One of the lesser joys of Paris life is enduring political demonstrations regarding elections that will take place several thousand miles from here. One wonders who the energetic (and loud) supporters of Cellou Dalein Diallo, putative President of the Republic of Guinea (capital city: Conakry), thought they were influencing as they marched through the 16me arrondissement. For a Stateside equivalent, imagine boisterous Philippinos chanting for their candidate as they thronged though the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Why?

Another book is out expressing concerns about higher education: "Sociologist Andrew Hacker and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make an incisive case that the American way of higher education has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of young adults. Going behind the myths and mantras, they probe the true performance of the Ivy League, the baleful influence of tenure, an unhealthy reliance on part-time teachers, and the supersized bureaucracies which now have a life of their own."

Now why didn't I think of those things?

Note: The NYT has now reviewed this book along with Crisis on Campus.

Note: The Economist has weighed in, too, on the potential obsolescence of America's great universities.

Yesterday we looked at the salary ($33,905/year) and the princely benefits available to a Cook Helper at the College -- the lowest paid union position at Dartmouth. The minimum professional requirements for the Cook Helper position are not even firm; they are only suggestions: a high school diploma and six months of food service experience (McDonald's, I expect, will do fine).

Let's try to put that information into perspective.

The requirements for a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at Dartmouth are rock hard: a four-year university diploma and a doctoral degree, which usually takes five years of graduate study to obtain. These certifications generally must come from one of the world's top institutions. Competition for open positions is fierce, and job security is limited to a three-year contract.

Therefore it might come as a surprise to readers that the average salary of an Assistant Professor at the College in 2008 according to the American Association of University Professors was only $79,700/year. But you should recall that this average figure includes high-paying departments like Economics. In fact, at Dartmouth there are a good many young Assistant Professors earning in the mid-$60k's, about twice the annual salary of a Cook Helper. Not a great return on investment for nine years of higher education, n'est-ce pas?

I wonder: if we paid our junior faculty more and our Cook Helpers less, would Dartmouth be able to attract better junior faculty, or -- here's an idea -- more faculty members.

Note: I vaguely recall a failed political system wherein university professors earned only slightly more compensation than workers, but the exact name of that system escapes me at the moment. Can you help me remember, Tovarisch?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.