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Dartmouth hits the AP wire
A new Associated Press piece on Dartmouth College is running in today's newspapers:
The four trustees say they've injected some much-needed new thinking and that there's nothing conservative about the issues they've focused on — free speech and undergraduate education (a particular point of pride for an institution that holds onto the title "college" despite having graduate programs that really make it a university).But board chair Charles "Ed" Haldeman, who heads Putnam Investments and is overseeing the governance review, says the trustee campaigns have become too combative and expensive, focusing on hot-button issues rather than finding people who might best serve the institution. The cost of campaigning discourages potential candidates and has brought Dartmouth negative publicity.
Haldeman declined to discuss specifics, but hinted the recommendations will include expanding the board, noting Dartmouth "is right at the bottom in terms of size." Haldeman said that "no matter where the board comes out this weekend, democracy will be an important part of governance at Dartmouth." But, he added, "it's all a matter of degree."
Zywicki and Stephen Smith, another trustee elected via petition, also declined to discuss details of what they've seen of the proposal. But Smith, a University of Virginia law professor, said he is disappointed.
He says Dartmouth is frustrated its in-house candidates keep losing elections, and now wants to stack the deck.
"I think many colleges and universities treat alumni as ATM machines," donating money and letting the administration do whatever it wishes, Smith said. By contrast, Dartmouth has built a genuine partnership with its alumni. But that partnership, Smith said, "is in grave danger right now."
We noted previously that there is trouble brewing at Dartmouth, in the form of a "governance review" that seems intent on curtailing the ability of concerned alumni to bring independent voices to the Board of Trustees. But today's story--and a recent local piece--have brought another interesting issue to the fore, namely indications that Dartmouth may dramatically expand the size of its board.
The wisdom of such a move would be questionable, to say the least. ACTA has conducted an informal review of some of our nation's elite private universities--specifically, the private institutions among U.S. News & World Report's Top 25 National Universities. Our review showed that the average board size at those institutions is about 46 members--a truly astonishing figure.
It's extremely difficult to imagine boards of that size providing the effective oversight today's universities sorely need. And we've seen the results of mismanagement in recent months--last year's scandal involving American University, where the president was using university funds to pay for his French chef and his son’s parties while the board was asleep at the switch, comes to mind, as does the continuing brouhaha over college administrators and student loans.
It's also of note that Dartmouth alumni just rebuffed, less than one year ago, another attempt to redo governance procedures. Yet now the Dartmouth establishment is at it again. One wonders: Are there not more critical issues (such as the academic mission of the college) on which attention might be better focused? T.J. Rodgers, a trustee nominated by petition and elected in 2004, made this point in last weekend's Wall Street Journal:
In Mr. Rodgers's judgment, the increasingly political denigration--the "rancor," he calls it--has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. "Before I ever went to my first board meeting," he says, "I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does--management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they're doing and what they need to get their jobs done."He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments--economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular--were "suffering from a shortage of teaching."
"It's a simple problem," Mr. Rodgers says. "You hire more professors." His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. "I've had to scrounge to get data," he says, the administration not being forthcoming. "My best sources of data come from faculty members and students."
While he can't discuss internal figures, he says there's been "a modest improvement since 2004. It's about 10 professors net gain." That's "going in the right direction, but not nearly as fast as I would like." While the college has added 1.1% faculty per year over the last decade, at the same time its overall expenses have increased by 8.8%, "so the inevitable mathematical conclusion of those numbers is that the percentage of money we spend on faculty is going down, and it has gone down consistently for a long time."
"In general, I don't have a prescription," he says. "I'm not trying to micromanage the place. What I'm saying is take the huge amount of money that an institution like Dartmouth has and focus it on your core business, which is undergraduate education, and make it really, really good. If you want to pinch pennies, pinch pennies somewhere else and not on the core business. That's all I'm saying."
Trustee politics is the reason that this problem with "the core business," as he puts it, has not been addressed. "I don't think we pay enough attention to it and care enough about it. We have time to worry about other things and somehow the main business of the college, which is to educate, doesn't dominate our meetings.
"I obviously don't want to talk a lot about what happens in board meetings, but I keep pushing to spend time on it--and that makes me an annoyance. . . . The priority has been, if you look at it, changing the rules to get rid of the petition trustees who are willing to criticize the administration.
Dartmouth's board meets tomorrow to consider all of this. In many respects, the best thing it could do would be to quit tinkering with trustee elections and get back to its real job--making certain Dartmouth's students are getting the quality undergraduate education they deserve. After all, if the system of picking trustees were really so broken, it probably wouldn't have prompted the highest voter turnout ever in the most recent election. (That was just a few months after the last attempt to change the rules failed miserably, losing by 18 points.)
However, if Dartmouth is intent upon--as it announced earlier this year--bringing its governance procedures in line with best practices, ACTA does have some suggestions, which we provided in a memo to the Dartmouth Association of Alumni in July. The gist of the memo is that according to best practices in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors, the role of Dartmouth's president in picking trustees is inappropriate. Board members are supposed to pick the CEO and hold him accountable--but at Dartmouth, the president is deeply involved not just in the present governance review, but also in picking the trustees on whom alumni do not vote. As our memo points out, this turns good governance on its head.
As their board meeting approaches, Dartmouth's leaders would do well to engage in less of the navel-gazing that has consumed the place lately and refocus their attention on the college's core academic mission, effective (rather than clubby and comfortable) governance and, as as Stephen Smith pointed out to the AP, not treating alumni as "ATM machines." Even Dartmouth alumni, as enthusiastic as they are, will only submit to so much before they decide to direct their support elsewhere. That would be bad for all involved.
Posted by cmitchell at September 6, 2007 12:20 PM
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Comments
ACTA doesn't seem to have done its research on this one. You seem confused by "indications that Dartmouth may dramatically expand the size of its board." If by "indications" you mean "an official press release" and by "dramatically" you mean "to 22 members," then I suppose you are correct. The Board voted in 2003 to expand the board from 16 to 22, and that's no secret.
Can you explain why "It's extremely difficult to imagine boards of that size [46] providing the effective oversight"? One would think that ACTA prefers a board that is large enough not to be hijacked by a small interest group that wants to bring Ward Churchill to campus or something � do you have in mind some number between 16 and 46 that would be ideal, and some reasons why you settled on that number? Or do you think that 22 is itself too large?
You also seem to be confused by the distinction between a collegiate board of trustees and an association of alumni. The "[]other attempt to redo governance procedures" was a proposal for a constitution of Dartmouth's alumni association put forth by alumni. The Board of Trustees did not change its procedures (as now seems contemplated) and would not have needed to ask for alumni approval if it had.
The general tone of your post implies that Dartmouth's Board cannot reduce alumni influence just because it wants to, or because it wants less influence from the particular brand of trustee who has been nominated by alumni recently. Dartmouth, of course, is free to change for either reason, or no reason at all. That's because its board is (as you must support) independent, conscientious, and actively involved in governance. What reason do you have to think otherwise? Is there some reason in your mind that Dartmouth may not change its board or reduce alumni influence?
In other words, does ACTA support Dartmouth's critics only because it happens to share their political philosophy, and does ACTA thereby ignore its general position on deeper principles of college governance?
Posted by: Alumnus at September 7, 2007 10:23 AM
Just curious -- since ACTA is so interested in "accountability," will it open its books with regard to this controversy? Is ACTA supplying funds to the anonymous CSDC (which placed the Times ads and runs savedartmouth.org) or the anonymous VoteDartmouth.org?
Can we get a little honesty and openness here? Or is "accountability" only required of corporations other than ACTA?
Posted by: Anonymous at September 7, 2007 10:26 AM
ACTA claims to believe that "Dartmouth's leaders would do well to engage in less of the navel-gazing that has consumed the place lately" at their next meeting.
But Anne Neal of ACTA previously wrote that those leaders should tinker with their internal governance system by removing the president from the Governance Committee, removing his vote from the Board (in contravention of Dartmouth's historic charter, by the way), and publicly stating that the Board will preserve the role of alumni in selecting trustees.
Sounds like navel-gazing to me.
Posted by: Gozer at September 7, 2007 02:08 PM