Dartmouth has an inferiority complex. But as the College’s greatest open secret, that comes as no surprise. The student body is largely made up of academic overachievers who, if pressed, admit that they once dreamed of translating Catallus in Harvard Yard or avoiding the muggers that roam New Haven.

Not that Dartmouth doesn’t adore Dartmouth. For all the smashed egos, the College does a remarkable job drafting a legacy full of self-aggrandizing irony. We may not pack the intellectual prestige of the unholy trinity of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, but we don’t really care to. Except for the fact, of course, that we actually do.

Dartmouth is often a place of bitter (or perhaps, more appropriately bittersweet) irony. The recent revelation that two of Dartmouth’s more renowned research professors, Michael Gazzaniga and Jon Appleton, will be departing for the California sun is no exception.

Both men are known to “bleed green”. Gazzaniga, a 1961 alumnus and member of the Dartmouth faculty for over a decade will soon depart for UC Santa Barbara while Jon Appleton, the man who has defined Dartmouth music for 38 years, is leaving for Stanford.

Faculty flight is nothing new for Dartmouth, which has lost many popular faculty members in recent months. But the loss of two well-respected researchers from a faculty with a dearth of research-oriented professors is a clear blow to President Wright’s growing focus on academic research. The impending opening of the Halderman Center, a facility focused on attracting research-oriented faculty, also highlights Dartmouth’s commitment to faculty research.

Why then, in a time when the College is attempting to attract faculty researchers are its best researchers fleeing?

The obvious answer is Appleton’s. In an interview with The Dartmouth, Appleton cited “‘a decline in the intellectual strength of the institution’” as his chief concern. This criticism, directed largely at Dean of Faculty Carol Folt and President James Wright is undoubtedly tied to the controversial removal of Gazzaniga from the Dean of Faculty post two years a ago. Despite unanimous support from research-centered faculty members in the sciences, humanities faculty members were able to oust Gazzaniga.

But while faculty politics have played a key role in recent departures, broader disagreements within the Dartmouth community of faculty, students, and alumni have heated to the point where Dartmouth, so proud of its history and tradition, is now desperately searching for an identity.

And in this moment of crisis, the puzzle that is Dartmouth has been poorly served by the ineffective leadership of President James Wright. Although a better politician than his two immediate predecessors, Wright’s recent lip service to the virtues of Dartmouth of old – a vibrant Greek system and a curriculum centered on the liberal-arts - has won him some points with students and alumni. Wright’s goal, however, has always been to ensure that Dartmouth is truly a college in name only.

The departure of Gazzaniga and Appleton are clear blows to Wright’s vision. But while it may be easy to pin their departures on the forces working against Wright’s academic goals, it is Wright himself that is responsible for this exodus.

What Wright has never understood is that Dartmouth’s size and history as a liberal-arts college is not its main impediment to growth as a university, but rather its greatest asset. The same academic philosophy that says Dartmouth should keep classes, and undergraduate programs small is the same one which has allowed professors like Gazzaniga and Appleton to flourish in an environment that has made them leaders of small, incredibly innovative fields of study, not guardians of tired and trite academic thought. By clinging to its traditions, Dartmouth is better able to innovate and educate. It’s an ironic lesson that the Wright administration would do well to learn.