Dartblog

The Valley News Rises (Blindly) to Defend the Retiree Death Benefit

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-09-02T04:00:00-05:00

Heart in hand as always, the Editorial Board of the Valley News rose to defend the downtrodden retirees of the College who have newly lost their $5,000 death benefit. Sadly, but too predictably, the Editors' eleemosynary reflex is not backed up by any economic research. The Board's first concern is one of expectation: that retirees have been led to rely on this benefit. But a contract argument does not work for me; all agreements between Dartmouth and its employees contain an explicit clause saying that benefits can be changed at any time by the College -- as the VN itself noted in a previous article on this subject.

Of greater interest in the editorial is the VN's evocation of the College's "stated intention of shielding lower paid employees from the impact of budget cuts as much as possible." I guess that the VN staffers feel the pain of the supposed poor.

But before we all join in a group hug, let's actually look at these lower paid employees. How much money do they actually make compared to other workers in the local labor market?

Currently the College is advertising an opening for a Cook Helper. This union position is a Job Grade A category posting, meaning that after a year it will pay $15.82/hour ($33,905/year). In addition, Dartmouth will contribute an additional 10% of that amount into the worker's pension fund. The College offers full health insurance for the worker's entire family for only a modest contribution. And the worker, after being on staff for one year, will receive 15 days of paid vacation, 11 days of paid personal leave, and four days of break between Xmas and New Year's (that's a total of 30 days of paid time off: six weeks).

Not bad. Not bad at all. Keep in mind that this is a Job Grade A hire -- the lowest paid union position at the College.

Now let's look at what a Cook Helper might make at a local restaurant. A quick canvas of several local eateries reveals that employees with similar responsibilities would be paid only $10-13/hour ($20,800-$27,040/year); after 6-12 months on the job they would receive about a 50% contribution to their personal health insurance (and nothing for their families); they would get absolutely no pension contribution; and after their first year of employment they would earn 7-10 vacation days (one and a half to two weeks).

And most definitely, they would not get a retiree death benefit -- which, as we have previously seen, is something that only DHMC and Dartmouth offer(ed) among all of the private employers in the Upper Valley.

Conclusion: If the Editors of the Valley News want to climb onto their high horse and ride out to defend the poor, the last place that they should start is with the employees of Dartmouth College -- the Kings and Queens of the local labor force, whose overall compensation is at least twice what an equivalent worker in the private sector earns.

Our Problems Are Also the (Academic) World's Problems

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-09-01T16:03:26-05:00

Lest you think that the various management and administrative problems that this page decries on a regular basis are in any way unique to Dartmouth, Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, described in a recent NYT op-ed how similar problems affect all of higher education.

Taylor is the author of the newly released "Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities." I have not yet read the book (it came out yesterday), but its reviews (WSJ, National Review, nothing yet in the Times) indicate it to be a worthy addition to a library of similarly minded books.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-09-01T04:00:00-05:00

A little while ago I wrote about the disappointing labor situation at DHMC, and how the hospital seemed to replicate the poor work environment at the College. At a certain point, money and benefits are no longer the primary motivators for employees -- even though employees at both places are awash in them:

Employees care much less about "a lack of raises, loss of vacation time, hospital overcrowding and mandatory overtime" than they do about being listened to, respected, appreciated, and given credit for their contributions to an institution. People want to work at a place that they value for its intelligence, efficiency, and effectiveness in making the lives of its customers better.

If you want to see these thoughts expressed more completely, take a look at this wonderfully engaging and creative, 11-minute video from Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Defining John Sloan Dickey's "World"

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-31T04:00:00-05:00

We've all heard ad infinitum John Sloan Dickey's memorable phrase from his Convocation address in 1946: "The world's troubles are your troubles ... and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix." President Kim repeats it very frequently, and he invoked it when the College rushed aid to Haiti after that country's earthquake.

But how should the College approach problems in other nations? As these pictures illustrate, current flooding in Pakistan is disastrous (800,000 Pakistanis Cut Off From Road) and approximately six million people there need emergency shelter. Is Pakistan's problem our problem, too? The need for medical care and funds must be as great in the Punjab as it was in Haiti, don't you think?

In fact, Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said: "This disaster is worse than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake." The Daily Telegraph noted that, "Billions of pounds will be needed to rebuild affected areas but western nations have pledged only tens of millions in aid."

President Kim certainly could make setting priorities the topic of a Presidential Lecture. It is a theme with which the Partners in Health organization has more than a little experience on an individual level, as well as on a larger scale. For example, in his book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, Tracy Kidder described on pp. 262-278* how a PIH team airlifted a very late stage Haitian cancer patient, John, in a chartered private jet to Boston for state-of-the-art treatment. However, left unexamined was data on how many lives could have been saved had the resources allocated to this one young man been devoted to many other suffering people.

*President Kim is mentioned on 44 individual pages in Kidder's 301-page book. The first time is on page 100.

The Rise of the Econs

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-30T04:00:00-05:00

Back in the 1970's, everyone's hands-down choice for the College's worst academic department was Economics -- or Ecy as we called it then. Not any more. The July/August Alumni Magazine (a part of Dartmouth that is very well run, by the way), has a good profile about our now-stellar Economics department -- by far the most popular major at the College.

The piece noted that in the 1980's the College finally changed its compensation policy in recognition of market forces: the best profs in the field of Economics commanded higher salaries than most other faculty members because of competition for Ph.D.'s from business schools and private industry. Prior to that, the foolish egalitarianism that still infects so much of our campus (here and here) mandated that Econ profs be paid on the same salary scale as other professors, with the result that Dartmouth was able to hire good professors in other departments and only less-good people in Economics.

However, the DAM story missed a critical aspect of how Dartmouth was able to build a department filled with profs who are engaging teachers, well published scholars, and experienced public servants -- all without a single graduate student on the premises.

Other departments at the College often lament that they lack the graduate students who can support professors' research and, more importantly, provide an environment in which dedicated scholars can work through new ideas with informed student colleagues. Economics has solved this problem in a creative way: rather than having professors whose primary fields cover the entire range of their department's discipline (as would be needed if the department had a graduate program) -- and who therefore don't have a great deal to say to each other -- several decades ago Economics made the decision to specialize in applied micro-economics. As a result, most professors can consult top-ranked colleagues about their research, and the best newly graduated Ph.D.'s across the nation are eager to join the department's vibrant intellectual life.

The downside of this choice is that Economics can only offer a limited number of upper level courses in certain areas, particularly theory; and introductory courses ("methods" courses in the parlance of the department) are often taught by professors who are teaching somewhat outside their primary area of scholarly interest, as in the case, say, of a labor economist teaching intermediate micro-economics (Chair of the department Gustman) or an urban economist teaching introductory macro-economics (Fischel) or a health economist teaching econometrics (Chandra). (There is also an advantageous side to this choice, though: these professors bring practical examples from the real world to the classroom.)

Is the trade-off worth it?

The initial question that needs to be asked is whether the College could ever attract a true leader in many (most?) areas if that person is the only person who specializes in a specific field in a department. As a general matter, the College regularly overestimates the faculty's merits when it lauds our professors as "leaders in their fields": speaking frankly, a goodly portion do not merit this praise.

Econ's thoughtful solution is that students are generally taught by leaders in their respective fields -- even if the professors in question are sometimes teaching a subject outside of their individual area of specialization. Members of the department believe that top scholars can do a good job teaching almost any methods class to undergraduates.

To my mind, the results justify this trade-off. There seems to be no question that Economics is now the College's best department. More than a few other academic departments could profitably emulate Econ either by focusing on one or two areas as they recruit new faculty, or by boldly bringing in teams of new scholars all of whom work in the same area. Of course, hard choices need to be made in order to put such a strategy into place, but a dictum from the business world applies here in spades: if you try to be good at everything, you will end up good at nothing.

Note: In an effort to reduce high enrollments and oversubscribed classes, the Economics department has made the decision several times over the past few years to increase the difficulty of its courses -- with the unintended consequence that enrollments grew even more. (So much for understanding incentives!) In fact, some Econ profs consider the department's 80's-level courses to be more demanding than typical first-year Ph.D. material.

Wine-Searcher.com

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-29T03:00:00-05:00

Last year I did a post on Wine-Searcher.com, a site that trolls the world's on-line wine retailers and allows you to comparison shop with great ease. A few weeks ago, the LA Times described the impact of this clever New Zealand company in a good article.

When They Get it Right: the HP-12C

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-28T04:00:00-05:00

In 1985 I purchased my first personal computer: a Compaq transportable. It weighed 32lbs, had a screaming fast 8 MHz processor (no 4.88 MHz IBM dog for this power user), a 9 inch green-on-black screen, a 5.25" floppy drive (for disks that were really floppy), 1 Mb of RAM, and best of all, a 20 Mb hard disk -- I never thought that I would need the 40 Mb option, and besides, that cost an extra grand. Total cost for a machine that could be toted about via its leather handle and that did not have a battery: $4,500.

Needless to say, that computer is only fit for use as a boat anchor today; even back then it could take two minutes to recalculate a large spreadsheet. My current laptop is literally hundreds of times faster, has thousands of times more storage, weighs in at a tenth of the weight of the Compaq, and in inflation-adjusted dollars it cost less that one fifth the price.

All of which makes Hewlett-Packard's achievement with the HP-12C financial calculator the more amazing. The one that I bought in 1983 is sitting on my desk right now, and the same model can be found all over the financial world. It is still state of the art, and according to Wikipedia, it is HP's longest lived product. Of course, its guts have been redesigned and the cost at Amazon is about half what I paid way back then, but you have to tip your hat to folks who could design a high tech product that is still a model of functionality and efficiency as it approaches its 30th birthday.

When in Parkhurst, Have an Espresso

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-27T04:00:00-05:00

A search for excellence will elicit no qualms from this quarter. President Kim obviously likes high-end coffee: so much so that he had a special 240v electrical circuit put into Parkhurst for the commercial grade Italian espresso machine that was installed in his office. No word yet on whether he is drinking Haitian coffee -- the history of which mirrors many of the ills of that country -- or whether a wine cellar for Chablis and a cheese room for Brie was included in the Presidential investment program.

There has long been a Keurig coffee machine in Parkhurst's kitchen, and the new espresso machine could have been installed there, too, so that everyone in the senior administration could enjoy un caffé di qualità -- but that would have cost President Kim a measure of social privacy.

Note: In my own experience as a management consultant in the Third World, it seemed that members of the international aid community always had a particularly refined sense of the better things. White LandCruisers with charity logos were a constant feature in high-end restaurant parking lots from Cameroon to Tanzania. Whether discerning taste was a reflection of the national origin or the education of these dedicated servants of the poor, I don't know -- but sure as shooting, nobody was paying for haute cuisine out of their own pockets.

Dartmouth Cuts Its Retiree Death Benefit

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-26T16:00:00-05:00

Oh, the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing in today's Valley News about the College's elimination of its retiree death benefit in order to save $150-200k/year -- which Dartmouth justified as follows:

"It was concluded that removing this benefit could save three to four jobs at the College and our priority is to preserve as many jobs as possible," the college said in a statement issued to the Valley News in response to questions about the death benefit.

How about a different priority: using this money to hire another professor and still cut those other jobs? If they were cuttable but for this specific saving, then they should still be cut.

The essential element lacking in the VN story was an investigation into how many companies in the Upper Valley actually offer a similar benefit. The Valley News does not offer any such thing to its own retired employees, neither does my company, nor does any other local employer that I know. My benefits expert says that the only entity in the Upper Valley other than the College that offers a death benefit to retired employees is... wait for it... DHMC.

The real story here is why Dartmouth felt compelled in the past to offer such market-exceptional, cradle-to-grave benefits. Clearly this is no longer possible, not when the College's budget is broken and students can't get into the courses that they want.

The President of Dartmouth Should Not Care About Global Health

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-26T04:00:00-05:00

The President of Dartmouth should not care about global health any more than he cares about African & African-American Studies, Asian/Mideast Language and Literature, Asian/Mideast Studies, Anthropology, Arabic, Art History, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Chinese, Classical Studies, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Computer Science, Earth Sciences, Economics, Evaluative/Clinical Sciences, Education, English, Engineering Sciences, Environmental Studies, Film Studies, French, Geography, German, Government, Greek, Hebrew, History, International Studies, Italian, Japanese, Jewish Studies, Korean Language and Literature, Latin Am/Caribbean Studies, Latin, Latino Studies, Linguistics, Mathematics & Social Sciences, Mathematics, Music, Native American Studies, Public Policy, Philosophy, Physics, Portuguese, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Religion, Russian, Studio Art, Sociology, Spanish, Speech, Social Science, Theater, Women's and Gender Studies, and War and Peace Studies*.

Of course, Jim Yong Kim can have his personal passions, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of people around here, your humble servant included, who would like to see our President show interest in subjects other than global health and the fields that surround it. The animating idea behind the liberal arts is that the study of a range of fields is of value, both in and of itself and also for students who will then take the knowledge and skills that they derive from this work and apply it to other areas.

Dartmouth faculty members share the same passion for their own fields that Jim Kim feels for his particular interest. However, as the leader of this institution, President Kim will not fulfill his responsibilities if he does not devote the same time and attention in his meetings and his speeches to the College's varied fields of study that he now gives only to global health.

This is not a gentle admonition; there are a good number of people on the faculty who are asking whether President Kim sees himself as running an Ivy League college or only its medical school.

* In other words, all of Dartmouth's academic departments.

Adios Minary

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-25T16:00:00-05:00

Looks like the Minary Center is to be sold soon. The Landvest ad says the property is already under agreement. A bad decision by the Trustees leads to a sad day for the College. This is the kind of move that cannot be undone.

Sex Advice: Unbelievable as Usual

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-25T04:00:00-05:00

Although the Times says that groping is a big problem in the subways on NYC,

Sexual Harassment Is 'No. 1 Quality of Life Offense' on Subways, Police Say

The peak times in which women report sexual harassment or assaults on the subways are the late morning rush, roughly 8 to 10 a.m., followed by the early afternoon rush, 4 to 6 p.m.

One stretch of the subways -- the crowded Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines between Grand Central Terminal and Union Square -- is a particular source of complaints.

And the average age of the men arrested for sexual offenses on the subways this year is 39.

These facts emerged on Thursday during a joint City Council hearing at which three committees -- on transportation, women's issues and public safety -- summoned officials from the Police Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to discuss a pervasive problem that strikes a chord with many subway riders, who say they have been ogled, groped, flashed, harassed and even attacked. [Emphasis added]

it seems that this kind of behavior is encouraged at the College (with the printing paid for by you-know-who):

Meanwhile, at large in New Hampshire, groping appears to be against the law.

The D had a full report on the Consent Day event publicized above:

Over 17 Greek and community organizations staged informational booths and games such as sex-position twister and lubricant tasting during this year's annual Consent Day, which took place on Friday afternoon...

Programming Board donated $1,800 for food and decorations for Consent Day...

Consensual groping makes as much sense as consensual rape. And donated money? Well, if you think a student's parents donated tuition money to the College, I guess that this works, too.

One would expect the use of more supple and accurate language from the College and her student journalists.

The Union Crumbles

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-24T04:00:00-05:00

As we noted previously, the members of the SEIU union voted to accept the College's offer of no salary increases over the next two years by a 5:1 margin. After the demonstrations in front of the Hop, this passivity might seem unexpected, but the College summoned the nerve to call the union's bluff -- although none too forcefully -- and the brotherhood caved.

The membership of the union includes custodial and other unskilled workers in the great majority, along with skilled tradesmen like plumbers, carpenters and electricians. In the same way as is done for the faculty, workers with lower skills are over-paid relative to the local market and craftsmen are underpaid. At the College, junior faculty and low-performing tenured faculty are relatively over-paid, and strong senior faculty members are paid less than the going rate at other top colleges and universities.

The custodial workers know well that in the open market at Upper Valley private companies, they could no longer command the $16-17/hour that the College pays them, plus full family health benefits, 10% pension contributions, five to seven weeks of paid vacation depending on seniority, and paid holidays. All that for a low-tempo job. In the real world, the market would offer them $11-13/hour with benefits that are only a fraction of Dartmouth's largesse, and hard work would be demanded of them every day.

The end result: low-skilled workers carry the day in union votes, and skilled tradesmen look elsewhere for better jobs. In fact, FO&M has trouble filling jobs that demand a degree of technical education, such as building systems controllers because, paradoxically, it does not pay enough for these positions.

Once again the conclusion should seem obvious: throw out the current noblesse oblige wage scale and bring in wage consultants like the Hayes Group to align Dartmouth's wages and benefits with the compensation offered by other Upper Valley companies. We can't afford the indulgences of past administrations, and as we have just seen, the union would be happy to accept anything better that the local scale.

How to justify this? How about trying a little honesty? President Kim should simply state that previous administrations were overly generous in past contracts and there is no justification for College employees being paid a huge premium over the wages paid to other workers in similar positions outside of the College.

The Kims: Good Help Is Hard to Find

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-23T04:00:00-05:00

At times this space has urged President Kim to be more exacting in staffing his administration. Too often Jim Wright's tired holdovers have been good enough for our new leader.

This is decidedly not the case as regards President Kim's personal staff. It seems that Jim Kim and his spouse, Dr. Younsook Lim, are now in the process of hiring yet another new House Manager for the President's residence on Webster Avenue -- the first three managers just did not make the grade during the Kim family's initial year in Hanover.

Drs. Kim and Lim are to be commended for insisting on nothing but the best support for their endeavors. There is quite a difference between mediocrity and high quality in one's employees. Maybe we can hope that eventually President Kim will become similarly exigent in choosing senior administrators for the College.

All that said, stories about President Kim's revolving door House Manager position are making the round of the faculty. It seems that President Kim and Dr. Lim are difficult employers in a domestic setting. Talk of summary dismissals is rife, and no conversation goes by without reference to Kim's exponnentially increasing reputation for arrogance.

Note: There is no doubt now that President Kim has a serious problem with the faculty. He needs to get out to the departments, meet the College's professors, and listen to their concerns about his administration and the direction of the College. Angry talk of the type mentioned above festers when there are underlying grievances.

All the President's Air Conditioning

Joseph Asch '79 — 2010-08-21T04:00:00-05:00

A few weeks ago, after lamenting that the College was shutting students out of air conditioned dorms, I commended the administration for taking it on the chin in the same way: there was no air conditioning in Parkhurst either.

That is true as far as it goes, but in recently reviewing the work reports over at F0&M, I was somewhat surprised to see that the President's offices, as well as those of Steven Kadish and David Spalding, had been specially re-wired not too long ago so that their supply of electricity was sufficiently abundant to support floor-standing air conditioners.

Jim Wright always held the view that he was not entitled to air con unless everyone else in the administration had it. It seems that this policy might not remain in place for too much longer.