At his inauguration, President Kim explained that his dentist father and philosopher mother taught him to keep his feet on the ground, but to shoot for the stars. Jim Kim will help Dartmouth reach new heights, but he is also the right choice to help us regain a firm footing. His commitment to excellence in undergraduate education – and to innovation and originality in all he does – should inspire confidence in the entire Dartmouth family. After a wide-ranging, two-hour discussion with President Kim this past December, I decided to run as a Petition Trustee candidate because I want to support his vision.
President Kim and Dartmouth face serious challenges. For the second time in less than a decade, a market downturn has caught the Board of Trustees unawares. In fiscal 2000, the endowment grew by 46 percent, and yet 14 months later, the previous administration tried to cut the swim team to balance an overextended budget. Between fiscal 2003 and 2007, the value of our endowment rose by 77 percent, but after the endowment shrank by 25 percent over the following two years, the College once again finds itself in a financial crisis. A 25 percent decline is serious, to be sure, but it has dropped the endowment only to where it was about three years ago.
Where has the money gone? Regrettably, the Trustees allowed the outgoing administration to raise staffing, salaries and benefits to destabilizing levels. To cite two examples: today the College has almost 42% more employees than it had ten years ago (going from 2,408 to 3,417). And the previous administration raised employee benefits spending to 40 cents for each dollar of salary. That 2009 figure compares with Harvard’s spending of 27.9 cents on benefits, Yale’s 27.5 cents, Brown’s 26.5 cents, and Cornell’s 24.9 cents (the remaining Ivies do not detail benefits in their accounts). If the College were to reduce staffing to anywhere near 1999 levels and provide benefits equivalent to those of our Ivy peers (which already far exceed the private sector average), the College’s severe financial difficulties would be more than over.
My Background
After growing up in Montreal, Canada, I graduated from Dartmouth as a History major in 1979. While a student, I worked at the radio stations in Robinson Hall, was a Rassias drill instructor in French and Italian, taught skiing, played numerous intramural sports, and took advantage of the D-Plan to study in Germany, Italy, and California.
I received a law degree from the Yale Law School in 1983 and then worked as a management consultant for two years with Bain & Company in London. Today I own two entrepreneurial businesses where success depends on watching every penny of spending. The medical products company that I founded in 1987, based in England, sells products of my own design in thirty countries; and in 1998, my wife and I took over a failed fitness facility in Lebanon, NH, and transformed it into an Upper Valley institution.
From 1986 until 2004, my wife, our children and I made our home base in Paris; however, from the early 1990s we were lucky to spend summers in Hanover each year. We moved from Paris to Hanover in 2004.
Involvement with Dartmouth
My passion for learning led me to return to Dartmouth classrooms whenever I was in Hanover. Over the past eighteen years, I have audited 30 undergraduate courses and discussion groups at the College. In addition to participating in lively classroom debates, each term my wife, Elizabeth, and I invite professors and students to our home for boisterous, conversation-rich dinners.
In discussions with faculty, the weak writing skills of students came up repeatedly – a problem that is certainly not limited to Dartmouth. In early 1998, I suggested to the members of the Art History department that a dedicated editor could effectively support the faculty by working with students on their papers. That fall, the first Departmental Editing Program (DEP) editor began full-time work in Art History. To ensure that the program began immediately, I funded the editor’s salary. The program was such a success that in subsequent years faculty in the Religion and Mathematics departments approached me; I funded editors for their departments, too. DEP ran from 1998 until 2007, when the Administration discontinued the program.
My ongoing studies have kept me in touch with undergraduate life at Dartmouth and have led to enduring friendships with faculty and students. Over time, I began to see that the College had in many ways lost focus on its undergraduate mission. Though Dartmouth has progressed in innumerable areas since my days as a student, in other ways it has slipped. In 2001 I submitted a column to The Dartmouth about my observations, the first of thirty pieces that the student editors of the D subsequently accepted from me concerning oversubscribed classes, student housing, the growth of the administration, alcohol policy, and ways to improve the student experience. Since August 2009 I have written posts on the College’s leading blog: Dartblog.com.
In addition to funding DEP from 1998 to 2007, over the past 20 years I have made significant donations to the Rassias Foundation, Chabad at Dartmouth, Professor Jim Murphy’s Daniel Webster Project, and Professor Faith Dunne’s research in education.
Why I Have Chosen to Run as a Petition Candidate
A lack of real diversity on the Board of Trustees has led to a sameness of thought among its members – and a repetition of past mistakes. The Board includes no undergraduate-level academics, no one with undergraduate administrative experience, nobody who lives or works in Hanover, and no members who interact with Dartmouth on a daily basis. Our Board is far too heavily weighted with financiers who cannot devote the time necessary to understand the College. Unlike either of the other candidates in the current election – and for that matter, unlike any member of the Board – I have been involved in life in Hanover for almost two decades. I’ve audited classes; invited groups of students to my home; attended myriad varsity hockey, soccer and football games; and come to know professors, administrators and coaches as neighbors and friends. For five years now, I’ve observed Dartmouth close at hand, deepening my appreciation of the College’s strengths – and acquiring an acute sense of the challenges facing the Kim administration. In serving on the Board, I would focus on the following areas:
Ensuring Fiscal Prudence: We must end the boom-and-bust budgeting cycles that see the College spend every available penny – and more – when the endowment grows, and then make painful cuts when the markets slip back – as markets inevitably do. Over the past decade, even as the endowment soared, the percentage that the Administration drew from it increased more, rising from a traditional range of 4.5-5.5 percent to over 7 percent – the highest draw in the Ivy League.
Re-committing to Undergraduate Excellence: Dartmouth is unique among the Ivies as a college with a profound commitment to undergraduates. Our top professors balance a dedication to teaching with the conduct of high-quality research in their fields. Yet we are in danger of losing this extraordinary advantage. We must end course oversubscriptions and reduce class size. Alumni from before the Class of 2000 were almost never shut out of oversubscribed classes; today’s students must frequently negotiate entry into their classes. For example, each term when they elect courses, students sign up for three first-choice and three back-up courses. Many courses even have priority rankings: majors over minors, seniors over underclass students, etc. We need more professors in key departments. Additionally, we should restore dormitory continuity. Students now live in numerous different dorms over the course of their undergraduate lives. Each time they return to campus, a housing lottery randomly sends them to a new dorm, mostly filled with other new arrivals. Community life at Dartmouth would be richer if students had the option of returning to a home dorm. Finally, the College should ensure that all our graduates, without exception, possess the necessary writing and speaking skills that are a prerequisite to achievement in any field.
Restoring Board Parity: Jim Wright began his Presidency by calling Dartmouth “a research university in all but name”; by the time he retired, his stated goal was to make Dartmouth the finest undergraduate college in the world. This change in rhetoric was the result of the alumni’s outcry in electing an unbroken string of Petition Trustees. Once again, parity served Dartmouth well. However, the alumni’s voice was muted in 2008 by the Board’s unilateral increase in the number of Charter Trustees. A return to the 117-year tradition of numerical parity between democratically elected Alumni Trustees and Board-appointed Charter Trustees would restore a strong voice to the alumni. The Board should respect the agreement reached in 1891 because this is the honorable thing to do — not because it is compelled to do so by a judge.
May I Ask For Your Help?
President Kim can both restore Dartmouth’s financial health and enable the College that we love to reach new levels of excellence. But to achieve these goals, he’ll need the support of Board members with a diversity of experience, a commitment to Dartmouth’s mission of undergraduate education, and the independence to question past practices, challenge assumptions, and advocate for innovation.
If you would like to discuss my petition candidacy or issues relating to the College, please don’t hesitate to write to me at JoeForDartmouth@Gmail.com. Thank you in advance for your support.
