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Wall Street Journal gets it right
ACTA has long urged alumni to take an active interest in their alma maters, arguing that those who care deeply about a particular college or university, who have themselves benefited enormously from their former schools, are vital stakeholders in their schools' ongoing excellence.
Alumni can often make a difference when things go wrong on campus. When a school loses its sense of mission, or when policy decisions run afoul of an institution's commitment to intellectual pluralism and free expression, alumni can play a crucial role in refocusing institutional attention.
The Wall Street Journal agrees:
Any number of colleges and universities seem to be having PR travails these days, but this may be a case where the turmoil is healthy. The school year that is now ending has turned out to be something of a banner year for academic reform.
Consider the recent unrest at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. When the school's tour guides were informed in an email last winter that a century-old cross was to be expelled from the school's chapel, alumni and students mounted a "Save the Wren Cross" campaign. Press releases, a Web site, and a petition that collected 18,000 signatures led to a restoration.
This experience has emboldened what might be called the William and Mary electorate. A new organization is now asking if the governing Board of Visitors should renew the college president's contract. That's normally a rubber-stamp affair, but now college executives are being forced to defend themselves against charges of poor financial stewardship.
The merits of these disputes seem less important than the fact that there is now earnest and public discussion about the performance of college administrators, who, like career government bureaucrats, are usually adept at avoiding accountability. Stakeholders are suddenly feeling empowered.
That's certainly true at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where alumni have used a petition process for the board of trustees to elect four independent candidates in recent years. These "petition candidates" have run against disciplinary procedures that lack due process rights, speech codes, and an increased budget emphasis on administrative bureaucracy at the expense of academics.
The Dartmouth administration responded last fall by proposing a new set of trustee election rules that would have made these outsider candidacies more difficult. The measure needed support from two-thirds of voting alumni to pass but failed to get even a majority. The year ended with the election of a fourth reformist, University of Virginia law professor Stephen Smith.
ACTA was involved on behalf of alumni in both the William & Mary controversy and the Dartmouth election. And we appreciate the WSJ's eloquent acknowledgment of the critical role alumni can play in ensuring that their former schools maintain both excellence and accountability--things that are ACTA's raison d'etre. Echoing the sentiments of University of Colorado president Hank Brown, who notes that "much of the scrutiny we are under is of our own creation," the Journal concludes that "Colleges and universities have largely brought this stakeholder activism on themselves--when they decided to become instruments of fashionable politics instead of repositories of knowledge."
Posted by acta online at June 25, 2007 01:35 PM
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Comments
Isn't there a difference between "maintaining" accountability and actually having accountability exist in the first place?
In other words, what makes you think that the private schools on the Journal's list are accountable to alumni at all? Is that why you used a mealy-mouthed word like "stakeholder," because the law provides no direct accountability whatsoever for private educational corporations? (Compare the word "shareholder," used by commercial corporations that actually are accountable to someone other than the attorney general.)
How far do you think you will get convincing private boards that your personal feeling that you are a "stakeholder" who is owed something should make them accountable to you? Should they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts when it's so obviously against the interests of the schools, not to mention counter to their founding charters?
Posted by: qbert at June 25, 2007 04:34 PM
Part of what's happening at W&M is the realization by alumni that the College doesn't run on autopilot. It needs some TLC from the Alumni - not just money, but attention too. The BOV wants to hear from the alumni. While there are arguably opportunities to help the BOV improve, it never hurts to have a few thousand extra eyes keeping an eye on the College. Then there's the issue of disaffected alumni. The situation has deteriorated to the point that no matter what the BOV does, there will be very disappointed alumni. The Society for The College of W&M plans to be in a position to assist with targeted giving. Although we may have disagreements, we still love our college. Alumni can still give to the College in a way that supports and respects their own deeply-held values.
Posted by: Todd Skiles at June 25, 2007 09:12 PM