This article by John Lippman was published in the Valley News on July 26.
[W]EST LEBANON, N.H. — Dartmouth College President Phil Hanlon said on Wednesday that the school “immediately took action” under his watch when allegations of sexual misconduct arose concerning three professors in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, but sidestepped a question about why a report in 2002 about one of the professors didn’t appear to carry much weight at the time.
Former professors Todd Heatherton, Paul Whalen and Bill Kelley retired or resigned in recent weeks rather than face a recommendation that they be fired, and had been on paid leave and barred from campus since spring 2017.
But a former Dartmouth professor, Jennifer Groh, has said that a female student had told her in 2002 that she reported a groping allegation involving Heatherton, who later was awarded an endowed chair. (Last fall, Heatherton’s attorney maintained that the college had investigated the claim and determined the touching was “accidental and totally unintentional — not a sexual touching at all.”)
“I can’t actually speak to what happened long before I got here, but what I can say is that (when) we heard the allegations … we immediately took action,” Hanlon said on Wednesday during a meeting with Valley News editors and reporters. “Any member of the Dartmouth community should understand from the action we took right from the start that we take (allegations of sexual misconduct) seriously.”
Turning to Dartmouth expansion projects that would impact the town of Hanover and concerns among residents about sprawl, Hanlon acknowledged that pushback — in addition to financial and infrastructure challenges — did weigh against building a proposed 750-bed dormitory in College Park, a 35-acre wooded parcel in the heart of Dartmouth’s campus.
“I think we were responsive to concerns about the use of College Park as a building site and so we certainly reconsidered those plans,” he said.
At the same time, however, Hanlon would not commit to forgoing other controversial development. That includes the fate of the Hanover Country Club and Dartmouth golf course north of the campus on Lyme Road/Route 10, or erecting a smaller building one day at the College Park site.
The Dartmouth-owned club posts an operating loss of more than $600,000 annually and maintenance of $1 million per year while membership is dwindling, which has thrown the fate of club into doubt and the future use of the land into question.
“We recognize the value it brings not just to our community, but to Hanover and the Upper Valley. We’d love to find some way that it could remain a golf course, but the demographics are tough here,” Hanlon said, alluding to the decline of golfers in New England. Notably, he pointed out, the college’s own men’s golf team chooses to compete at a course at the Quechee Club.
Although Hanlon in his opening remarks had cited a “profound sense of place” as one of Dartmouth’s core strengths, he would not rule out campus expansion along Route 10 one day, onto what now is golf course land.
“The land is very precious, it is very important for the college and (we) certainly have no thoughts or intentions of selling the land … (but) I’m not going to sit and rule anything out in the future. I’m not going to tie the hands of my successor,” he added, noting, however, that the college’s most recent master plan in 2013 envisions maintaining the campus within its current boundaries.
Hanlon, a 1977 graduate of Dartmouth, just marked passed his fifth anniversary as college president. The past five years, while encompassing notable efforts in fundraising and recruiting the “most selective, highest quality” student body in history, has nonetheless been a period when Dartmouth has recognized “we’ve frankly been limited by some issues in the past,” Hanlon said.
In particular, he acknowledged, those issues deal with “harmful student behavior,” such as excessive drinking and sexual violence. The college’s Moving Dartmouth Forward program, launched in 2014 to curb high-risk student behavior by adopting such measures as mandatory expulsion for students found guilty of “most extreme sexual assault” and banning hard alcohol at parties on campus, appears to be having an effect in the level of drinking. “Medical encounters” related to alcohol consumption have been declining, according to college tracking data — although Hanlon acknowledged data so far on sexual assaults are more difficult to get a handle on because incidents are “famously underreported.”
As to what inappropriate behavior the three ousted professors engaged in, Hanlon declined to provide details, saying even though the college did not enter into a nondisclosure agreement with them, “everyone involved in this incident, including survivors, has privacy rights … we respect those privacy rights.”
Hanlon defended how the college handled the allegations when administrators were first made aware of them in the spring of 2017.
“We put them on administrative leave and barred them from campus immediately just because the allegations were serious enough that we needed to make sure to protect the community,” he said. Dartmouth publicly acknowledged the then-ongoing investigation in October.
Hanlon also declined to discuss any details of the findings, saying, “I’m not going to comment on investigative reports.”
During his five years of leadership at Dartmouth, Hanlon said that the college has been “buck(ing) the trend of homogenization in higher education” by purposefully “recommitting” to its core value as a liberal arts institution and not trying to refashion itself into the model of a mega-university, although in fact, “we’ve been a university since the 1700s,” he said.
The contrarian move is best exemplified by the decision by the trustees, following heavy lobbying by alumni, to reject a plan earlier this year to grow the student body by up to 1,100 students, or 25 percent.
Hanlon, who championed a growth strategy at the University of Michigan as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs before returning to lead his alma mater, said the decision not to expand Dartmouth’s student enrollment was made because of the financial and infrastructure stress it would place on the college.
“It’s a very complicated thing to try and figure out, how to expand the student body, what are all the things that go with that,” he said. “It was not just housing, but dining and athletics and recreational facilities that will support a larger student body. All of those things needed to be looked at.”
After reading the task force report on the expansion proposal, “I could see we needed to make investments that are not in the current investment plan in order to scale successively. So that’s when I went to the trustees and said I really don’t recommend (it) at this time,” he explained.
One of the biggest challenges now on Hanlon’s plate is Dartmouth’s $3 billion capital campaign, which to date has raised, through gifts and commitments, $1.6 billion toward its goal.
“In September we will announce not record-breaking, but record-shattering totals for fiscal year 2018 fundraising,” he said, noting that $168 million has poured in just since the college ended its “quiet phase” and went public with the campaign at the end of April.
Dartmouth in early March announced that tuition, room and board and fees for the upcoming school year will increase by 3.9 percent, to $70,791.
The “Call to Lead” capital campaign includes $500 million targeted for student financial aid.
