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Dartmouth election the wave of the future?
The bureaucratic ins and outs of academic governance, alumni associations, and so on aren't usually the stuff of exciting news and don't usually attract much attention. But Dartmouth's current trustee election, in which alumni will vote to place a Dartmouth alum on the board, has proven to be a telling exception to this rule.
Glenn Reynolds has offered some opinions about the watershed moment that Dartmouth's election exemplifies. And now the Boston Globe is following the story--which includes the controversy surrounding the story--with close and careful interest:
According to one faction, a shadowy cabal of conservatives is waging a war of misinformation to take over the board of trustees of Dartmouth College.According to the other, devoted alumni are fighting an administration that has neglected undergraduate education in favor of research, let athletic teams languish, and cracked down unfairly on fraternities.
Voting begins this week for an alumni representative to the board, the latest battle in a fight that may prove influential around the country. Is Dartmouth the first domino in a national war on the allegedly liberal, politically correct Ivory Tower? Or is it an inspiration to alumni not to stay on the sidelines?
At the Hanover, N.H., school, alumni elect half of the trustees, an unusual setup, and the board appoints the rest. For most of Dartmouth’s history, an alumni council nominated all candidates, and they tended to be palatable to the administration. But a clause little used until recent years allows a petition candidate to run if he or she gathers 500 signatures from fellow alumni.
In the last two elections, in 2004 and 2005, petition candidates who criticized Dartmouth’s direction and boasted conservative or libertarian credentials won the three open seats.
"Too often in the past, colleges have said, 'Send us your money, and leave us alone,'" said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group that backs the petition efforts at Dartmouth. "We say, 'Sure, send your money, but also speak up.'"
Neal said Dartmouth is part of a significant trend, along with Colgate University and Hamilton College, where conservative alumni also competed for spots on school boards last year.
At Dartmouth, candidates are spending tens of thousands of dollars campaigning, unheard of in alumni elections at universities, according to Sheldon Steinbach, former general counsel of the American Council on Education.
Accountability is the wave of higher education's future. And alumni have a pivotal role to play in shaping that future.
Posted by acta online at April 3, 2007 09:41 AM
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Comments
"an administration that has neglected undergraduate education in favor of research, let athletic teams languish, and cracked down unfairly on fraternities."
Of course if you really want to improve undergraduate education then getting rid of the fraternities and the big sports programs would be an excellent first step.
While I'm sympathetic to some of ACTAs goals, whenever people start defending fraternities and sports it kind of reminds me of conservative southerners defending segregation and Tom Delay defending Jack Abramoff.
Posted by: Puzzled at April 3, 2007 11:44 AM
"if you really want to improve undergraduate education then getting rid of the fraternities and the big sports programs would be an excellent first step."
The funny thing is that the school is not trying to get rid of fraternities or its sports programs (which are big in almost no sense of the word, anyway). The school is loaning money to fraternities to bring their houses up to code, and it's spending $70 million on new athletic facilities, and it hired back its league-champion football coach. The school just won its first NCAA championship in any sport in more than 30 years.
The candidate is trying to manufacture issues in order to win an election -- which hardly sounds as selfless as he makes out, does it?
Posted by: Puzzler at April 4, 2007 10:03 AM