The quotation in the OP's question comes from the transcript of a WCAX radio interview with Jim Yong Kim, then president of Dartmouth College, on December 24, 2010. Kim became president of the World Bank in March 2012. The excerpted paragraph appears in the midst of a longer response to a question about the involvement of the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science in relieving the post-earthquake health crisis in Haiti. Here's the full question and answer, for context:
Sullivan: I think a tangible example of that [Kim's interest in encouraging Dartmouth students to go into the field of global health] is what is going on in Haiti right now. Partners in Health has been there, is still there. Is that the kind of influence we could see more of in the future?
Kim: Well you know the Haiti project was based on a ‘once in every 200 years' disaster. The earthquake just devastated a country that could least afford it, the country that could least afford it in the western hemisphere. and the response of Dartmouth students and faculty and the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center has been extraordinary and we kept it up, especially now with the cholera outbreak.
We are continuing to support efforts in Haiti and I think that will continue as long as we are helpful but we are not going to be in the business of going after every disaster in the world. There are many other colleges and universities and organizations that do it much better than we do. This was something that was quite spontaneous. Really wonderful to watch, but it is not a pattern that we are necessarily going to repeat in every country that has a disaster.
I also think that what our students get out of the arts and humanities is critical for them to develop a sense that is much bigger than the quantitative aspects of a problem to understanding human complexity. So, I think every day we are preparing young people to tackle the troubles of the world. I don't think that John Sloan [D]ickey ever meant that we were going directly fix the troubles of the world. I think what he meant and what I quote him as saying is ‘The worlds' trouble are your troubles.' But since the worst troubles of the world come from the hearts of men and at that time there were only men on campus, there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings can not fix.
So, some of the things that we do like the healthcare delivery science are going to be directly useful. But what we really do is: we are about building the better human beings who are going to tackle those troubles in a way that we have never seen before.
I think the critical piece to building those human beings is a broad liberal arts education where you get really in-depth in subject matter but then you also study Greek literature and you also study philosophy and you are forced to take a studio art class. Those are the kind of human beings that I think the world needs to tackle the world's troubles[.]
John Sloan Dickey, whose name appears midway through the crucial paragraph, was president of Dartmouth from 1945 to 1970, and was noted for his sensitivity to social issues outside the walls of academia. During his tenure as college president, he founded various programs that attempted to connect Dartmouth students to real-world problems of the time, and I get the impression that Kim saw himself as following in the tradition of Dickey's activism.
According to a January 27, 2007, article in Vox of Dartmouth (which calls itself "The Newspaper for the Dartmouth Faculty and Staff"), Dickey in a 1946 convocation address told students:
The world's troubles are your troubles...and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.
It thus appears that Kim was riffing on that quotation with the WCAX interviewer. Unfortunately, the point, nature, and extent of the original quotation got garbled by the interview transcriber's handling of Kim's parenthetical remark about the all-male student body of Dartmouth in 1946. To put it bluntly, the transcriber utterly failed to represent that portion of Kim's remarks accurately, owing to a spectacular misapplication of simple punctuation marks.
Here, I think, is how the transcriber should have rendered the paragraph in order to make Kim's meaning reasonably intelligible:
I also think that what our students get out of the arts and humanities is critical for them to develop a sense that is much bigger than the quantitative aspects of a problem, to understanding human complexity. So, I think, every day we are preparing young people to tackle the troubles of the world. I don't think that John Sloan Dickey ever meant that we were going [to] directly fix the troubles of the world. I think what he meant, and what I quote him as saying, is ‘The world's troubles are your troubles. But since the worst troubles of the world come from the hearts of men'—and at that time, there were only men on campus—'there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.'
The crucial changes in my version are (1) the use of em-dashes to break out the parenthetical phrase "and at that time, there were only men on campus"; (2) the extension of the quotation beginning "The world's troubles are your troubles," so that, instead of ending there, it continues all the way to the end of the phrase "hearts of men"; and (3) the resumption of the quotation to encompass "there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix." To accomplish these things I introduced the following changes in punctuation: (a) two new em-dashes, (b) a relocated close quotation mark, and (c) an additional pair of quotation marks. As Mari-Lou A observes elsewhere, I could have used parentheses instead of em-dashes to achieve goal (1) above, but in this particular situation I like the visual jolt of the dashes.
The point of Kim's interpolation about there having been only men on Dartmouth's campus in 1946 wasn't to emphasize that the world's troubles come from the hearts of men (as opposed to the hearts of women) and therefore that better human beings (women) can fix the world. Rather, it was to defend retroactively (and anachronistically) Dickey's use of "men" to mean "human beings"—on the shaky grounds that he was addressing an audience composed entirely of male human beings.
It's an odd tangent to go off on, but it's the sort of thing that people say in unrehearsed interviews. The much more serious problem here relates to the radio station's transcription of the spoken interview. The transcriber should have noticed that something weird was going on toward the end of that paragraph and should have done a little research to figure out who John Sloan Dickey was, what he had said, and what Kim was trying to say about those two things. That may seem like a lot to ask of a humble interview transcriber, but it took me only 15 to 20 minutes of online research to work out what was going on, so I have little sympathy for the inadequate job the transcriber did.
One thing that we can all take away from this episode is a renewed awareness of how important punctuation is and how potentially harmful it can be to a correct understanding of a person's transcribed remarks. Though punctuation may not be a matter of grammar, as we often read on this site, it can produce completely misleading grammatically correct statements when incorrectly applied to a person's spoken words. So don't take it lightly: In writing, punctuation is an extremely powerful and often underestimated tool in an author's (or editor's or transcriber's) hands.
