Education: A Lecture From the Faculty

When the trustees of Dartmouth College installed David McLaughlin as the school's 14th president in the summer of 1981, he seemed a perfect choice for a scholarly Ivy League bastion steeped in lusty, old-boy fellowship. Indeed, his persona glowed the deepest Dartmouth green: Phi Beta Kappa in the class of '54, wide receiver on the football team, M.B.A. from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. Three of McLaughlin's four children had graduated from Dartmouth or were going there. Finally, as chief executive officer of the Toro Co., makers of lawn and gardening equipment, McLaughlin was an exemplar of the business success that can be earned by a Dartmouth man with the right stuff.

That last credential was particularly important, since Dartmouth, like other colleges across the country, was facing the pressures of a cost crunch and a projected dip in enrollment. McLaughlin has responded to the challenge. By last fall he had boosted the endowment from $254 million to $414 million and fattened faculty salaries 33.7%, to a healthy average of $50,600 for full professors. Although applications for the Hanover, N.H., campus were rising to an all-time high of 9,500 for only 1,030 places in the freshman class, McLaughlin pushed the enrollment of blacks; Dartmouth now has a larger percentage of black undergraduates (9%) than any other Ivy League school. And not least, he cracked down on fraternity low- jinks that had made Dartmouth the inspiration for the caustic film National Lampoon's Animal House. !

It seemed a bravura performance, worthy of praise all around. But over the past month, at a series of querulous meetings, Dartmouth's faculty of arts and sciences has unanimously condemned McLaughlin's reign. A special faculty committee drafted a 16-page critique that bitterly complained, "The administration of the college is insensitive to and not knowledgeable about education concerns and (the faculty's) proper and necessary role in the governance of the college." In lay language: McLaughlin had given his orders and done his works without first conferring with the faculty, a serious oversight at an intimate, old-line school like Dartmouth with a deep tradition of collegiality. Said Biology Professor Melvin Spiegel: "He responds as chairman of the board, not as president and leader of this institution." As one Cornell professor describes the administrators, "They're used to running that place like a New England town meeting."