Standard 5: Faculty

The Dartmouth faculty is sufficient in quality, numbers, and performance to accomplish the institution's mission and purpose. The Dartmouth faculty enjoys a national reputation for excellence in teaching and an international reputation for the quality of its publishing faculty. Since its last evaluation, Dartmouth has made demonstrable progress in hiring minority and women faculty. Although 75% of the Dartmouth faculty are tenured, the University seems able to grow new intellectual areas by selective faculty replacements enabled by normal attrition. Most faculty maintain the normal teaching load of four courses per year and offer a variety of services tailored to students' individual needs.

Decisions concerning the area in which to hire begin in the Department with a Department vote. These recommendations are handed over to the appropriate Associate Dean who is responsible for advocating new positions to the Dean of Faculty. Much the same procedure holds true for contract renewals, annual reviews, and tenure and promotion decisions. Judging by the trust that seems to characterize relationships between faculty and deans, this process seems to have worked with remarkable lack of conflict between the various levels of decision-making. Procedures for evaluating faculty for salary increase observe this same pattern. However, we note that in order to ensure that merit determines a greater percentage of the salary increases, the Dean of Faculty is taking a more active role in that process.

Each faculty member receives a reasonable amount of money for travel and research. Dartmouth's sabbatical leave policy matches that of comparable colleges and universities, and the university seems particularly generous in supplementing outside grants so that faculty who have earned modest research grants are free to extend a one-semester sabbatical to a full year. In addition, there are various sources for grants within Dartmouth itself. Most recently, the University has been deliberating the question of how to deal with faculty who have reached the age of retirement, or what role if any should emeriti play in the Dartmouth community.

Faculty recruitment and retention was a common source of concern. There have indeed been some losses of outstanding faculty to justify this concern, but Dartmouth has frequently been able to avert raids on its faculty by major research universities. Concern seems to be aimed at the cost of retention as well as at the loss of key faculty. At other universities, energetic retention has been known to sap funding from other projects and create inequities among the faculty that would not arise from the normal system of rewards. We applaud the Dean of Faculty's preemptive efforts to create an intellectual environment at Dartmouth that even the best faculty will be reluctant to leave. It strikes us as especially important, in this regard, for the administration to follow through with energetic support of the proposed Humanities Center.

The evaluation team's visit to campus brought to our attention the following concerns:

1. While the Dartmouth faculty and administration agree that an increasing emphasis on research is necessary to keep Dartmouth competitive with comparable colleges and universities, there is some concern that this increased emphasis puts too much pressure on junior faculty, who must also mature as teachers and serve on committees. The question is whether a six-year probationary period is sufficient time for junior faculty to carry out enough research to provide a sound basis for a tenure decision while fulfilling the responsibilities of a college teacher. There was considerable reservation about the option of extending the tenure decision 2-3 more years beyond the normal probationary period in cases where the faculty member's research was not yet ready to be judged. Junior faculty felt that receiving such an extension could stigmatize them.
2. To accommodate its increased emphasis on research, Dartmouth has been gradually toughening the standards for tenure and promotion. We found the junior faculty anxious about exactly what this means for their respective departments. To allay some of this anxiety, we suggest an orientation program for new faculty that 1) does not overlap with their teaching schedules and 2) describes the expectations for tenure and the tenure process itself with as little ambiguity as possible. Women enjoy an admirably effective mentoring network on the Dartmouth campus. Although nothing short of hiring a few senior minority faculty will provide a similar network for junior minority faculty, Dartmouth could be more energetic in providing support for them.
3. The faculty seems rather content with a system by which proposals for new hires and such projects as the Humanities Center make their way up from a faculty constituency, most often a department, through the Associate Chair, to the Dean of Faculty. The Dean of Faculty made a compelling case for this process when he described the process of consultation and negotiation that occurs at every step in this process before any proposal is funded. However, if Dartmouth wants to move beyond its present practice of encouraging creativity and research on an individual level, it will, we believe, have to provide additional means within its present system for new ideas to emerge through groups of faculty or faculty together with students.

In conclusion, we want to stress the excellence of the Dartmouth faculty, and our suggestions should be understood in that context.