The Crumbling Hierarchy

Quick administrative turnover and serious criticism from both student and faculty groups have characterized the five-year tenure of Dartmouth's President David T. McLaughlin.

Last month, disapproval over the president's job performance climaxed in a heated faculty meeting debate where the Dartmouth faculty came very close to pushing through a vote of no confidence in McLaughlin's ability to govern the college.

Charging that the president is largely responsible for making the Hanover campus "the laughingstock of the nation," Dartmouth biology professor Melvin Speigel said that "if [McLaughlin] had any respect for the faculty and the college" he would resign.

Whether it's ordering the college to tear down the anti-apartheid shanties on the Green or suspending students who attempted to do the same thing two weeks ago, McLaughlin can't seem to please any faction at the otherwise sleepy New England college.

If McLaughlin, formerly chief of a large corporation, receives any praise these days, it's from those who are impressed by the growth of the college's endowment. Yet a chart in The Dartmouth's newsroom (see photo above) reveals the widespread dissatisfaction among both faculty and administrators--many of whom have left since McLaughlin's 1981 arrival.

Students on both sides of the political spectrum likewise think that the leadership at this 4000 student Ivy League school is floundering. Robert W. Flanagan, vice president of the conservative Dartmouth Review, criticizes McLaughlin's "inability to lay down the law and stick by it. Without that, you have a political football game."

"He has to get some backbone," Flanagan says.

Student liberals on campus are equally dissatisfied with McLaughlin. "There is a leadership crisis on this campus. The administration to a large degree doesn't act, it reacts," says senior Michael R. Williams, a member of the Dartmouth Community for Divestiture (DCD).

Highlighting his absence on campus the day of the Martin Luther King holiday--the president was fundraising 2500 miles away in Florida--Joseph Leake, head of the Dartmouth Afro-American Society, lays much of the blame for the campus' current strife directly on the president. "McLaughlin's lack of leadership caused the escalation," Leake says.

In the midst of the January 24 moratorium on classes, Williams addressed the problems of racial and social intolerances at a campus forum where the president was in attendance. Referring to a promise of improved racial atmosphere the president made to one Black student considering a transfer, Williams told McLaughlin "You failed me."