ACTA's Must-Reads
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"Really?"
Over at the Pioneer Institute's blog, Liam Day is shocked by ACTA's study The Vanishing Shakespeare:
Again, I have to ask, Shakespeare? Really? Not Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair (Yes, I have a thing against early 20th-century American realism), but Shakespeare, the apogee of Western Culture and the English language. Now, the literary canon needed to be broken open and made more inclusive, but please tell me there is a place, an exalted place, for William Shakespeare in even a multi-cultural world.
Separately, Day commented on a recent Gallup survey showing that only seven percent of Americans can name our first four presidents in order. For one of the causes of this problem, one might consult ACTA's The Hollow Core, which looked at 50 top colleges and found that only seven require a survey course in American history or government.
Lesson? Students don't learn what they aren't taught, and it has consequences.
Posted by cmitchell on August 17, 2007 at 02:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Momentum
Accreditation continues to be a hot topic in higher ed news, and ACTA's recent policy paper, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It, continues to galvanize important debate on the issue. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) found two of ACTA's recommendations "fundamental to the future of accreditation and how it operates," agreeing that there is a problem with allowing accreditors to decide which schools are worthy of receiving federal student aid, and agreeing, too, that accreditors need to be more publicly accountable. Writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Alan Contreras agreed with ACTA's points about breaking the tie between federal student aid and accreditation, about restoring a core curriculum, and about improving accountability.
Now, at Inside Higher Ed, Jane Shaw of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is weighing in on accreditation--and is adding her voice to the growing chorus of those who believe that in tying federal student aid to accreditation, the government gave excessive power to accreditors:
Unwilling to back up the expanding federal aid with direct monitoring of institutions-- and nudged by a few scandals--government officials eyed the regional accreditors as gatekeepers. The accreditors received, in turn, an enormous increase in prestige and power.
This support from the federal government has enabled the six regional agencies to function in a way that economists would call a cartel. They divide up the country and operate without competition--while holding life-or-death power over the institutions that they "represent." This arrangement stifles innovation and slows to a crawl the creation of new institutions (such as independent online universities).
It's good to see both debate about accreditation and a building consensus about what some of the system's most pressing problems are. Surely this is a sign of good, constructive change to come.
Posted by acta online on August 16, 2007 at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What's in a name?
It's common for academics these days to assert that academic freedom is under attack. But what's just as common is for those assertions to take place in something of a conceptual vacuum. Quite often, the claim that academic freedom is being attacked is made in the absence of a clear understanding of what academic freedom really is; often, too, such claims involve an attempt to expand the definition of academic freedom beyond its proper purview.
This is a point ACTA president Anne D. Neal made at Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer. Citing the AAUP's foundational 1915 definition of academic freedom, Neal noted that today academic freedom is often taken to mean "anything goes," and is used to defend indefensible conduct on the part of professors. Such arguments, Neal observed,
arise from a basic conviction that academics should be free from accountability. They involve manipulating the term "academic freedom" in ways that undermine a concept of foundational importance to the academic enterprise. They amount to an attempt to turn the concept inside out--morphing what was originally a cluster of interlocking privileges and responsibilities centered on the public good into a justification for the false idea that academics have no obligation to the public at all. Finally, they stem from the profoundly mistaken premise ... that input from the public, from constituencies such as alumni and trustees, violates academic freedom as well.
Neal's point worth making again in the wake of Inside Higher Ed's coverage of a forum on academic freedom that was held earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. According to Inside Higher Ed, the forum featured several presenters who all argued that academic freedom is currently under attack. And yet, as Inside Higher Ed describes it, the forum was characterized by the same sorts of conceptual confusions Neal outlined in June. No definition of academic freedom seems to have been established, and two of the panelists appear to have based their claims on misconceptions about what the term really is and what kinds of expression it is meant to protect.
Lisa Anderson, an international relations professor at Columbia University, reported that at Columbia, job candidates in Middle Eastern studies are being grilled about their politics and that appointments are being made on the basis of politics--troubling, indeed--as is her claim that Columbia is vetting outside speakers for their politics. Both claims, if true, suggest that Columbia is engaging in behavior that is quite contrary to both the tenets of academic freedom and the university's anti-discrimination policies. However, Anderson also argues that the academic freedom of Middle Eastern studies scholars has been damaged by criticism coming from people who disagree with their scholarship. And this is where her claims are compromised by confusion about what academic freedom is. Academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism--and, indeed, the energetic debate that has grown up around Middle Eastern studies represents the very sort of exchange that academic freedom seeks to foster.
Similar confusion governs the analysis of Neil Gross, a Harvard sociology professor who presented the results of a survey studying whether social science professors felt their academic freedom was threatened. According to Gross, about one-third did. But it's questionable whether, in asking professors about their feelings, Gross discovered anything at all about the actual state of academic freedom. Though he acknowledged that one explanation for the poll results is that his subjects could have been defining academic freedom in their own way, he nonetheless took professors' subjective impressions as proof that there is a problem, calling the one-third figure "alarming" and arguing that we are in "an up cycle" when it comes to attacks on academic freedom.
Such arguments do not tell us anything meaningful about academic freedom as such. What they do tell us is that academic freedom has become a distressingly amorphous concept. Because its history and significance are not broadly understood, "academic freedom" is now often used to forward ideas and claims that are, in fact, antithetical to it.
Posted by acta online on August 16, 2007 at 06:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Studying up on study abroad
In the wake of last winter's student loan scandal, the public is newly aware of the need for transparency in higher education--and now comes the latest revelation. Monday's New York Times broke a corker of a story about how study abroad programs engage in conduct that is at once ethically questionable and costly for students--and in response, academic officials are scrambling to explain themselves.
The Times reported that at many schools, study abroad programs are run through for-profit companies and non-profit institutes that give perks to schools in exchange for sending students their way. These include "free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees."
Are the students the first concern? By no means. Students typically pay full tuition to their home institution while studying abroad; the school then pays the students' abroad tuition and pockets the often considerable difference. Worse, students who wish to strike out on their own to save money run into trouble--the Times tells the story of a Columbia student who spent his junior year at Oxford's Magdalen College, only to find that Columbia refused to transfer credit for the courses he took there. He wound up staying where he was, and graduated from Oxford rather than repeat his junior year at Columbia.
The Times article caused quite a stir--and prompted an immediate response from higher education officials and external providers. In the story, Brian Whalen of the Forum for Education Abroad noted the need for greater transparency so that students know whether their costs or choices are affected by their schools' arrangement with external providers.
"We're all wringing our hands about how to make it possible for lower income kids to participate in study abroad," Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, told the Times. "But one of the reasons it costs so much is all this institutional mediation."
And, in follow-up articles published at Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, college administrators and study abroad companies acknowledge the need for greater accountability when it comes to how individual colleges and universities run their study abroad programs.
As Eric Lund, who directs international and off-campus study at St. Olaf College, told Inside Higher Ed, "If individual schools are making deals on the basis of special offers like that, and if the assumption is that the provider is going to be able to monopolize a market, or expect something in return, there are reasons to be concerned about relations like that. ... It raises questions about ethical standards ... in our field if some arrangements like this are going on."
Peggy Blumenthal of the Institute of International Education agrees: "Disclosure is really the key issue," she told Inside Higher Ed. "It's really the realization--and maybe schools are not always as quick to come to this as they need to be--that today we just need to disclose all of our ties that we have with business providers. And that's true, ever since the new accounting rules for for-profit companies and now, increasingly, for not-for-profit companies. You're expected to disclose."
Although a number of study abroad officials have criticized the Times for overstating the problem, no one is arguing that change is not needed. Currently, about 200,000 students study abroad each year, and about 20 percent of those go through independent providers. But as more and more schools are requiring study abroad for graduation--higher education's goal is to send a million college students abroad each year by 2017--the cozy business practices associated with study abroad programs are coming under growing scrutiny.
Today's New York Times reports that New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo has begun an inquiry into universities' relationships with study abroad providers. On Wednesday, his office delivered subpoenas to five such providers--with a promise of more to come. The inquiry grows out of that office's work on the student loan system. "As our investigation continues to expand," said Benjamin Lawsky, Cuomo's deputy counselor, "we are finding that more and more vendors who do business on campus are there because of the cozy relationships they have developed with the schools. The question is whether those relationships help the schools at the expense of students."
Posted by acta online on August 16, 2007 at 04:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Money talks
It's well known that America's faculties tilt to one side. Studies of voter registration and voting patterns have consistently documented a lack of diversity among professors when it comes to political issues. And while many professors argue that their outside electoral habits have no impact on their teaching and research, there are convincing arguments to the contrary. As University of Montana professor Paul Trout and UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis have argued, political one-sidedness creates groupthink where there should be robust debate, skews research, and even encourages scholarly organizations to behave like advocacy groups. The result is an impoverished scholarly atmosphere that undermines the quality of undergraduate education. As ACTA revealed in a 2004 survey, 49 percent of college students believe their professors "frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject" and 29 percent feel they must agree with their professors' political views to get a good grade
A new study from the Center for Responsive Politics comes at the issue from another angle, and reports some striking results. Tracking campaign contributions during the '08 cycle, the Center found that higher ed is a bigger donor than the oil and gas industry, the computer and Internet industry, general contractors, and the drug companies. Currently, people employed by colleges and universities have contributed over $7 million to prospective presidential candidates, parties and committees, with 76% of the total going to Democrats and 60% going to individual candidates. Barack Obama is the frontrunner at $1.5 million, while Hillary Clinton follows at nearly $940,000.
Within higher ed, Harvard is the biggest contributor, with $266,000 in donations, 81% of which has gone to Democrats. 90% of the University of California's $248,488 has gone to Democrats, 92% of the University of Chicago’s $102,880 has gone to Democrats, and a whopping 99% of William and Mary's $136,200 has gone to Democrats.
Campaign contributions from higher ed have skyrocketed during the last two election cycles. During the 1990s, academics tended to give about $7 million per cycle. But in 2000, they gave $17 million, and in 2004 they gave $38 million. The effect on individual candidates' campaigns has been dramatic--in 2004, John Kerry received more money from University of California employees than from any other employer, and these gave more than twice what employees of Time Warner, the Kerry campaign's largest corporate donor, gave.
Intellectual diversity is not, of course, reducible to party affiliation, and the professoriate's campaign contributions do not themselves tell us what happens inside college classrooms. Still, the numbers are suggestive, and they do indicate cause for concern. "This...might not be a crisis if it were not for the fact that some of the ideals that encourage intellectual openness command less allegiance in academe than they once did," ACTA noted in its 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. "Today, the notion of truth and objectivity is regarded by many professors as antiquated and an obstacle to social change. In this 'postmodern' view, all ideas are political, the classroom is an appropriate place for advocacy, and students should be molded into 'change agents' to promote a political agenda. ... Faculty imbalance, combined with the idea that the 'politically correct' point of view has a right to dominate classroom and campus discussions, has had fearful consequences for university life."
Posted by acta online on August 14, 2007 at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rethinking research
Accreditors' primary responsibility is to ensure the educational quality of the schools they evaluate. But, as ACTA's recent policy paper on accreditation shows, too often accreditors either fail to perform this function, or involve themselves in matters that are beyond their purview, or both. And, as ACTA argues, accreditors need to return to first principles in order to reform a broken system.
A new draft report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) offers some interesting insights. The AACSB established the first guidelines for business school accreditation in 1916, and since then it has been a leader in setting accreditation standards for business schools. In its new report--approved in April, and now open for public comment--the AACSB questions some of the foundational assumptions underlying our understanding of educational excellence. Specifically, the AACSB is asking whether business school education is enriched when faculty are actively involved in research. That question, in turn, compels the AACSB to ask a series of related questions: How exactly does faculty research benefit students? What kinds of research improve educational quality, and how do they do so? How can business schools measure the educational benefits of faculty research? And what should accreditors do to assess whether business schools are working to ensure that faculty research has a positive impact on student learning?
We tend to take it as a given that faculty research enhances students' educational experience. This is a foundational aspect of the university model, and so accepted is the belief that research and teaching go hand in hand that a growing number of colleges--traditionally understood as teaching-centered institutions--are building research requirements into their expectations for faculty as well as their undergraduate curricula.
But much of this philosophy depends on a foggy notion of alchemy--put research and teaching side by side, and they will each improve the quality of the other, the logic often goes. And perhaps the logic is best left murky--out of respect for the inherent imprecision of human learning and discovery. But, again, perhaps the murkiness is a problem requiring clarification.
This is the working premise of the AACSB report, which wants, above all, to explore ways accreditors can compel business schools to demonstrate that the research faculty members do serves students in some measurable, demonstrable way. Recognizing that business schools are special entities whose educational and research profiles are organized around a necessary but difficult tension between application and theory, the AACSB proposes that business schools should work harder to encourage a useful and productive "handshake" between their educational missions and their faculty research profiles.
The resulting recommendations center on finding new ways to value practical, applied faculty research (which tends to be seen as less worthy than prestigious, peer-reviewed publications) as well as on establishing mechanisms for quantifying the impact of faculty research. While accreditors have tended to focus on the volume of faculty research, the AACSB is proposing that they begin requiring schools to devise flexible metrics by which to measure how well faculty members' research advances schools' educational missions. The additional paperwork this requirement would create, the AACSB argues, would be worth it, since it would enable a much closer and more substantial "integration between institutional mission development and processes for individual faculty performance planning and appraisal." As the AACSB notes, "Such close integration is at the heart of accreditation processes for without such linkage there can be no assurance of effective, long-term curriculum delivery and, therefore, contribution to creating the high-quality managerial and leadership talent required for the future success of business schools and our economy."
Business school graduate education differs substantially from undergraduate liberal arts education. And yet, the AACSB is raising issues that are just as relevant to the latter as they are to the former. As such, in working to devise a new mechanism for ensuring the quality of business school education, the AACSB is modelling a style of creative, responsible thinking that could profitably be adopted by those whose job it is to ensure the quality and integrity of undergraduate learning.
The AACSB invites the public to respond to the draft report here.
Posted by acta online on August 13, 2007 at 12:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Voluntary accountability
ACTA has long argued that higher education needs to be accountable to the public. As college costs skyrocket, parents, students, and taxpayers all deserve to have solid information about where their dollars are going--and about whether students are getting educations that are worth what they are paying. ACTA has also long argued that the ideal accountability mechanism is one that emerges from inside colleges and universities themselves. By voluntarily implementing reporting measures that publicize information about educational quality, colleges and universities can strike an ideal a balance between institutional autonomy and accountability.
Now, in the wake of last year's report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, state schools are doing just that. The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel has the details:
The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (big research universities) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (the rest of them) -- are about to take a significant step. ...The state schools are designing a template for college Web sites that, for those that opt to use it, shows in standard format: (1) details about admission rates, costs and graduation rates to make comparisons simple; (2) results from surveys of students designed to measure satisfaction and engagement, and (3) results of tests given to a representative sample of students to gauge not how smart they were when they arrived, but how much they learned about writing, analysis and problem-solving between freshman and senior years.
The last one is the biggie. Participating schools will use one of three tests to gauge the performance of students with similar entering SAT scores at tasks that any college grad ought to be able to handle. One test, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, gives students some circumstance and a variety of information about it, and asks for short essays (no multiple choice) on solving a problem or analyzing a scenario. Under the state schools' proposed grading scale, 70% of the schools will report that students did "as expected," given their SATs. An additional 15% will report they did better or much better than expected, and 15% will report students did worse or much worse than expected.
The proposed measures are being welcomed by higher ed officials across the board. Charles Miller, who led the Spellings Commission, says, "They're focused on the right thing, doing it the right way." Dan Fogel, president of the University of Vermont, greets the new measures as a means of meeting higher ed's "profound ethical obligation to ensure that our students learn most things that we are trying to teach them." Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers calls the measures "a counterweight to what is otherwise the overwhelming tendency for universities to be accountable only to their faculties," adding that "Unless you have some way of noticing when you are doing a better job of educating, you're not likely to do a better job of educating."
There are some hurdles--as Wessel notes, it will be a challenge to devise a test that coordinates meaningfully with the sheer diversity of our colleges and universities. And, as Bryan O'Keeffe of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity observes, objective data may not emerge from a model that relies on voluntary self-reporting.
Still, the NASULGC and the AASCU have taken a remarkable and important step forward. The measures they are contemplating respond admirably to a growing consensus--spearheaded by groups such as ACTA--that colleges and universities should be providing more information about learning outcomes. As University of Maryland chancellor William Kirwan puts it, "I don’t think this would have occurred without external pressure for greater transparency and accountability."
Posted by acta online on August 13, 2007 at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
What's wrong with this picture?
A small religious college struggles to stay afloat. It needs to increase enrollments and improve retention. The president and the board develop a strategic plan and implement an ambitious campaign designed to attract and retain more students and ultimately draw more alumni contributions.
The accreditor moves to revoke the college's accreditation.
This is the story of St. Andrews Presbyterian College in North Carolina. In 2005, the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) placed St. Andrews on probation for what St. Andrews president Paul Baldasare calls "a disagreement concerning the college's strategic plan and how the college has structured its finances." And in June, SACS announced its intention to revoke St. Andrews' accreditation for failure to demonstrate that it is financially sound. Now the college is appealing the decision, and--in what would be a painful redirection of hard won resources--the trustees have authorized legal action if the appeal fails.
As ACTA shows in its recent policy paper, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It, accreditors routinely overstep the bounds of their authority, and, as long as federal student aid hangs in the balance, there isn't a lot schools can do to resist them. The system urgently needs reform, and the first step is to break the corrupting link between accreditation and federal student aid.
St. Andrews is a perfect case in point: an accreditor micromanaging financial matters that are best left to the board while ignoring the issue that should be its primary and determining concern, educational quality. St. Andrews has been singled out by U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Monthly, the Princeton Review, by Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, and many others for its innovative and effective curriculum. Even more to the point, SACS itself has praised the caliber of the college's programs. By SACS' own lights, St. Andrews is succeeding in its educational mission.
And yet, St. Andrews' future is uncertain because the overweening bureaucrats at SACS have decided to involve themselves in fiduciary matters and to second guess the trustees who are legally responsible for the institution. St. Andrews' financial plan may be wise--or not. But that's something for its trustees to decide, not its accreditor.
If federal student aid weren't tied to accreditation, St. Andrews could simply forego accreditation and forge ahead on its own. But as things stand, St. Andrews will lose everything it has worked for if it loses accreditation. Without accreditation, students who need federal aid will not be able to attend the school; they will go elsewhere, and the student body will decline in both numbers and economic diversity. SACS has St. Andrews in a stranglehold--one that arguably benefits no one but itself.
Posted by acta online on August 09, 2007 at 10:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Developing the accreditation debate
ACTA's new policy paper, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It, has drawn lots of attention since its release last month--and its no-nonsense approach to accreditation reform has elicited a chorus of agreement from both accreditors and academic officials.
In a response published at Inside Accreditation, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) acknowledged the validity of ACTA's arguments about how accreditors do little to enhance educational quality while raising costs and compressing the diversity of institutions. CHEA also observed that two of ACTA's recommendations are "fundamental to the future of accreditation and how it operates": 1) that the gatekeeping role accreditors perform for the government--effectively determining which schools are worthy of receiving federal student aid--should be reassessed; and 2) that accreditors should be more responsive to calls for public accountability. Finding much common ground with ACTA's position, CHEA's response indicated an encouraging willingness on the part of accreditors to revisit the terms upon which they operate.
Others are seeing the value of ACTA's recommendations, too. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education is running a piece by Alan Contreras, an administrator at the Oregon Student Assistance Commission who contributes frequently to The Chronicle and to Inside Higher Ed. Best known in education circles for his work on diploma mills, Contreras has an abiding interest in accreditation as a means of differentiating fake schools from real ones, and he agrees wholeheartedly with ACTA that the link between accreditation and federal financial aid should be broken:
ACTA is quite right in one of its recommendations: that we should decouple accreditation from eligibility for federal grants and loans for students. Because financial aid is a major issue only for undergraduate programs, the many institutions around the country that offer degrees beyond the baccalaureate level now have no special incentive to become accredited. Indeed, the great majority of unaccredited colleges and universities with which I am familiar offer mainly or exclusively graduate degrees, especially religious degrees. The same is true of diploma mills, of course, whose customers mainly want doctorates.
Thus making accreditation independent of federal student aid would have the salutary effect of drying up many ineffective or unnecessary accreditors. It might also lead the federal government to set genuine standards for what makes a college good enough for federal aid, which would be a true--and long overdue--revolution.
And that's not the only place where Contreras and ACTA agree. Contreras wholeheartedly agrees with ACTA's indictment of accreditors for their failure to insist on a coherent core curriculum: "Colleges and universities at all levels should move toward making unified, required core curricula the bulk of the first two years of college."
He also reserves special praise for what he calls "the document's best part"--the manner in which it "thoroughly dissect[s] one of the strangest and least defensible aspects of today's accreditation system .... The idea that a college can be evaluated only by reference to its own goals." Accreditors' willingness to exempt colleges from accountability to established standards, Contreras notes, "is largely nonsense and needs to be revisited."
Of course, neither CHEA nor Contreras agrees with all the ideas put forth in ACTA's paper. But what we have in Contreras' piece--the misleading headline aside--is not just any agreement, but agreement to remarkable degree. This, surely, is testimony to how far this debate has traveled since ACTA's first report on accreditation--and as such it's a tantalizing taste of the progress that still stands to be made.
Posted by acta online on August 07, 2007 at 06:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
History lessons at Dartmouth
This spring, Dartmouth alumni elected University of Virginia law professor Stephen Smith to the board of trustees, and in response, longstanding debates about who should be running the College are flaring up again. As Smith noted in an op-ed last month, "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."
One of those "alternative methods" involves challenging Dartmouth's "1891 Agreement." Consisting of several Board resolutions adopted in 1891, the agreement granted alumni the right to elect half the College's trustees. George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki, a Dartmouth trustee who ran as a petition candidate in 2005, explains the idea in a piece appearing in the Dartmouth student newspaper, The Dartmouth. "In recent communications to alumni," Zywicki notes, "Chairman of the Board Ed Haldeman questioned the validity of this longstanding agreement":
"If you read the resolution," [Haldeman] claims, it "didn't promise parity," does not "contain the word or concept of parity in it" and merely permitted "the alumni to nominate the next five trustees for the Board to then elect." Haldeman adds that there "seems to be a great deal of confusion about the 1891 'agreement.'"
It is Chairman Haldeman's expression of doubts about the Agreement that has created confusion-- confusion about the Board's intentions and its commitment to honoring Dartmouth's longstanding and beneficial partnership between its alumni, the Board, and the administration.
Mr. Haldeman challenges us to read the 1891 resolution for ourselves. I have--and I am not only a lawyer but a professor who has taught contract law for over a decade. And, in fact, it is an agreement, it does contain "the concept of parity," and it does promise alumni the right to elect half of the Board.
Zywicki goes on to explain how the 1891 Agreement emerged from decades of tension between Dartmouth and its alumni--the College wanted alumni money, but alumni were unhappy with management of the college and wanted a say in how their donations were spent. A compromise was reached in which Dartmouth agreed to allow alumni to elect half the members of the board. At the time, Dartmouth had ten trustees, so alumni gained control of five seats. And over the years, as Dartmouth gradually expanded its board, it faithfully took care to ensure that for each new appointed trustee, another was elected by alumni--thus ensuring that alumni retained control of half the non ex officio seats, and thus staying true to the 1891 Agreement.
Now Haldeman is apparently arguing that the 1891 Agreement only promised alumni the right to elect five people to the board--and that therefore alumni today should only control five of the eighteen trustee seats. In so doing, Zywicki argues, Haldeman betrays both the spirit and the substance of the 1891 Agreement:
This partnership between alumni and the Board has governed the College for nearly half of its very existence--indeed it has defined modern Dartmouth itself. As a result of its unique tradition of former students representing current and future students, Dartmouth has remained distinct among its peers in maintaining undergraduate, liberal arts education as its first priority. The Board should honor the spirit and wisdom of this partnership and appreciate the benefits it has produced, rather than treating alumni as adversarial parties to an arms-length contractual negotiation governed by only the minimum of what may be legally mandated. To change this tradition would be to change Dartmouth itself.
Standard principles of contract interpretation--context, history, language, tradition, intent and practice--all indicate that the 1891 Agreement means exactly what everyone has understood it to mean for 116 years: It promises the alumni body the right to elect half of the Board of Trustees. Let us honor that promise.
Zywicki thus brings a crucial dose of historical truth to a matter that has far-ranging implications -- not only for Dartmouth's governance but for the principle of independent oversight generally.
Posted by acta online on August 07, 2007 at 02:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack