By his side that late evening was Steve Kadish, Dartmouth’s newly hired senior vice president and strategic advisor, who had worked for Kim as chief operating officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Earlier that year in Boston Kadish had watched Kim’s enthusiasm for Dartmouth build through the interview process. “I remember he came back from one meeting with the search committee quoting John Sloan Dickey: ‘The world’s troubles are your troubles…and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix,’ ” says Kadish. “He was on fire with the idea of what this opportunity would be.”

What neither of them anticipated on that June evening was just how unusual the coming year would be—more specifically, how much it would focus on one thing: the budget. Kim had imagined he would ease into his new role, getting to know Dartmouth before making any big changes. Instead, his first year would be consumed by financial constructs he barely understood at the time: structural gaps, smoothing formulas and endowment distributions, ultimately leading to major cost-cutting and restructuring. Instead of pleasant “get to know you” gatherings, many in the community would meet him through emotionally charged forums on the budget, town hall meetings and protests.

Although the sense of unease about budget cuts has died down considerably around campus, the budget review kicked off in 2009 continues to shape Dartmouth in profound ways. Last summer, as administrators began tackling a massive structural deficit, DAM initiated a series of interviews with Kim and other campus leaders to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how Dartmouth got through the budget crisis—and where the College goes from here.

By the time Kim took office most hoped that the worst of the 2008 financial downturn had blown through Hanover. Yes, the endowment had fallen from a high of $3.76 billion to $2.82 billion, but then-President Jim Wright had already taken decisive action, cutting $70 million from the budget and eliminating 60 jobs. Though publicly they made clear that further cuts might be necessary, privately Wright and the board of trustees also hoped they had bought Kim some breathing room.

“The objective during Jim Wright’s tenure was to try to give his successor some time to do his or her own analysis, knowing there would probably be more to do,” says Ed Haldeman ’70, the CEO of Freddie Mac who served as Dartmouth’s chairman of the board of trustees from 2007 until last June.

The analysis began right away, led by Kadish, who was no stranger to restructuring the financials of a large organization. As the undersecretary for the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services from 2003 to 2006, he had been deeply involved in a major restructuring of the $10-billion-plus department. Kadish had also been involved in the 1999 to 2002 turnaround of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, helping it go from receivership (the nonprofit equivalent of bankruptcy) to profitability in short order. Kim describes him as “one of the most brilliant budget analysts I’ve ever met.”

Among those helping Kadish was David Spalding ’76, then VP of alumni relations and now Kim’s chief of staff. A 29-year veteran of Wall Street with an M.B.A. from New York University, Spalding had worked for Chase Manhattan, First National Bank of Chicago, GE Capital Corporate Finance Group and Lehman Brothers before becoming a founding partner of the Cyprus Group, a private equity firm.

For his part, Kim was getting up to speed on financials—period. “When I started I didn’t know what private equity was,” says Kim. “I didn’t know the difference between private equity and a hedge fund. I just had a very vague sense of all that stuff.” To remedy that, trustee Bill Helman ’80, now chairman of the trustee investment committee and a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock, drove up from Boston to give Kim a crash course in finance.

Kadish and his team pored over data and asked a lot of questions. The good news, he quickly found, was that the endowment had been well managed. Despite a -19.6-percent investment return in the fiscal year (FY) ending June 30, 2009, the negative returns compared favorably with most peer institutions. And the 10-year average endowment return for the fiscal years from 2000 to 2009 was still at 8 percent, putting Dartmouth in the top 5 percent of university endowments nationally. (Now looking at the period 2001-10, which excludes a 46 percent return in FY 2000, Dartmouth’s 10-year return averages 5.1 percent, placing it within the top 20 percent of universities.)

“Some of the answers I got were disconcerting in terms of what they meant,” says Kadish. Fundamentally, Dartmouth was spending more than it was earning, and that gap was forecast to grow. Just as disconcerting was that the inherited budget was built on an assumption that the endowment would continue to grow 10 percent annually.

“Before the fall of 2008, 10 percent returns made sense,” says Spalding. After all, returns had exceeded 10 percent for the previous four years, reaching 23.7 percent in FY 2007. “But in the fall of 2009—coming off the worst year by far in recent memory and a 10-year average performance of 8 percent—it was hard to feel comfortable building a budget off those numbers,” he says.

Also unsettling was the fact that Dartmouth’s endowment distribution—the percentage of the endowment the College spends each year—was 7 percent, well above the traditional best practice of 4.5 to 5 percent. If the economy took another dive—an entirely plausible scenario, and one that Kim says he still thinks about today—Dartmouth could be facing even tougher choices.

The analysis yielded numbers that made everyone in the Kim administration gulp: If they did nothing Dartmouth would be running a deficit of about $100 million within two years.

As the fiscal crisis played out, life in Parkhurst became synchronized to the rhythm of board of trustees meetings, pizza deliveries, late-night surges in electricity use and individual sleep deficits peaking just prior.

The first meeting was a doozy for Kim, both exhilarating and sobering. On September 22, 2009, he would give his first major public address at Convocation, receive the Wentworth Bowl and officially be inaugurated as the president. The day before, the man who three months prior was fuzzy on the difference between public and private equity would stand up in front of some of the nation’s best business minds, trustees such as General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt ’78 and eBay president and CEO John Donahoe ’82, and explain to the board why the current endowment distribution was unsustainable in light of the economy. Emphasizing that all cuts would have to be strategic in order to preserve the academic experience of Dartmouth, Kim made clear the amount to be trimmed from the budget was in the neighborhood of $100 million. The board agreed.

After briefing the Faculty Committee on Priorities, Kim spelled things out clearly in an October 9, 2009, memo to faculty and staff: “First, we will reduce expenses.” It set off a firestorm of speculation and worry that hundreds of layoffs were imminent.

Having wrapped their arms around the problem for the September board of trustees meeting, Kim and his team now had until the November 5, 2009, meeting to propose a timetable and strategy for making those cuts.

The financial crisis was not unique to Dartmouth, of course. Many peer institutions chose to make budget cuts but continue to reduce their endowment expenditures slowly. For Kim, this strategy was doubly worrisome. Not only could Dartmouth face painful and undesirable financial scenarios if the economy took another dive, but a gradual reduction would mean slow but steady contraction of the endowment payouts for many years to come.

Instead, Kim homed in on a strategy put forth by Stanford University President John Hennessey: Make cuts as quickly as possible, painful as that may be, and then instead of dying the death of a thousand cuts you can begin to invest in growth. “That just made a ton of sense to me,” says Kim. “If the economy gets worse, then you’ve done a lot of important work. But if the economy improves, then you’re ready to really think about strategic planning rather than continuing to think about more and more cuts.”

After producing and refining the financial models, Kadish and his team recommended a two-year horizon, reducing the budget each year by $50 million. “Jim was hoping we could get there in one year, but it wasn’t feasible,” says Kadish.

Although they considered bringing in consulting firms including Deloitte to lead the reduction process, eyes bulged at the proposed multimillion-dollar price tags as bids came in. Instead, Kim decided to hire away one of Deloitte’s consultants, Antonia Jimenez, and use her insight on processes to work with the talent Dartmouth already had. (Kadish had worked with Jimenez twice previously, at Harvard Pilgrim and again in the Massachusetts state government.)

Kim dramatically expanded the budget committee, a group that had long met to provide advice and counsel to the president on budget matters. In October 2009 he tapped Kadish and then Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt (who has since become Dartmouth’s provost) to lead it. They increased its membership from 20 to 33, bringing in the deans and chief financial officers from the professional schools as well as additional faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, and began to meet, often on a weekly basis. The group turned its regular meeting space, 303 Parkhurst, into a hastily modernized power strip- and whiteboard-filled war room.

At the November board meeting the trustees spent hours debating the pros and cons of quick cuts vs. spreading them out over time. The argument for the slow route was that by spreading out cuts and layoffs gradually, the negative impact on campus would be lessened. “But as we talked Jim increasingly caused the board to see that it would be better for the institution to take the reductions at one time and then be able to go back to the phase of creating new programs, new experiences, growing again,” says Haldeman.

According to Kim, the board was also concerned about the impact swift cuts would have on his relationship with the Dartmouth community. “I think financially everyone felt it was the right thing to do,” says Kim of quick cuts. “They just worried that we wouldn’t survive the political fallout.”

Kim had experienced the heat of protest before, notably in 2004, when as director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department he led an initiative aimed at getting 3 million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by 2005. “There were days the BBC would light up with very critical stuff, sometimes directed at me personally, and I would walk into the office just feeling so bad, like I wanted to crawl into a hole,” says Kim. “But after a few days these things pass. What I understood from that experience is that if it’s the right thing to do, you just have to do it.”

Listen to or read enough of the administration’s budget reduction messaging and you will be clobbered over the head with the word “strategic.” Never just cuts, strategic cuts made by the Strategic Budget Reduction Initiative (SBRI)—not done across the board, mind you, but strategically. The implication to nervous College alumni and observers: Don’t worry, we’re not going to harm the “Dartmouth experience.”

Although hiring was delayed on more than a dozen vacant faculty positions, no faculty were laid off, and student academics went largely unchanged, though some course offerings were reduced.

“The most valuable experience that the students have is when they’re working intensively on projects with individual faculty members,” says Kim. “You can call that inefficient, but I would call that high value. What do we need to do to be able to create more experiences like that? I think what we need to do is to free up money from the administrative side so that we can invest more in the educational side.”

The real secret sauce to the SBRI was in the horizontal cuts, the streamlining of campuswide administrative areas such as benefits, IT, procurement and finance. This type of restructuring and belt-tightening is commonplace in business, but almost unheard of in higher education, according to Kim’s team.

As Kadish and Jimenez examined Dartmouth’s administrative systems, it was clear that inefficiencies were complicating what should be simple tasks. As they mapped each transaction, creating mind-bogglingly complex flow charts, they were surprised to see how many shadow systems existed for any given transaction. “There were tracking systems to track other departments doing their systems,” says Jimenez, “If someone lost a paper once, a system was created to prevent that problem from recurring.”

In other cases policies were inconsistent from one part of Dartmouth to another, which created confusion and led to errors. For example, one department’s travel policy required receipts for expenses of $75 and up, another for $50 and up, and a third for anything greater than $1.

“There are 3,056 staff at Dartmouth, of whom 300 or 400 touch our financial processes,” says Kadish, whose title changed to executive vice president and chief financial officer in June 2010 as part of an administrative reorganization. “Some people only do a particular transaction once or twice a month, which makes them more likely to get it wrong.”

By creating five new financial centers to centralize tasks such as processing a new hire, issuing reimbursement for travel expenses or purchasing supplies, the goal is for Dartmouth’s financial transactions to become faster, more efficient and easier to track. Two centers have already been established with three more to come.

Procurement, too, had become fragmented. The team’s analysis showed that the Dartmouth faculty and staff of 4,060 had been ordering 703 different types of pens and 204 varieties of sticky notes. The amount Kadish’s team estimated would meet 90 percent of the need? Ten pens and three sticky notes.

Kadish is quick to absolve anyone from blame for past inefficiencies, noting that it’s normal for businesses to develop this way, individuals creating systems to solve their teams’ problems. “I always say it’s good people trying to make the best decision with the information they have,” says Kadish. The SBRI, he believes, offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to organize, streamline and declutter.

“I hope that we develop ways of running Dartmouth that are more effective and less expensive and that every year we do it even better,” says Kim. “My guess is if we do that not only will we have lowered our costs, but everyone will be experiencing the new administrative structure as more effective and better.”

All in all Kim’s first year was challenging for everyone on campus. If there’s any silver lining, says Spalding, it’s that Kim was able to fundamentally shape Dartmouth faster than anyone would have expected. “Normally presidents shape an institution by looking at how to increase spending,” says Spalding. “Kim had to do it through cutting.”

Imagine for a moment your typical finance guy, the kind of hard-charger you bring in when you need to hack out tens of millions from your organization’s budget in short order. Got it? Now picture the opposite. That’s Steve Kadish.

Kadish speaks in soft, gentle tones. He specializes in the contemplative pause, making you feel how unconsidered and imprecise your thoughts are by comparison. “In one of the early budget committee meetings, Steve said something like, ‘Let’s all remember to be hard on ideas, but soft on people,’ ” says Sylvia Spears, acting dean of the College. “He’s a very calm presence.”

In many ways Kadish is a complementary counterpart to both Folt and Kim. Folt buzzes with energy. When she speaks of bringing faculty voices into the budget process, you can almost imagine her cheerfully rallying the faculty to meetings. A member of the faculty since 1983, she holds institutional knowledge that is valuable to the new administration.

By his own admission, Kadish is a worrier. “I feel like one of my jobs is to worry, and by worrying about what can go wrong, figure out how to make that not happen,” he says. “Jim is much more about new ideas and creation. He has such optimism and I believe it’s that optimism that allowed him do things in global health that were previously unthinkable.” It’s as if Kadish worries so Kim doesn’t have to.

Kim was cautiously optimistic from the start that $100 million in cuts could be identified. Folt says she knew it was possible when she saw how well the faculty and staff collaborated in budget committee meetings. It took Kadish until Saturday, December 11, 2009.

It was during a call to Folt that day when the rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what they thought they could save without doing harm to Dartmouth finally topped $90 million. “I knew some of the numbers were off, but they were off by a order of magnitude that was tolerable,” says Kadish. “That was a great moment of confidence for me. It was enough to know that it was possible to do.”

But Kadish’s confidence hadn’t yet fully solidified when, on December 1, President Kim stood before a crowd in Alumni Hall in his green-and-navy striped tie and unveiled this plan to the Dartmouth community. Framing his speech around where Dartmouth will be at its 250th anniversary in 2019, Kim provided detailed financials, explaining the structural gap and his rationale for why the College needed to cut big and move fast.

At the end of that month Dartmouth reached a milestone seven years in the making, wrapping up the $1.3-billion Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience. But what should have been an achievement to celebrate now felt like a public relations liability.

Over and over in forums and private conversations, the administration was put on the defensive. “Why can’t you just close the gap with some of that $1.3 billion you just raised?”

Before the din could grow louder, on January 15, 2010, Kim and his team held another Alumni Hall forum in which Carrie Pelzel, then-VP for development and now senior VP for advancement, offered an explanation. The College couldn’t use that $1.3 billion to cover the structural gap, she told the capacity crowd, because one portion of it had been earmarked for current use expenses and was already spent, another portion was committed to specific building projects either done or in progress, and the final portion was gifts to the endowment for specific purposes such as new professorships. She also noted that some of those funds were currently under water.

Although that largely diffused the question, the type of gala celebration that has accompanied previous campaign conclusions was intentionally tabled. The only celebration was a quick dessert-only reception, held in conjunction with a philanthropic investors’ meeting in New York City, to thank the 20 members of the campaign’s executive committee. “Given the kind of cuts we had to make,” says Pelzel, “it was just totally inappropriate for us to do anything but that.”

Between the November 2009 and February 2010 board of trustee meetings, the budget committee’s goal was to identify $100 million in savings—$50 million from FY 2011 and another $50 million from FY 2012.

It was during this time that members of the budget committee sat down individually with Kim and his team and made PowerPoint presentations about their respective areas. They also heard presentations on proposed horizontal cuts. “It was almost like Neo in The Matrix,” says Spalding. “Kim was sitting at the head of the long conference table in his office, downloading everything there was to know about facilities or athletics or admissions—asking questions, pushing back.”

One particularly painful and unpopular decision was backing off of the 2008 commitment to no-loan financial aid packages for undergraduates. Reinstating loans for families earning more than $75,000 would save Dartmouth $10 million once fully implemented for all four classes, but how would it impact students? Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Maria Laskaris ’84 and her team crunched the numbers and determined that even with loans returned to the financial aid mix, no student would graduate with more than $22,000 in loan debt. Kim, who graduated from Brown in 1983 with $40,000 in loans, thought it was an acceptable burden.

But would it leave Dartmouth unable to compete for top students? Laskaris determined that only 60 or 70 of the 2,100-plus students admitted annually were also accepted by other schools with no-loan policies. “We thought for those 60 or 70 students, we can always match [other schools’ offers],” says Kim.

Not every proposed change was adopted. One of the most publicly discussed, an unpaid furlough for employees that would take place around the December holidays, was studied and rejected. While the staff salary savings would have been significant, some staff would still be needed to keep facilities maintained and laboratory research operating. Campus leaders also worried about the College’s lowest-paid workers losing a paycheck, especially around the holidays. And while many College buildings could be shut down to save heating and electricity costs, others could not. Although a furlough would have saved an estimated $1.5 to $2 million, Kim and the budget committee decided that the savings were not worth the negative impacts it would have.

In looking for areas where Dartmouth could achieve big savings quickly, its annual healthcare bill—$44 million in FY 2009, up from $28 million just three years earlier—was an obvious choice. “It had been almost 20 years since we made significant changes,” says former chief human resources officer Traci Nordberg, who has since left for a position at Vanderbilt University. Though Dartmouth’s benefits council, a committee of faculty and staff, was in place to examine regularly the College’s benefits, in the past Nordberg says it had primarily been looking at additions rather than subtractions.

Dartmouth’s health insurance plans were “by far the most generous of any of our peers,” says Kim, basing the claim on a 2009 Hewitt Consulting report that compared health plan features and costs at 60 colleges and universities. Under the most popular plan now being offered, there is an individual deductible of $250 ($500 for two and $750 for a family) with 10 percent co-insurance. In addition, employees now shoulder a higher percentage of the cost of their premiums, now paying 25 percent, up from 20 percent. (The split for any staff member is on a sliding scale based on income; those who make $20,000 pay nothing and those making more than $200,000 pay 38 percent.) Another benefit cut came when it was decided to discontinue a 7-percent salary payment to new staff hires over the age of 40. The benefit stays in place for existing staff and faculty, as well as any new faculty hires.

By re-bidding contracts, director of facilities Linda Snyder (who is also Steve Kadish’s wife) was able to reduce the budget of the new Visual Arts Center by $10 million, largely by seeking competitive bids for different aspects of construction.

In one particularly creative move a $12-million gift from the class of 1953, designated to construct a new cafeteria in the McLaughlin Cluster on the north end of campus, was instead used to renovate Thayer Hall into the renamed Class of 1953 Commons.

The gift, given in 2003, had been in a holding pattern as Dartmouth first tackled other new building priorities. It was kept on the hold list after building estimates came in more than double the gift amount. In good times Dartmouth could take on the balance as debt. But these were not good times. “These wonderful alumni in the class of 1953 wanted to see this done,” says Pelzel. “A number of them called and said, ‘You know, we’re not getting any younger. We’d love to see this built while we’re still alive.’ ”

At the same time, Thayer was in need of renovation. Its mechanical systems were so inefficient they were heating the air around the building in the wintertime. Snyder’s team realized that the class of 1953 gift, combined with cost savings derived from greening the building, could meet both priorities.

Immediately after the board approved these changes at its February 2010 meeting, the changes to financial aid were announced, along with the stickiest wicket by far: layoffs.

Layoffs were a core issue for Students Stand With Staff, a student organization formed in January 2010 to advocate for the fair treatment of College staff during the budget crisis. On the afternoon of February 4, 2010, not long before they held an evening vigil with union workers on the Green with more than 400 attendees, at least a dozen students met with Kim, Kadish and Nordberg in Kim’s office. By all accounts, it was a contentious meeting.

Group organizer Eric Schildge ’10 describes Kim during that meeting as angry, defensive and patronizing. The students present wouldn’t have been surprised to be “patted on the head and shooed out the door,” says Schildge. Instead they were surprised by the “tongue lashing” Kim gave them.

Phoebe Gardener ’11, another organizer who was at the meeting, acknowledges that the students’ written list of demands was partly to blame for the tense mood, but was disappointed in Kim’s reaction. “Instead of embracing us as students concerned about social justice he treated us as if we didn’t have enough information to understand the issues, that it wasn’t our business and we were not financially aware enough,” she says.

Kim is quick to express regret about the tone of that meeting. What the students heard, he says, “was my frustration at the demands they were making that didn’t seem to reflect the communications that were out there. It was a moment of great frustration for me.” Shortly thereafter Kim met again with Schildge and another student. Schildge describes Kim’s tone in the meeting as “apologetic.”

“I expressed to them that I was very proud that they did what they did and that it was a moment of great courage,” says Kim. “They were making a principled stand and that was exactly what I would have them do. It’s not easy for someone who has worked for social justice his whole life to be picketed around the issue of social justice. It was not an easy thing for me to deal with personally.”

When the announcement of layoffs came on February 8, 2010, it was not as bad as many feared: 38 employees were let go, with two more added later. Kim says that he made sure to read the name of every person who was laid off. “I was later heartened by the fact that many of them were losing their jobs in areas where we’ve rehired people very quickly,” he says. “The fact that many of them had a great chance of being rehired was encouraging to me.”

Of the 100 who were laid off between Wright and Kim’s tenures, 22 have been hired back, the majority of those in jobs at Dartmouth Medical School. (Some of the others have already accepted jobs elsewhere, according to Nordberg.)

More than 100 voluntary early retirements or layoffs—sweetened by the December 2009 offer of nine months of severance, up from six—reduced the need for some involuntary layoffs, each of which averaged $70,000 in annual savings to the College.

Nonetheless, the specter of layoffs during a prolonged period was stressful for staff. All staff and faculty salaries were frozen in FY 2010. In FY 2011 staff received an across-the-board 1 percent raise; faculty received 3 percent. The professional schools also had a pool of money equal to 1 percent of staff salaries to distribute at their discretion as merit raises.

In the end the staff raise proved a de facto reduction for roughly half, whose 1 percent raise was eclipsed by the increase in health insurance premiums that began in January 2010, resulting in a decreased or near-flat amount of take-home pay. The administration’s implication has been that staff didn’t mind the cutbacks because the alternative was layoffs. But quietly, many were frustrated.

“Of course we mind [the pay freeze],” exclaims one staff member who asked to remain anonymous. “Nobody wants layoffs, but at the same time, our salaries haven’t gone up. People are not happy about it.” Other staff report that many of their colleagues share a simmering resentment and frustration that they bore the brunt of the cutbacks while the faculty went untouched. In that context, objectively small changes such as raising annual parking fees from $6 to $12 per month for non-exempt and hourly workers and from $10 to $30 a month for exempt and salaried workers—which increases revenue by $400,000 annually—have raised the blood pressure of more than a few. “How many people do you know who have to pay for parking at their job?” asks one staffer.

By the fall 2010 the SBRI had pinned down $83 million of the needed $100 million, and the bulk of its energy had shifted from discovery to execution, an important if somewhat less dramatic process of project management and business process design.

The first year of an exercise such as this is oddly straightforward, says Kadish, in that it’s a process of examining the numbers and making a plan. The second year, he says, is harder as it deals with more of the cross-institutional issues and seeks to sustain momentum. “After the first year some people feel like, ‘We did it! Now we can go back to the way we used to do things,’ ” he says. “The second year is about maintaining the culture of continuous improvement you’re trying to build.”

Continuous improvement, however, doesn’t come without controversy. According to an October 19, 2010, article in The Dartmouth, several administrators expressed frustration with the new Ricoh copy machines mandated by procurement, complaining—largely anonymously—that the machines were slower and lacked some of the features of the previous models.

“To be honest, it was a very bumpy rollout,” admits Kadish. “About 80 percent went smoothly, but parts of it happened too quickly. We had a team of 12 Ricoh employees here for a couple of months and we went through everybody’s issues. We really feel as though that’s behind us and we learned a lot about communicating and responding.”

In addition, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 560 filed a grievance with the College, claiming unfair labor practices regarding the introduction of W.B. Mason as the sole vendor for office supplies. The union doesn’t object to W.B.  Mason as a vendor, but union employees previously had delivered supplies from a warehouse in nearby Lebanon, New Hampshire; now W.B. Mason delivers supplies directly to College offices.

“By subcontracting out our work, we’re losing work, which is an unfair labor practice,” SEIU President Earl Sweet told The Dartmouth in October 2010. “It’s very concerning to us that they keep subcontracting out our jobs, because we all eventually might not have jobs.”

The union has filed several other grievances against the College. When management of the Hanover Inn was outsourced to Pyramid Hotel Group in August 2010 union employees retained their jobs at the same wages but, Sweet says, with greatly reduced benefits. In addition, union employees at Dartmouth Medical School’s Café North were reassigned when the College closed it in June 2009. Despite giving the union repeated assurances that Café North would not reopen, says Sweet, the College has given a local bagel shop use of the space, in effect subcontracting jobs, as was done at the Inn.

From the beginning of the budget crisis Sweet and the union have been Kim’s most vocal critics. Although no union members have been fired or laid off, according to Sweet, 114 union jobs have been lost through retirement and are not being filled. (There are now approximately 400 union workers employed at the College and another 50 at the Hanover Inn.) Sweet understands the need for budget cuts, but he says it feels as though Kim and his team have used the budget crisis as an opportunity to reorganize and eliminate jobs in a way that was not transparent. “In many ways the nonunion employees have it worse than we do,” says Sweet. “We can speak up. They are afraid to.

“I could talk to President Wright,” says Sweet. “President Kim is not that open.” However, Sweet admits he has not requested time to meet with Kim. When asked in January to respond, Kim noted, “I would happily meet with Earl Sweet anytime he wants to meet with me.”

Recently news on the endowment has been positive. The value of the endowment is up to $2.99 billion. The 10 percent returns that the administration did not want to depend on back in 2009 did in fact transpire for FY 2010 [ending June 30]. Those gains reduced by about $3 million the amount Kadish and his team needed to cut from the budget. However, Kadish notes that going forward the vast majority of endowment returns that exceed projections will be put into strategic reserves and not credited to any budget cuts.

A plan to close the full $100 million gap through FY 2012 was presented to the board of trustees in April. The normal rates of hiring and letting go have resumed; barring another financial downturn, there will not be any focused program of layoffs.

From his office—now filled with books and decorated with a statue of Daniel Webster (class of 1801), a drawing of Samson Occom and a mosaic of the 16 previous College presidents—Kim is excited about returning to the phase of leadership where he can influence Dartmouth by addition rather than subtraction.

As he went through the interview process more than two years ago, Kim was electrified to learn about the job of a college president—an avocation he had never before considered. He was excited by the impact his position could have, as he puts it, “on students, on scholarship, on real problems that exist both in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont and in the nation and the world.” Though that excitement was muted somewhat by the financial crisis, Kim admits the feeling has returned.

“We still have some things to do and adjustments to make,” he says, “but there’s no doubt we are fully into the phase of looking forward.”

Julie Sloane is a frequent contributor to DAM. A former writer for Fortune Small Business, she lives in Pennsylvania.

Is the Lawsuit Over?
A New Hampshire judge ruled in early January that the seven alumni plaintiffs suing the College over representation on the board of trustees lacked standing to bring the action. The College’s request for summary judgment was granted as the judge ruled the claims had already been dismissed—with prejudice—in an earlier lawsuit. “We urge the plaintiffs not to appeal,” said Dartmouth general counsel Robert Donin, “at a time when the College is addressing the impact of the prolonged economic downturn.”

Quake Relief
Two weeks after the devastating earthquake in Haiti students had raised $133,000 for relief efforts. The money was donated to Partners In Health, the organization co-founded by President Jim Kim. At the same time two teams of doctors and nurses from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center departed to treat quake victims.

Dunn Quits
Men’s basketball coach Terry Dunn suddenly resigned on January 8, the day before Ivy League play was to begin. Media reports—and several DAM sources—indicated a player revolt led to the resignation, but acting Athletic Director Bob Ceplikas ’78 denied it. “I have no idea how they got that,” he said. “This was Terry’s decision.” It’s well known that Dunn ran tough practices, but players refused to talk about the abrupt resignation. The College named Mark Graupe, a first-year assistant coach, as interim coach. “We told the athletic director that we didn’t want anyone coming in from the outside,” said team captain Robbie Pride ’10. “With there being so much drama lately we need stability and positive energy, and Coach Graupe gives us that.” Graupe said he was grateful for the opportunity. “In the next two months I’m simply going to work very hard and, with the help of the coaching staff and administration, do my best to guide these young men through the rigors of the Ivy season,” he said. The team’s record through January was 4-12. Dunn’s record through five and a half seasons was 47-103.

Time to Vote Again
Three alums are vying for two seats on the board of trustees. Longtime Beltway journalist Morton Kondracke ’60 and businessman John Replogle ’88 were nominated by the Alumni Council. Petition candidate Joe Asch ’79 will run against Replogle; Kondracke will run unopposed. Although the most contentious campaign issue of recent years has been parity on the board of trustees—those in favor want an equal number of alumni-elected and board-chosen trustees—neither Kondracke nor Replogle have a stand on the issue. “I’m still listening to arguments on both sides,” says Kondracke. Replogle says he will wait until he speaks to trustees after the election. Asch, a Hanover-area businessman who runs Dartblog, a Web site often critical of the College, is clear on the issue. “In 1891 the alumni and the College agreed to parity on the board of trustees,” he says. “We should honorably respect that agreement without having to ask a judge whether it is legally binding.” Trustee voting runs March 10 through April 7.

The X Factor
An early-morning fire at the Phi Delta Alpha house on January 9 left much of the third floor damaged and the rest of the house inundated with smoke and water. A cracked chimney in the 100-year-old structure may have been the cause. No residents suffered any injuries, thanks to two brothers who had been up all night when the 5 a.m. alarm went off and were able to rouse the other residents. And what were Lane Zimmerman ’11 and Adi Sivaraman ’10 doing up so late? Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on an Xbox.

Floored
The U.S. House of Representatives has lauded the Dartmouth Outing Club. Rep. Paul Hodes ’72 (D-NH) introduced a resolution praising the club for its “100 years of service to the United States and its wilderness” that was passed in mid-January. “The Outing Club has always been a point of pride on campus,” says Hodes.

Make Me An Offer…
When Tuck professor Richard D’Aveni asks his “Advanced Competitive Strategy” students to study The Godfather, he’s not encouraging a life of crime. Instead, the movie demonstrates three business strategies he teaches in class, all exemplified by a member of the Corleone family. D’Aveni argues that Vito (Marlon Brando) conducts his business as “a government in hiding, dispensing justice, watching out for the neighborhood like a Robin Hood figure,” while Vito’s son Sonny (James Caan) engages in “a war of annihilation,” attempting to overwhelm competition with the force of an army. The most successful Corleone, Michael (Al Pacino), practices what D’Aveni calls “hyper-competition and globalization.” As he spreads his influence to Cuba and Las Vegas Michael “revolutionizes the industry by destroying the competitive advantage of his rivals,” says the prof. And what do students think? Some feel it’s impossible to compare organized crime to business, but others come to appreciate the film more. “You have to start thinking like a Sicilian,” says D’Aveni, “to examine the fine, little details and interconnections.”

Dollars and Degrees
Based on annual tuition and room and board fees of $49,974, Dartmouth is the 36th most expensive college in the land, according to CampusGrotto.com. That makes the College the second-most expensive Ivy, behind Cornell. Here are the overall top five: Sarah Lawrence College ($54,410), NYU ($51,991), George Washington University ($51,730), Bates College ($51,300) and Skidmore College ($51,196).

]]> http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/campus-4/feed/ 0 http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/taking-charge-2/ http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/taking-charge-2/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:31:15 +0000 suejenks http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/?p=5288 Ever since the March 2 announcement that Jim Yong Kim would become Dartmouth’s 17th president, speculative chatter has coursed through academic and healthcare circles. The global health crowd wonders why Kim chose Dartmouth over leadership posts in infectious diseases and healthcare delivery—and the Obama administration, which considered him. Academicians note his atypical resume for a college president. Among alumni and students questions continue to circulate: How was he chosen? Why did he accept? What are his goals? How will the College change under Kim’s leadership?

Kim has touched on the answers in many public and private forums. He’s met with Dartmouth alumni, faculty, administrators, students and prospective students. He’s given numerous interviews, and his comments about Dartmouth’s assets, legacy and potential have been widely viewed on YouTube and other sites.

Listening to these speeches could easily convince one that Kim’s lifelong goal was not just to lead a college but, singularly, to be president of Dartmouth. His excitement is that genuine and, by the accounts of many, contagious—even off campus. A June event in Boston at which Kim was introduced to alumni and parents attracted 450 people, the largest crowd in memory for a presidential event.

Even as medical school commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient last May at his alma mater, Brown University, Kim wove in a reference to John Sloan Dickey ’29, Dartmouth’s president from 1945 to 1970. In exhorting the 90 newly minted doctors to use their education and skills to serve the greater good, Kim quoted Dickey’s maxim, “The world’s troubles are your troubles,” then proceeded to answer the question that even there hung in the air. After all, Brown was honoring Kim based on his accomplishments as a global health physician. What kind of career move was this detour to Hanover?

Kim’s answer was unequivocal: “It is the greatest privilege of my life.”

In a wide-ranging interview in June as he wrapped up his global health work at Harvard, Kim crisply ticked off the things that convinced him to take his new job, especially the undergraduate college with what he describes as some of the smartest young people on the planet taught by talented faculty dedicated to undergraduate education. “This is rare and precious,” says Kim. “I don’t think there’s another college or university where I’d want to be president.”

He also cited Dartmouth’s graduate and research institutions—Tuck School, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice—as well as the College’s beautiful and largely cloistered setting, which—as Kim sees it—enables students to spend four years intensely engaged in their studies, faculty and peer interactions and social organizations. Kim includes in this last category clubs, arts groups, student government and publications, environmental and political organizations, the College’s extensive sports programs, and the fraternities and sororities that he and his pediatrician wife, Younsook Lim, and their two young sons will live among when they move into the president’s house on Webster Avenue. (For the time being Kim is camped out in an apartment while the president’s house undergoes a renovation that will, among other things, make it fully accessible to those with physical limitations as well as wired for 24/7 teleconferencing.)

“It is a phenomenal environment for learning and scholarship,” says Kim of the College.

But Kim will also tell anyone who asks—he actually made a point of it in his speech at Brown—that being a college president never crossed his mind until he started talking to the Dartmouth search team last fall. And while his enthusiasm and graceful demeanor has been widely reported and commented upon—he listens respectfully, he doesn’t shout or strut, he’s egalitarian and keenly interested in new ideas—it would be a mistake to underestimate the strategic thinking he brings to any decision.

The evidence of Kim’s career shows him to be a man of steely resolve: ambitious, willing to challenge the status quo and unwavering in the pursuit of goals. He comes to Dartmouth deeply serious about the mission the trustees have handed him: to build, in Kim’s words, “the highest quality, most extraordinary undergraduate education the world has ever seen.”

That Kim lacks the resume of a typical college president, with stints in deanships and administrative posts, is largely irrelevant, former colleagues say.

“Jim is a very unusual person in that he is both an anthropologist and a physician, with the broadest possible worldview but also great expertise in his field and the ability to stimulate curiosity in students,” says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s William H. Foege, Kim’s global health colleague and former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There aren’t many people who are good researchers, good clinicians and good teachers.”

Also off point, say people who know Kim, are the headlines that have sought to compartmentalize him as the first Asian president of an Ivy League college, a world-health pioneer, an advocate for the poor, a tuberculosis (TB) expert. Indeed Kim is every one of these things, but more significantly he is someone who consistently steps off paths hedged by conventional definitions of success to seek ever-broader intellectual challenges.

“People think of me as a global health person, but it’s just one part of what I do,” Kim says. “A lot of what I’ve done with AIDS and TB has more to do with being an anthropologist than a physician. My interest in infectious diseases is not so much the biology as the way infectious diseases lead to an understanding of poverty and its effects. Lately I’ve been looking at business models—how can we better apply marketing, strategy and operational management to make people better off? Because around our most cherished social goals—health, the environment, a mother’s ability to feed her child—we’ve tolerated horrifically bad execution. It’s inexcusable.”

The process that united Kim and Dartmouth was remarkable both for its serendipity and the way the parties came to share common purpose.

The College began its search for a new president in spring 2008 following Jim Wright’s announcement that he would retire as of June 30, 2009. The trustees engaged John M. Isaacson ’68, president of Isaacson, Miller, a Boston-based search firm that specializes in recruiting executives for nonprofit organizations, notably colleges and universities. In an interview Isaacson described the process that eventually led to the trustees’ unanimous selection of Kim as one of “definition, discovery and learning.”

The definition part—what exactly did Dartmouth want from its next president?—was the most arduous, Isaacson says. Besides meetings with faculty, students, alumni and other constituencies, it included focused research on characteristics of successful academic leaders, according to the head of the search committee, trustee Albert G. Mulley Jr. ’70, chief of general internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of health policy at Harvard’s medical school. From these early soundings emerged a 25-page document, “The Opportunity for Leadership at Dartmouth,” that was given to each candidate. (To view, go to www.dartmouth.edu/presidentsearch.)

The document is remarkable for the fervor with which it states Dartmouth’s historic achievements, purpose, ambition and expectations of its 17th president. Sections are set off by quotes from Dartmouth presidents and alumni. Daniel Webster, class of 1801: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Ernest Martin Hopkins, class of 1901 and president, 1916 to 1945: “Education is not with what men shall do, but with what men should be.” Richard Hovey, class of 1885 and composer of the College alma mater: “Tho’ ’round the girdled earth they roam, Her spell on them remains.” And, of course, the Dickey quote repeated at the Brown medical school commencement.

The narrative of the document employs similarly stirring language: “The next president of Dartmouth will build on a rich tradition and an impressive trajectory. Through the generations, Dartmouth recruited and educated leaders and it preached intellect, virtue and courage. Even as it has retained its commitment to teaching, to building character and to personal transformation, the College has placed new importance on the task of personal learning by fostering partnerships between students and faculty for research and independent study, intuitively understanding that the future belongs to leaders who are inspired, creative and unafraid.”

According to Mulley and trustee chair Charles E. “Ed” Haldeman Jr. ’70, the tone was intentional; trustees did not want candidates looking simply to notch a college presidency. In crafting it, Isaacson and the search committee used actual phrases that alumni, faculty and students had said or written to make their hopes and expectations known.

“We wanted to stop, look, listen and learn as much as we could from all the constituencies of Dartmouth, so we put up a Web site that had literally thousands of postings,” Mulley says. “The language [in the “Opportunity for Leadership” document] about Dartmouth’s legacy of forming leaders and about people going forward with inspiration and courage came from there. We were trying to capture the spirit of the dialogue, but we were also trying to put something out there that would attract people who had demonstrated that they personally were committed, inspired and unafraid.”

Kim’s name did not even appear in the database of prospective college presidents that Isaacson’s firm keeps and turned to in the early stages of the Dartmouth search.

Kim had returned to Harvard in December of 2005, after three years in Geneva with the World Health Organization, where he’d revolutionized international policy on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and greatly expanded the number of AIDS patients receiving antiviral therapy in poor countries.

For these accomplishments and his longtime work with Partners in Health, the visionary international health organization that Kim cofounded in 1987 with Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl and which was featured in Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kim had received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2003. He also was elected to the prestigious Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

In quick succession U.S. News & World Report named Kim one of America’s 25 best leaders and in 2006 Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Harvard, for its part, bestowed not one but three department chairmanships: director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, chair of the department of global health and social medicine at the medical school, and chief of the division of global health equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Kim was in demand nationally and internationally as a lecturer, serving on numerous advisory committees related to health and poverty and also collaborating with Farmer in designing and teaching an enormously popular undergraduate course on global health. The tight-knit global health community fully expected the 49-year-old physician to take on ever more influential positions in infectious disease treatment and prevention. According to Howard Hiatt, former dean of Harvard’s school of public health and a mentor to Kim, his former student was constantly fielding recruiting proposals from medical schools and elsewhere.

Then Kim, knowing nothing of Dartmouth’s search, met Mulley in September of last year. Although both men were faculty physicians at Harvard, their paths had not previously crossed in the medical school’s maze of divisions, departments, specialties and subspecialties. That first encounter was on a subject of shared interest: how to improve health systems operationally so as to deliver better treatment to more patients.

“This was not connected to the search at all,” Mulley says, “but as I got to know more about him I started thinking how Jim had used his undergraduate education, his medical training and his anthropology studies to tackle some of the most difficult issues globally, and also how he had committed himself and his education in a way that involved some personal sacrifice.” The two men continued to meet. Mulley eventually introduced the topic of Dartmouth and invited Kim to throw his application into the pool.

Kim, for his part, attributes his decision to do so to Hiatt, who advised him to take Mulley’s suggestion seriously, as well as to conversations with other mentors and educators, including Brown president Ruth Simmons. The idea of leading an undergraduate institution intrigued him partly because of his own college experience, which he described in his medical school speech as “the defining experience of my life.” Still, Kim wasn’t sure. Then he read “Opportunity for Leadership” and, he says, was com-pletely “blown away.”

“I’d seen similar [recruiting summaries] and I even went on the Internet to pull up a few from universities that were looking for presidents, just to compare,” Kim says. “They were cursory and full of platitudes; Dartmouth’s was literary! It was so interesting that I began reading further, specifically about past Dartmouth presidents.”

His conversations with Mulley, Haldeman and various alumni clinched his interest, Kim says, recalling alumni who teared up when they spoke of what Dartmouth meant to them and how it had influenced their lives.

According to Hiatt, Kim’s decision to take up Dartmouth’s challenge is consistent with his broad view of education and its applicability in the world—though Hiatt is somewhat rueful about his role in encouraging Kim’s interest.

“It’s a brilliant move on the part of Dartmouth,” Hiatt says. “But you can’t imagine what a severe loss it is to us here at Harvard.”

Born in South Korea, the second of three children, Kim grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, population 22,000, where he distinguished himself at Muscatine High School as valedictorian, president of his class, a point guard on the basketball team and quarterback of the football team. Nevertheless, he says he came to Brown with a chip on his shoulder about being Korean. Despite his family’s collective accomplishments, Muscatine’s only Asian family was not entirely accepted in the community. Stares—and sometimes jeers—were not unusual on trips to the mall, Kim says.

“So in addition to my classes at Brown [where he graduated magna cum laude] I spent a lot of time in the Third World Center with the African American and Latino students where we were constantly debating and trying to come up with a rationale that united us,” Kim recalls. “One of the sillier things we came up with was that all of us liked spicy food. Why? Because our ethnic and cultural roots were in poor countries where people use spices to liven up really dull food—rice, beans and, in my case, kimchi, cabbage.”

Kim recounts this lightly. As an anthropologist he understands the power of personal stories to capture emblematic human experiences and forge connections with people of different backgrounds. But his appreciation goes beyond scholarly interest: Kim is a natural storyteller who has plumbed his experiences as student, teacher, scientist, colleague, social activist, son, husband and father to find stories with universal appeal and the power to drive home a point.

Characteristically, this one about the debates at the Third World Center, though told with perfect comedic timing, has a serious point. The discussions about race with other students of color—and their ultimately fruitless search for a clean divide between whites and nonwhites—enabled him to move beyond introspection to an understanding of his cultural and racial heritage in context, whether the setting was the Third World Center or back home on school breaks where Kim says his late “practical dentist father,” a two-time immigrant and escapee from repressive North Korea, thunderously denounced his son’s penchant for “non-science courses.” Kim has thought a lot more since contemplating the Dartmouth job about his experiences as a college student and the influence of his undergraduate years on the trajectory of his life and career.

“The thing I became aware of was the extraordinary combination of race, culture and class,” Kim says. “I decided to go to medical school for those ‘real skills’ my father wanted for me, but at the same time I decided to study anthropology.”

Kim undertook these studies at Harvard. For his Ph.D. thesis in anthropology, Kim investigated the economic and political role of pharmaceuticals in Korean medical practice—research that required him to travel to South Korea and learn his ancestral language. “What I discovered there was that while I looked like everyone else in Korea, in my head I was American,” Kim says. “I saw things differently. Culture, I realized, was layer upon layer upon layer. I came away from that four- to five-year investment in intensive study largely a universalist.”

This applies professionally as well. His specialized degrees notwithstanding, Kim works hard at being a generalist because, like an antenna searching for signals, he wants to be open to information from all sources, not just science and anthropology but economics, political science, music, literature, languages and the many out-of-classroom activities and experiences that make up a Dartmouth education.

For example, Kim loves sports—both as a player and as an educator. He played competitive volleyball well into his 30s, has recently returned to golf (in which he was once a single-digit handicapper) and, more casually, despite his habitual long work days, says he looks forward to playing Frisbee with students on the Green. By week two of his tenure he had played golf with both students and trustees, teeing off in the rain with students at 5 a.m. for 12 holes before a morning meeting.

Kim is thrilled by the fact that roughly 80 percent of Dartmouth students participate in varsity, club and intramural sports. He also values social organizations, including the fraternities and sororities that are periodically controversial at Dartmouth, as at other colleges. “There’s a ton of evidence that participation in team sports and social organizations nurtures intellect,” Kim notes.

This capacity to seek out and apply useful information from disparate sources marked Kim’s work with Partners in Health to address critical health needs in Haiti and Peru and, later, with the World Health Organization (WHO) to improve TB and AIDS treatment in poor countries.

“Jim really has a rigor for thinking through problems and finding pathways to solutions that no one else sees,” says longtime colleague Ophelia Dahl, executive director at Partners in Health. “There are a lot of door-closers, the people who say: ‘No, I don’t think we can do that.’ ‘No, there’s no funding.’ ‘No, that’s not how we do things here.’ Jim asks the right questions and knows how to advocate and make the case.”

The best way to understand what that means is to take an example from Kim’s past: his successful challenge to business as usual at WHO with regard to MDR-TB.

MDR-TB can be cured only with special drugs that have historically been priced out of reach of poor countries. WHO officials had long accepted the drug prices as a given, and from this assumption flowed a policy that essentially abandoned poor patients with this lethal strain of TB.

Shocked by the equation’s utilitarian brutality, Kim questioned why the price had to be a given. After determining with his research team that all but one of the MDR-TB drugs lacked patent protection yet still were priced hugely above the cost of production, Kim recast price not as a given but as an X variable and through a complex market strategy negotiated price reductions of as much as 90 percent.

His approach to this problem can’t be described as purely medical or anthropological, and it certainly wasn’t grounded in conventional global health thinking. The drivers of his analysis came from the academic disciplines of economics, political science and mathematics.

The implications are many as Kim begins his examination of givens and potential variables at Dartmouth. Kim has repeatedly asserted that he intends to begin slowly in order to learn from as many constituencies as possible and to familiarize himself with the College’s operating structure. But people who know him well say the wait for action is not likely to be long.

“Jim’s analytical approach is evidence-based, and once the evidence is there he is decisive and acts boldly,” says Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and professor of medical anthropology at Harvard who has known Kim since he was a medical student.

What changes might be in store for Dartmouth are impossible to predict at this point. The first crop of freshmen under Kim’s tenure has yet to arrive for first-year trips. But there are clues. For one thing, Kim is a sharp critic of prevailing approaches to diversity at colleges and universities because they overlook the fundamental role of cultural identity in how people see the world and apply their intellect and creativity. He cites, among other examples, the largely racially based method of measuring and describing population mix—black, white, Asian, Hispanic—and the prevalence of “political correctness” which, according to Kim, stifles honest engagement and hides issues that ought to be aired.

“The way we deal with diversity on American campuses is so superficial that it is dangerous,” Kim says. “The worst of it is that smart young people can see through the superficiality and conclude that diversity is not important or that the shallow, stylized way we deal with cultural competence is sufficient. It is not. In the end we have to understand each other’s humanity.”

Kim has great faith in the ability of undergraduates to grasp that humanity and believes the undergraduate years are the most fertile for inculcating in students a broad worldview, confidence in their ability to surmount obstacles and the capacity for informed risk-taking—all attributes of leaders.

The scientist in him makes the case biologically: 18- to 22-year-old brains are still developing, the myelin is not all there and the neural pruning that leads to streamlined—but also more cautious—adult thinking isn’t complete. Parents, teachers, administrators and Dartmouth’s Safety & Security staff are very familiar with the downside. This age group tends to leap before it looks. But their openness of mind to ideas, to new ways of doing things and to people not like themselves, far outweighs deficits in maturity. It’s one of the reasons Kim says he and Farmer explicitly chose to create and teach a global health course at Harvard for undergraduates, despite their heavy teaching and mentoring loads at the medical school level and an institutional emphasis on graduate students.

“What a place like Rwanda or some other poor country needs more than anything else is people willing to take the steps necessary to understand Rwanda and the Rwandan people on their own terms and to identify solutions within that framework,” Kim says. “This requires a strong liberal arts education to achieve the suppleness of mind necessary to creatively use what’s available. At the end of four years students should be shot out into the world with vision, passion, humility and determination no matter how they choose to use their education.”

Kim’s speeches are replete with references to all that Dartmouth has to deploy toward this goal. But he’s also demonstrated in his global health work and his teaching and research at Harvard that he’s a stickler for execution. At Dartmouth this is certain to play out broadly, whether the issue is campus life, alumni affairs, technology or how scholarly ideas are translated in the classroom.

“We have to identify the areas of excellence at Dartmouth but we also have to look at other campuses and capture their best ideas,” Kim says. “And we have to be willing to experiment—to test our best hunches and see what happens. Are we being as effective as we can be at turning on young peoples’ intellect and curiosity? Are there teaching techniques that encourage students to operationalize what they learn, essentially helping them to experience leadership?”

That’s a sampling of the directions in which Kim is likely to move Dartmouth, though by no means comprehensive. Indeed, Steven Kadish, a longtime public health administrator who helped Kim operationalize goals at Harvard and now is Kim’s strategic advisor at Dartmouth, says they have a standing joke: “Only one new idea per day.”    

Irene M. Wielawski is a freelance journalist who lives in Pound Ridge, New York.

Kim’s First Day

A different kind of College tour took place on July 1, one that did not feature an undergrad walking backward while talking to prospectives. Instead President Jim Kim started his new job by venturing around campus to meet and greet staff, faculty and students and to check out his new domain. His first official address as Dartmouth’s 17th president came before a crowd of staffers at the Top of the Hop. “What we’re doing here on a day-to-day basis is going to change the world,” he declared. During the next two days Kim shared a similar vision with faculty, students, athletics and development staff as he toured the professional schools and hospital. “I’m thrilled to see how great it all is up close,” he said. Kim also joined a community gathering on the Green, where free ice cream took the edge off threatening skies.

Back To Iowa
The immensely popular—and effective—dean of the College, Tom Crady, announced suddenly in June that he was leaving his job for family reasons. Crady, who spent 25 years at Grinnell College in Iowa prior to coming to Hanover, said he would be returning to the Hawkeye State to engage in “a series of new projects.” Sylvia Spears, director of the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, has been named acting dean.

Down Goes Brewster
Workers demolished Brewster Hall, a former dorm, in mid-August to make room for the new Visual Arts Center. The building, constructed in 1938 to house Hanover Inn employees, had also been home to Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority and the International House through the years. Said Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman: “There’s a lot of history that’s coming down with these bricks.”

His Day Has Come
With his extended family in the front rows and featuring speakers ranging from New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, trustee ex officio, to best friend Paul Farmer, President Jim Yong Kim officially took the reins of the College September 22. Describing Kim as “inspiring” and “focused,” students, faculty and alumni alike said they were impressed not only by the content of Kim’s speech—a call to obtain an education that can be used to solve the world’s problems—but also by his delivery. Many mentioned the “joyous” feeling of a day punctuated by student performances and a solo rendition of “Take Care of This House” by Heidi Kim, sister of the president. “There is so much good will,” said Jim Wooster ’59, Th’60, Tu’60, one of many local alums among the crowd of 5,000. “I liked hearing about President Kim as a person,” said Crishuana Williams ’12. “He was engaging,” said Bianca Cole ’12. “I want to go to his office hours.” “That he spoke to the practicality of the humanities was important,” said art history professor Kathleen Corrigan. “It’s a good place to begin.”

Helping Hands
A young Iraqi burn victim brought to the United States by the Maryland-based foundation Hope M.D. will soon be returning home after a series of pro bono operations performed at DHMC by pediatric surgeon Dr. Mitchell Stotland, Adv’07. Now 22 months old, the girl arrived in Hanover in June, seven months after suffering third-degree burns over much of her upper body in an explosion of unknown origin in her neighborhood. Getting the child here despite obstacles imposed by the military was almost as difficult as the surgeries, say Hope M.D. volunteers. Foundation co-founder Jon Heavey ’98, an Army surgeon who served in Iraq and is now completing his tour of duty at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., initiated contact with Dartmouth by reaching out to student activities director Linda Kennedy. The child has been comforted by her mother while staying in the home of two College employees: Amin Plaisted, a senior programmer, and his wife, Nahid Tabatabai, a research associate in the economics department.

New Trustees Named
In June the board added two charter trustees, Denise Dupre ’80 and William W. Helman IV ’80. Dupre, an economics major, is an adjunct professor at Harvard University Extension and the oldest of four sisters who attended Dartmouth. Helman, who majored in history and economics, is a partner with Greylock, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley.

Happy Feet
Men’s soccer got off to a great start this season, posting a 5-2-1 record through September. Ranked as high as fifth nationally early on, the team didn’t give up a goal through its first four games. Freshman goalkeeper Sean Donovan ’12 was named the Ivy League Co-Rookie of the Week following his efforts in a shutout of UConn, another top-20 team. Heading into October Ivy League play, the team was ranked 18th. “I think we’ll be a dangerous opponent,” said coach Jeff Cook.

Pillow Talk
Meet the Sexperts, a group of 90 students who have undergone extensive training to advise fellow students on the most intimate of topics. Some, such as Adi Rattner ’10, a premed major from Baltimore, plan on careers in reproductive health. “This program allows students to discuss healthy sexuality and ways to minimize risk when one becomes sexually active,” says Kari Jo Grant, coordinator of health education programs.“It’s good to have these conversations in the daytime because generally students get together for sex at night after alcohol has been consumed,” adds Sexpert Elizabeth Howland ’11, an anthropology major. “That’s not the time to be figuring out how to put on a condom correctly.”

Centuries of Service
The 10 current Dartmouth employees who’ve worked on campus longer than anyone else have a combined 411 years at the College (as of August). All of them have been working here since the class of 1969 matriculated.