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Trouble brewing at Dartmouth
In recent years, Dartmouth has offered a fascinating window into some of the modern academy's defining issues. On the one hand, widespread desire for change has led alumni to elect four reform-minded petition candidates to Dartmouth's board since 2004; on the other hand, institutional resistance to change has led Dartmouth to erect barriers to prevent future petition candidates from becoming trustees.
At Dartmouth, alumni elect half the trustees--and any alum who collects 500 alumni signatures can add himself to the ballot as a petition candidate. In 2004, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers ran as a petition candidate--and was elected. In 2005, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson and George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki followed suit. Responding to growing alumni concern about the direction of the college, their platforms were staunchly committed to educational rigor, academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and improved fiscal oversight. In response, Dartmouth tried--and failed--to change the rules to make it harder for dark horse candidates to run.
The most recent episode in this instructive clash between alumni and institutional wills centers on University of Virginia law professor and Dartmouth alum Stephen Smith, a petition candidate who was elected to the Dartmouth board last spring. Citing a 79 percent increase in administrative spending and unbalanced hiring (117 new administrators, as compared to only 50 new faculty), Smith ran on a platform declaring his intention to "stop bureaucratic bloat and to invest in excellence" as well as to protect the quality of undergraduate education at Dartmouth.
"Stephen Smith's election underscores that today's alumni are concerned about what's going on at their institutions," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said at the time. "For years, Dartmouth alumni have been rightfully demanding input on critical issues facing their college. ... It's time for the academy to realize that alumni will no longer 'put up and shut up.' Indeed, the academy ignores alumni voices at its own peril."
Neal's words are proving to be prophetic. Unhappy with the outcomes of recent trustee elections, Dartmouth is again working to poison the pot and change the rules. Rather than welcome fresh voices who represent one of Dartmouth's most important constituencies--its 65,000 alumni--Dartmouth seems to want to prevent future petition candidates from finding influential places on its board, and to ensure that its own insider candidates are elected.
In an op-ed published in the Dartmouth, Smith explains:
Before the ink was dry on the press release announcing my election to the Board of Trustees last month, we were let in on a secret: a Board committee from which petition trustees have been excluded is exploring alternative methods of selecting Trustees--a euphemism, really, for stripping Dartmouth alumni of their longstanding right to elect half of the Board.
The basis for this unprecedented assault on alumni rights is a series of false charges made by those who have again found themselves on the losing side of an election.
The leading charge is that I essentially "bought" the election. The amount I purportedly spent keeps going up, but the current claim is that I spent "as much as $200,000."
With all due respect, claims that I "bought" the election are not only absurd but insulting to alumni. As I told the Associated Press last month, I spent approximately $75,000--the same amount Sandy Alderson reported spending. Almost half of what I spent went to gathering signatures because, unlike my opponents, my place on the ballot was not guaranteed.
[...]
Truth be told, I was badly outspent because the administration spent lavishly to defeat me.
Smith goes on to detail the elaborate, costly, and questionable lengths to which the Dartmouth administration went to oppose his candidacy. He also dismantles Dartmouth's spurious claim that petition candidates are "divisive":
It is not "divisive" for candidates to discuss the issues facing Dartmouth. It is democracy, pure and simple. All I did was tell voters where I stand on the issues. The only attacks and invective came from the other side.
Nevertheless, it is true that elections with petition candidates differ from contests between nominated candidates alone. Petition candidates are not anointed to run by a committee of insiders; they have to earn their place on the ballot by appealing to broad segments of alumni. The presence of petition candidates forces nominated candidates to talk about real issues--eek!--and thereby allows alumni to make an informed choice about who should represent them as trustees.
That, presumably, is why alumni turned out in droves in last year's constitution vote to reject efforts, strongly supported by the administration and the Board, to weaken the petition process. Alumni know that the petition process is an essential mechanism for achieving accountability and transparency in the governance of the College--and, evidently, that is the last thing the administration and its allies want.
The current effort to disenfranchise alumni, though carefully masked behind talk of "best practices" and remedying deficient election procedures, is merely a brazen power play by insiders who resent alumni involvement in College affairs. It will be a sad day indeed if the Board of Trustees joins in that unprecedented assault on our alumni.
Dartmouth is making governance history. In the face of administrative laxness, alumni have begun to play a crucial role in determining the future of the institution. And, in the face of active alumni participation in governance, the administration is betraying its own stated commitment to welcoming input from all those who care about Dartmouth. What happens next will tell us much--not only about the direction Dartmouth is moving in, but also about the kind of history this time-honored institution is going to make.
Posted by acta online on July 19, 2007 at July 19, 2007 06:05 PM
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Comments
The post above contains several factual errors and egregious misstatements.
The statement that "institutional resistance to change has led Dartmouth to erect barriers to prevent future petition candidates from becoming trustees" is false. Although there is talk of change (that's what Smith's letter is about), Dartmouth has not yet erected any barriers.
The statement that "Dartmouth tried--and failed--to change the rules to make it harder for dark horse candidates to run" is inaccurate. The Association of Alumni tried and failed to adopt a new constitution for itself, which would have changed the rules for all candidates. The Association is funded by Dartmouth but is as independent as its leaders want to make it.
"Citing a 79 percent increase in administrative spending and unbalanced hiring (117 new administrators, as compared to only 50 new faculty), Smith ran on a platform declaring his intention to "stop bureaucratic bloat." It is true that Smith made these claims as part of his campaign rhetoric, but it is misleading on ACTA's part to repeat them without checking their accuracy.
ACTA president Anne D. Neal is quoted as saying "For years, Dartmouth alumni have been rightfully demanding input on critical issues facing their college." Because the post does not explain why their demands are "righful," and Neal's quotation suggests that she believes Dartmouth alumni have a right to demand input in the school's operation. They do not, and Neal would appear more knowledgeable and less shrill if she said "properly" or "appropriately."
This statement is both factually false and misleading in its implications: "Rather than welcome fresh voices who represent one of Dartmouth's most important constituencies--its 65,000 alumni--Dartmouth seems to want to prevent future petition candidates from finding influential places on its board, and to ensure that its own insider candidates are elected." Among other things, the statement implies that alumni are elected only by petition, and that if Dartmouth were to eliminate petition candidates, it would shut out "fresh voices," alumni, or both. This is false because all of the trustees elected by alumni by any method are by definition alumni; in addition, all of the trustees elected by the board itself invariably are alumni as well. The idea that Dartmouth has "its own candidates," when all of the nominations are conducted by committees of the Alumni Council, an group of 100 alumni who are chosen by alumni, is silly.
It was a mistake for ACTA to repeat the errors Smith perpetuates in his misleading letter: the myth that there is "secret" Board committee "from which petition trustees have been excluded" (the long-standing Governance Committee, by definition, includes less than the full board; the current petition trustees have only been on the board since 2004); the myth that alumni have a "longstanding right to elect half of the Board" (only the Board has the right to elect anyone to the Board; the alumni chosen as "nominees" by whatever process are obviously no more than nominees); the myth that someone has charged that Smith "bought" the election (the Board has discussed the cost of campaigning to all candidates, but no one has seriously claimed that anyone "bought" the election); the myth that "the administration spent lavishly to defeat" Smith (Sandy Alderson raised his own funds to defeat Smith; the administration's "Ask Dartmouth" website, to which Smith might refer, covers issues much broader than those of his campaign, continues to operate after his campaign has ended, and where it dealt with his campaign issues, sought to communicate facts accurately where he had spun them in a misleading fashion).
Neither Smith nor ACTA can succeed on the strange claim that Smith's campaign was somehow not "divisive." The mere facts that controversy existed at all or that Smith felt the need to continue to spin the facts after his election indicate that divisiveness exists. Smith explicitly sought to divide alumni between those who supported him and those who, he perceived, supported the administration. He did this through the invention of spurious and misleading campaign "issues" (such as the ideas that students' rights to due process of law or free speech are somehow being harmed). To say that "The only attacks and invective came from the other side" is utterly false; for ACTA to repeat Smith's claim is a mistake.
ACTA repeats Smith's misconceptions that the winner of the majority of alumni ballots somehow does not appeal to broad segments of alumni unless he is a petition candidate; that alumni are represented by trustees; that the petition process is essential to accountability and transparency, or that those virtues are either deserved or desirable; or that there is some kind of conspiracy to "assault" alumni by "disenfranchising" them.
ACTA states that "the administration is betraying its own stated commitment to welcoming input from all those who care about Dartmouth" without suggesting what constitutes that betrayal. What has Dartmouth done that so upsets ACTA? Its Governance Committee has stated that it is looking into the nomination process, that is all. Dartmouth has done nothing to get riled up about, and ACTA's gullible quotation of Smith's propaganda will not change that.
Posted by: Beza. at July 23, 2007 11:57 AM
If the market can be presumed to favor corporate "best practices," and if few institutions have adopted Dartmouth-style elections since Dartmouth first instituted them many years ago, we might suspect that such elections do not fall under the category of "best practices."
At least Trustee Smith should not presume that the "talk" of "best practices" is a mask. He (and economically-inclined Trustee Zywicki) would not be doing their jobs if they failed to investigate the existence of a great discrepancy between their system and those of other schools.
There must be a reason the best-run schools (i.e. those that function well and are not controlled by "insiders," legislative favorites, or special-interest groups such as alumni) seem to have declined to adopt Dartmouth's system.
Posted by: Anonymous at July 26, 2007 01:56 PM