprise Institute Conference on accreditation, where ACTA president Anne D. Neal spoke, drawing on our recent policy paper. Drawing on the author's comment that the conference's "nine participants were heavily tilted toward critics who have spoken or written of accreditation's flaws," Alan Charles Kors posted a comment so golden it just must be repeated:

I trust that Inside Higher Ed will continue to inform us untendentiously whenever panels or symposia are "not exactly an even-handed review" or are "heavily tilted." I also trust that my deed to the Brooklyn Bridge is legally valid.

Well said.

Posted by cmitchell at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

AAUP Watch

The AAUP's recent statement on "Freedom in the Classroom" deserves extended comment--and that's forthcoming. In the meantime, it's worth noting a few things about it.

1) As the Chronicle of Higher Education's Robin Wilson notes, the statement "is billed as a tool to help professors decide what they can and cannot safely say in the classroom -- particularly when it comes to hot-button cultural and political issues," but it reads "more like a defense of the professoriate in the face of heavy criticism" from outside the academy.

2) AAUP president Cary Nelson has been quite blunt about the fact that the real aim of the statement is "to give faculty members arguments that are really clear and that they can use with administrations" when they are questioned about their classroom conduct; in the face of repeated, documented instances of faculty members who use their classrooms in less than professional ways, Nelson has said the AAUP statement will allow professors to say (the words are Nelson's), "Don't mess with me."

3) Because it is framed defensively rather than as an impartial consideration of real issues, the AAUP statement misses its mark. Though it purports to be a set of guidelines for faculty classroom conduct, it is so dismissive of the criticisms that have been leveled against college teachers that it manages neither to state the problem clearly nor to offer clear, substantive advice. The result is a skewed and distorted image of academic freedom that, to quote ACTA president Anne D. Neal, evinces a "bald unwillingness to acknowledge academic responsibility as well as academic rights" and that thus downplays the academy's documented "failure to regulate itself."

4) The AAUP's stubborn refusal to acknowledge outside criticism--which goes so far as to suggest that misconduct in the classroom exists only as a statistical possibility ("sometime, somewhere," the statement concludes, "some instructor will step over the line")--ignores important concessions in their own ranks. Indeed, one of the statement's strongest endorsers, Penn State English professor Michael Berube, makes just such an acknowledgement in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed that ran on the same day IHE reported the statement's publication:

... sometimes these critics have a point: there are indeed college professors who think that the principle of academic freedom covers everything they do and say in the classroom, regardless of whether it has any bearing on the course material. (Those professors need to read the AAUP statement, as well.) Certainly, no professor of analytic number theory has any business subjecting his students to a soliloquy about the war in Iraq, and no professor of introductory cosmology has any business fulminating about illegal immigrants. And no professor of anything has any business haranguing or intimidating students--for any reason. ... The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles notes that professors 'should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.' In 1970, the AAUP clarified this guideline, explaining that 'controversial' matter, in and of itself, is not a problem; rather, irrelevant material is the problem. ... The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is 'controversial.' Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.

5) Berube sounds a lot like ACTA when he writes in this vein--and that's all to the good. There is merit in moving beyond the slipperiness of the AAUP statement, and finding solid common ground with the very reasonable concerns that ACTA has for years been raising about politics in the classroom. In a 2004 study, for example, ACTA learned that 49 percent of students said their professors "frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject" and 29 percent felt they had to agree with their professors' political views to get a good grade. That's not a sign of a healthy intellectual environment--and it's why the academy has been getting charged with doctrinaire classroom antics. It's also one of the many reasons why the AAUP should have worked a little bit harder to take those charges seriously.

More to come.

Posted by acta online at 12:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

AAUP Watch

Last week ACTA sent a strongly worded letter to Richard Blum, chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California. In it, ACTA expressed concern about reports that UC Irvine chancellor Michael Drake had rescinded an offer to Dr. Erwin Chemerinsky because of inappropriate political considerations; the letter urged the Regents "to undertake a systematic review of the integrity of the academic hiring process and the state of intellectual diversity at UC." A subsequent press release summarized ACTA's stance on the Chemerinsky case.

So there really should not be any doubt about where ACTA stands on the issue, particularly since its position is consistent with ACTA's historic, repeated emphasis on the importance of keeping politics out of academic personnel decisions. The Chronicle of Higher Education was not confused on this point: In an article on the Chemerinsky debacle, Katherine Mangan links to ACTA's letter to Blum and quotes from it: "Universities must encourage and foster opposing viewpoints. When--as here--administrative actions suggest that the university is averse to the robust exchange of ideas, corrective action is in order."

And yet, some commentators appear to remain befuddled about the facts, even going so far as to suggest that ACTA is partially responsible for UC's gross dereliction of fair procedure. At Common Dreams, law professor Marjorie Cohn declares that the Chemerinsky scandal "is the latest chapter in the post September 11 attack on academic freedom under the guise of protecting security"; she then fingers ACTA as a leader in this alleged "attack"--even though ACTA has always scrupulously defended the academic freedom and free speech rights of the professoriate. (Readers will recall, for example, that when many were calling for University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill to be fired for his comments on 9/11, ACTA was one of the few who stepped forward and loudly defended Churchill's expressive and due process rights.) Cohn then unconscionably omits the crucial fact that ACTA is among the "hundreds" who protested Drake's decision and presumably helped convince UC to renew its offer to Chemerinsky today. Cohn also conveniently ignores the fact that her concern--that "Drake's action sends a clear message to academics that they must avoid speaking out or writing about controversial issues" and thus "is a threat to academic freedom"--echoes ACTA's own.

But it would be unfair to focus exclusively on Cohn--who is a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild--for incorrectly reporting ACTA's position on academic freedom and procedural impartiality. After all, she is only following the lead of the AAUP itself.

Just this past weekend, AAUP president Cary Nelson spent time criticizing ACTA, as he has been wont to do, because ACTA happens to disagree with the AAUP's current articulation of academic freedom: "They constantly attack professors exercising what (the American Association of University Professors) regards as their academic rights." But Nelson's comment only reveals his own confusion about the AAUP's definitions and statements --on which ACTA's defense of academic freedom is based. As ACTA has consistently noted, the AAUP's original conception of academic freedom was not one of simple faculty rights, as Nelson would have it, but a system of correlative rights and responsibilities. Indeed, Nelson distorts the facts when he casts ACTA's commentary on the academy as an attack on professors' "academic rights"; professors do not have the right not to be criticized, and it is inflammatory, to say the least, to describe legitimate expression as an "attack."

But Nelson is simply repeating older AAUP canards--as at least one blogger, Stephen Butler, notes. Butler, to his great credit, recognizes the overblown and misleading rhetoric of the AAUP for what it is. Looking into matters himself, Butler found in ACTA an organization that articulates perfectly reasonable positions on political correctness in the academy, with special emphasis on the curriculum.

"Nelson and his group are overreacting to the goals of ACTA," he writes. "What is it, exactly, that [is] so damn dangerous about a core curriculum? I get the feeling that many in academia have come to believe that the only liberal education is a Liberal education." Noting that later this month Neal will be speaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--where, it's worth noting, Nelson teaches English--Butler concludes on an encouraging note: "I hope Anne Neal and her group make some serious waves here at the University of Illinois."

Neal, of course, will do at Illinois what she always does: She will comment in a reasoned, measured manner on higher education. And odds are that this will, indeed, make waves.

Posted by acta online at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

When giving goes wrong

If you are following the higher ed news--or if you are just reading the major papers--you'll know that in a time of increasingly divisive debates about the direction of higher ed, alumni who care about the future direction of their school need to do more than make financial contributions. They need to donate in such a way that they can ensure their dollars are used for projects they believe in.

It's excruciating for alumni--and costly for everyone--when colleges and universities renege on the trust bestowed by alumni when they send their donations. A lawsuit involving Princeton University makes this point in dramatic and instructive terms--and has spurred a lively discussion about the interplay of philanthropists who want to control how their funds are used and schools that wish to limit the restrictions donors can place on them.

From the Financial Times:

An upcoming ruling in a protracted legal battle between Princeton University and an alumnus who claims the school misused the funds his family left it nearly 50 years ago could have repercussions for the way US colleges and other charitable groups raise and spend money from donors.

The case centres on a $35 [million] donation made in 1961 by Charles and Marie Robertson, heirs to the A&P grocery fortune, to establish an eponymous foundation. William Robertson, the couple's son, filed a suit against the university in 2002 claiming that Princeton has failed to hold up its end of the deal since the money was given specifically to train students to work for the US government. Mr Robertson wants to be able to spend the foundation's money somewhere else.

Princeton contends the foundation was created to support the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which trains students not only for careers in the US government, but for a variety of other policy-related jobs. Princeton further argues that the initial agreement with the donors gave it final say over how the money is spent.

The judge in the case has not issued any decisions yet, but people close to the case say a ruling is imminent.

The Times notes that the case has moved a growing number of donors to draw up contracts outlining how their funds are to be used and clarifying consequences in the event of breach of contract. The Princeton case will be a watershed moment for both alumni and higher ed institutions, as it will help set the bar for the extent of schools' fiduciary responsibilities to donors, as well as for whether courts can compel schools to return misused donations.

At the heart of the suit lies the issue of institutional accountability, especially as it intersects with the delicate issue of donor intent. As ACTA president Anne D. Neal told the Times, "Too many alumni donors in the past have given on the basis of a smile and a handshake. This case makes clear that donors must trust, but verify." And as such, the Princeton dispute is yet another in a growing number of cases that document the pressing need for better accountability and transparency in higher education.

Posted by acta online at 02:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

On the lighter side

From a new feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Academic Life asked several scholars to share their secret (or not so secret) guilty pleasures--their passions outside the classroom and the laboratory. Professional wrestling, anyone? Trolling for Krispy Kremes in the wee hours? Here's what they said....

Anne D. Neal, president, American Council of Trustees and Alumni

My particular passion--besides ACTA? That's easy--landscape restoration and design. The Harvard historian Donald Fleming [now emeritus] introduced me to Frederick Law Olmsted in his American intellectual-history course decades ago. And while it was not love at first sight, my passion for Olmsted and his remarkable landscape firm have only grown with time. For the last 15 years, I have dedicated my spare time to learning more about the Olmsted firm, its landscape philosophy, and other prominent landscape architects. And because of this passion, I've served as the co-chairman of the Olmsted Woods restoration at the Washington National Cathedral.

I get real (not guilty!) pleasure from removing "exotic invasives," ending soil compaction, and reducing storm-water runoff. And what started as a volunteer interest has become an academic one: I have taken a night course on landscape restoration and contributed to several scholarly publications, including Ecological Restoration and the Handbook of American Women's History.

Others queried include Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and Jacob Hacker of Yale.

Posted by cmitchell at 11:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A sad day for Dartmouth

That's what Saturday was, according to ACTA's press release:

WASHINGTON, DC (September 10, 2007)--On Saturday, September 8, the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees voted to dilute the role of elected alumni trustees in a decision which drastically changes Dartmouth's historic governance process. In a divided vote, board members voted to add eight unelected members and change the way future alumni elections are held. The college has refused to reveal the actual vote count.

These changes come after the alumni in 2006 roundly rejected similar changes to the election process in a vote on the alumni Constitution; four straight trustee election victories by petition-nominated, reform-minded alumni; and the 2007 election of a majority of reform petition candidates to the Executive Committee of the Dartmouth Association of Alumni. The board chairman claimed the changes would end "destructive politicization of trustee campaigns that have hurt Dartmouth."

Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said the board's decision means "the Dartmouth administration and its supporters on the board have now done by fiat what they could not do by alumni consent."

Neal continued, "Having suffered six recent electoral defeats--as alumni in record numbers demanded independent voices on the board and Alumni Association--the Dartmouth establishment now found a different way to end the College's unique tradition of vibrant alumni involvement and participation."

"Since when did differing views and vigorous campaigns become 'destructive' and 'divisive?'" she asked. "That is the essence of democracy--but that, regrettably, is exactly what the administration and its supporters on the board appear to fear."

"The loyal and engaged alumni at Dartmouth have traditionally been a source of great strength," Neal concluded. "The board majority's refusal to respect that tradition marks a sad day in Dartmouth's history."

Posted by cmitchell at 06:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Core values

When the Spellings commission issued its report on the future of American higher education last year, ACTA criticized it for failing to address the question of what college students should know. "The report stresses the need to ensure that students graduate with the skills they need to function in an increasingly competitive global economy--but fails to address the fact that students don't graduate with those skills because the undergraduate curriculum is not designed to ensure that they acquire them," ACTA president Anne D. Neal wrote. "The report also fails to note that today's truly educated American needs more than skills--he or she also needs a strong grasp of what democracy is, what citizenship means, and why they matter."

Emphasizing access and accountability to the exclusion of curricular content, the report sidestepped an absolutely pivotal--and deeply controversial--piece of the puzzle. And, as such, the report perpetuated rather than resolved one of the defining problems of our era: our collective inability to decide what higher education is for.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis agrees:

We have not come to agreement--indeed we have had little discussion--about the purpose of higher education. In the absence of any big concept about what college is supposed to do for students, both students and faculty members prefer the freedom of choice that comes with the elective curriculum. We would each rather do our own thing than embrace our collective responsibility for the common good. But the argument that students have nothing in common is false, and the conclusion that a college education should have no core is wrong.

Lewis reviews the usual arguments against core curricula--that it's impossible to implement one meaningfully, that students are too diverse to be brought together within a common educational program, that knowledge is expanding so rapidly that it is futile to try to distill what all students need to know into a set series of courses. Finding those explanations profoundly wanting, Lewis sees them less as good reasons for preserving the current model of diffuse, consumer-oriented distribution requirements than as transparent excuses for our national failure to maintain a strong sense of educational purpose.

"I stoutly oppose federal interference in the content of college curricula," Lewis writes. "But institutions of higher education have a social contract with America, and we are not holding up our end of the deal." More to the point, he adds, "We owe it to the country to teach our students how democracy works."

Citing Losing America's Memory, ACTA's study of American college students’ historical illiteracy, Lewis notes that our colleges and universities are failing to ensure that today's undergraduates understand what democracy is and what democratic citizenship entails:

More is at issue here than the dates in American history. Students need to develop a feeling for the preciousness of human freedom and self-determination, and the responsibility of citizens to act for the good of their country and not only in their personal self-interest. In college, they should learn how America's foundational ideas, of liberty and equality under the law, apply to the difficult problems with which it is struggling today. They need to learn that as citizens we have no one but ourselves to blame for our elected officials and their actions.

The basic point is made eloquently in Harvard's classic curricular report, General Education in a Free Society, written just after World War II, when civilization itself seemed nearly to have perished. Education, the report says, had to create "the common ground of training and outlook on which any society depends." The report states elsewhere, "a successful democracy (successful, that is, not merely as a system of government but, as democracy must be, in part as a spiritual ideal) demands that these traits and outlooks be shared so far as possible among all the people."

Of all forms of government, democracy most demands an educated, thoughtful citizenry. Our country is based on a concept, not on kinship. Poles will continue to be Polish as long as there is a Poland, but nothing holds America together except our intellectual legacy of democratic principles. If universities don't honor that legacy, our children will not inherit our nationhood genetically. They can receive it only through learning.

A former dean of Harvard College and the author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?, Lewis knows whereof he speaks. He writes from experience when he observes that while undergraduates are hungry for civics and U.S. history courses, faculty often are reluctant to teach such courses because they "are not trendy enough" and so don't have adequate professional cachet. He also witnessed Harvard's recent reworking of its general education program, a "difficult and thankless" process that resulted in a "striking effort to define a core."

As a result, Lewis observes, Harvard may mark the beginning of an important national reinvestment in core civics education. Thanks to those who believed in the importance of anchoring Harvard's curriculum more firmly in specific content, there is reason to hope that the new requirements will begin to fill the civic vacuum created by the previous system of broad, cafeteria-style distribution requirements. "Harvard's recently voted curriculum expects all students to study American institutions to prepare them for 'civic engagement,'" he writes; "It is too soon to know what courses will fulfill that requirement. But I cautiously hope that we are stepping back from our relentless relativism and indifference to civic responsibility."

For more on what core curricula are, why they matter, and where one can find them, see ACTA's The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum.

Posted by acta online at 02:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Navigating the curriculum

Metaphors abound for the problems with undergraduate education today--and they tell us a lot about both what's wrong and what we need to do to improve. For example, a consensus is emerging around the idea that the system of broad distribution requirements is fundamentally flawed--and that consensus is visible in the imagery used to critique that system. ACTA, for example, frequently describes curricula that privilege choice over content and cater to niche interests at the expense of comprehensive and coherent coverage as "cafeteria-style" systems. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has done the same. And while ACTA and the AAC&U may disagree about the best way to resolve the problem, their common language shows that they are essentially agreed about the nature of the problem. Such agreement in turn speaks volumes about how far we have come in our discussion about what college education in the twenty-first century should be.

So how do we create a curriculum that is more meaningful and coherent than the non-curriculum embodied in endless, equivalent choice? And what kinds of metaphors can we adopt to help us imagine a workable solution? Writing at the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers answers to both questions. In "Our Compassless Colleges," Berkowitz argues that what higher education needs is direction, a sense of mission. And, in introducing the image of the compass, he offers us a guiding metaphor for the kind of guidance colleges and universities ought to begin providing.

Noting that the "veneer of structure" offered by broad distribution requirements really just "reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person," Berkowitz makes a strong case for a return to core curricula based on shared, essential, cumulatively acquired content. He's dissatisfied, for instance, with Harvard's recent reworking of its curriculum because it does not do enough to ensure that students receive a genuinely liberal education.

"The new requirements add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education," he argues; "Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same material. Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum -- same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know."

What bothers Berkowitz about Harvard's new core is that it recreates the problems it was ostensibly crafted to resolve. Under the new system, students still have more choice than direction, and they will still focus their energies on minute study of specialized areas at the expense of acquiring a broad, solid understanding of the disciplines. And such systems, Berkowitz believes, are not only irresponsible, but positively harmful in their encouragement of sloppy habits of reasoning.

Berkowitz is at his most eloquent when he describes why liberal education matters, and why only a firm core curriculum shaped around shared, defined content is adequate to the mission of liberal education. His words are worth quoting at length, since they are behind a subscription wall:

... properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals fit for freedom.

The nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to -- realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal education.

Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today's university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses.

Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live.

Such a core, Berkowitz observes, still leaves plenty of room for students to complete majors and to explore other interests through electives. So the argument that core curricula cannot be implemented without overloading students' schedules is a non-starter. The real issue, he notes, is faculty and administrators who object to core curricula because, at bottom, they are less fun for professors to teach. Core courses require faculty to function as generalists, and they also reduce their opportunities to teach courses on the specialized material closest to their hearts. Still, that's no argument at all when one considers that the purpose of college is not to please teachers, but to prepare students for life.

So who is in a position to effect change, when those who set the curriculum have a vested interest in keeping it the way it is? Not parents and students, Berkowitz admits. But brave presidents with vision and spine are, and so are trustees who are committed to student-centered reform. The trick is for the public to make it clear to higher education leaders that they know how directionless higher education has become--and to insist that our colleges and universities learn to use a compass.

Posted by acta online at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More on Dartmouth

Some comments on our previous post on Dartmouth raise important issues regarding the size of governing boards. ACTA has discussed this issue many times, and our philosophy is that the most effective size for a board is around 15 members or less. Here is what we said in our 2005 report Governance in the Public Interest: A Case Study of the University of North Carolina System:

An oversized board diffuses responsibility and makes meaningful discussion difficult....A smaller board [than UNC's] would facilitate a focus on central issues, allow thorough discussion, and increase each member's accountability.

UNC's Board of Governors, as our report noted, has 32 members. Dartmouth's current board, on the other hand, is right around the size we cite as ideal--it has 18 members. This stands in stark contrast to many of its peer schools, which have, as we noted in our other post, a rough average of 46 board members.

We've also been asked many times why we believe what's going on at Dartmouth is important and what exactly our role has been. That's more than worth explaining again here.

As our mission statement says, ACTA "is dedicated to working with alumni, donors, trustees and education leaders across the country to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically-balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price." That should make obvious why Dartmouth interests us. For many years, we have stood up for the right of Dartmouth's alumni--as well as those of other schools--to provide thoughtful input. We are concerned that the present governance review may imperil such input. And the reason for that is Dartmouth's leaders' own statements. For instance, Dartmouth vice president for alumni relations David Spalding said the following to the Boston Globe:

It's hard to say that there is a groundswell of opinion among alumni on this issue. We're hearing from a few hundred of our alumni who feel very passionately about this through the petitions. We're not hearing from thousands through these petitions.

That suggests one of two things: Spalding either doesn't know what his "constituency"--the alumni--thinks, or he doesn't care. A recent report from the Dartmouth Association of Alumni Executive Committee tells quite a different story:

Ninety-two percent of Dartmouth College alumni responding to an opinion survey say they want to keep their right to elect one-half of their alma mater's trustees, a right they have enjoyed since 1891. The Association of Alumni of Dartmouth College, through its Executive Committee, conducted the survey via U.S. Mail.

[...]

The Association received 4,156 responses from alumni during two weeks in August. The first statement on the survey read: "I believe that the Board of Trustees should maintain its current balance of 50% charter trustees and 50% directly-elected alumni trustees (excluding the two ex officio positions)."

We're also interested since our experience shows that too often, academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability are threatened, rather than valued, by those inside our nation's campuses. Comments like those of T.J. Rodgers in the recent Wall Street Journal piece--addressing Dartmouth's core academic purpose and the status of the free exchange of ideas--underscore the kind of thoughtful discussions that independent trustees, can and should initiate, and we are worried by the fact that trustees who try to do so are under attack.

We believe alumni have a key role to play in higher education, and we have taken the opportunity to say so in the media. We also believe that while the present governance review has claimed to be interested in best practices, it is actually exemplifying "worst practices" as regards the role of the CEO and conflicts of interest--something we documented in a memo, at the request of alumni.

Some of the ideas in our memo were, notably, included in a full-page ad (PDF) in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. We did not subsidize this ad, nor have we supplied any financial support to the Dartmouth effort. We simply shared our expertise with concerned alumni and they, under their own volition, acted on it. And now it's the board's turn to act. We hope they will do the right thing and preserve alumni input. The passion Dartmouth alumni have for their alma mater is a blessing, not a curse, and the board should treat it accordingly.

Posted by cmitchell at 02:31 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Dartmouth hits the AP wire

A new Associated Press piece on Dartmouth College is running in today's newspapers:

The four trustees say they've injected some much-needed new thinking and that there's nothing conservative about the issues they've focused on — free speech and undergraduate education (a particular point of pride for an institution that holds onto the title "college" despite having graduate programs that really make it a university).

But board chair Charles "Ed" Haldeman, who heads Putnam Investments and is overseeing the governance review, says the trustee campaigns have become too combative and expensive, focusing on hot-button issues rather than finding people who might best serve the institution. The cost of campaigning discourages potential candidates and has brought Dartmouth negative publicity.

Haldeman declined to discuss specifics, but hinted the recommendations will include expanding the board, noting Dartmouth "is right at the bottom in terms of size." Haldeman said that "no matter where the board comes out this weekend, democracy will be an important part of governance at Dartmouth." But, he added, "it's all a matter of degree."

Zywicki and Stephen Smith, another trustee elected via petition, also declined to discuss details of what they've seen of the proposal. But Smith, a University of Virginia law professor, said he is disappointed.

He says Dartmouth is frustrated its in-house candidates keep losing elections, and now wants to stack the deck.

"I think many colleges and universities treat alumni as ATM machines," donating money and letting the administration do whatever it wishes, Smith said. By contrast, Dartmouth has built a genuine partnership with its alumni. But that partnership, Smith said, "is in grave danger right now."

We noted previously that there is trouble brewing at Dartmouth, in the form of a "governance review" that seems intent on curtailing the ability of concerned alumni to bring independent voices to the Board of Trustees. But today's story--and a recent local piece--have brought another interesting issue to the fore, namely indications that Dartmouth may dramatically expand the size of its board.

The wisdom of such a move would be questionable, to say the least. ACTA has conducted an informal review of some of our nation's elite private universities--specifically, the private institutions among U.S. News & World Report's Top 25 National Universities. Our review showed that the average board size at those institutions is about 46 members--a truly astonishing figure.

It's extremely difficult to imagine boards of that size providing the effective oversight today's universities sorely need. And we've seen the results of mismanagement in recent months--last year's scandal involving American University, where the president was using university funds to pay for his French chef and his son’s parties while the board was asleep at the switch, comes to mind, as does the continuing brouhaha over college administrators and student loans.

It's also of note that Dartmouth alumni just rebuffed, less than one year ago, another attempt to redo governance procedures. Yet now the Dartmouth establishment is at it again. One wonders: Are there not more critical issues (such as the academic mission of the college) on which attention might be better focused? T.J. Rodgers, a trustee nominated by petition and elected in 2004, made this point in last weekend's Wall Street Journal:

In Mr. Rodgers's judgment, the increasingly political denigration--the "rancor," he calls it--has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. "Before I ever went to my first board meeting," he says, "I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does--management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they're doing and what they need to get their jobs done."

He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments--economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular--were "suffering from a shortage of teaching."

"It's a simple problem," Mr. Rodgers says. "You hire more professors." His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. "I've had to scrounge to get data," he says, the administration not being forthcoming. "My best sources of data come from faculty members and students."

While he can't discuss internal figures, he says there's been "a modest improvement since 2004. It's about 10 professors net gain." That's "going in the right direction, but not nearly as fast as I would like." While the college has added 1.1% faculty per year over the last decade, at the same time its overall expenses have increased by 8.8%, "so the inevitable mathematical conclusion of those numbers is that the percentage of money we spend on faculty is going down, and it has gone down consistently for a long time."

"In general, I don't have a prescription," he says. "I'm not trying to micromanage the place. What I'm saying is take the huge amount of money that an institution like Dartmouth has and focus it on your core business, which is undergraduate education, and make it really, really good. If you want to pinch pennies, pinch pennies somewhere else and not on the core business. That's all I'm saying."

Trustee politics is the reason that this problem with "the core business," as he puts it, has not been addressed. "I don't think we pay enough attention to it and care enough about it. We have time to worry about other things and somehow the main business of the college, which is to educate, doesn't dominate our meetings.

"I obviously don't want to talk a lot about what happens in board meetings, but I keep pushing to spend time on it--and that makes me an annoyance. . . . The priority has been, if you look at it, changing the rules to get rid of the petition trustees who are willing to criticize the administration.

Dartmouth's board meets tomorrow to consider all of this. In many respects, the best thing it could do would be to quit tinkering with trustee elections and get back to its real job--making certain Dartmouth's students are getting the quality undergraduate education they deserve. After all, if the system of picking trustees were really so broken, it probably wouldn't have prompted the highest voter turnout ever in the most recent election. (That was just a few months after the last attempt to change the rules failed miserably, losing by 18 points.)

However, if Dartmouth is intent upon--as it announced earlier this year--bringing its governance procedures in line with best practices, ACTA does have some suggestions, which we provided in a memo to the Dartmouth Association of Alumni in July. The gist of the memo is that according to best practices in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors, the role of Dartmouth's president in picking trustees is inappropriate. Board members are supposed to pick the CEO and hold him accountable--but at Dartmouth, the president is deeply involved not just in the present governance review, but also in picking the trustees on whom alumni do not vote. As our memo points out, this turns good governance on its head.

As their board meeting approaches, Dartmouth's leaders would do well to engage in less of the navel-gazing that has consumed the place lately and refocus their attention on the college's core academic mission, effective (rather than clubby and comfortable) governance and, as as Stephen Smith pointed out to the AP, not treating alumni as "ATM machines." Even Dartmouth alumni, as enthusiastic as they are, will only submit to so much before they decide to direct their support elsewhere. That would be bad for all involved.

Posted by cmitchell at 12:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack