The Dartmouth Fracas
Alumni trustees can reconnect the university with American life.
BY PETER ROBINSON
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:30 a.m. EDT
Ho-hum about the clash of civilizations? Blasé about the struggle for Congress? Then turn your attention to Hanover, N.H., home of Dartmouth College, where the fighting is really intense.
The story begins with T.J. Rodgers, the entrepreneur who founded and runs Cypress Semiconductor. In 2004 Mr. Rodgers, class of '70, decided his alma mater could use him on its board of trustees (half of whose members are elected by alumni). He circulated a letter in which he insisted on a reassertion of high academic standards, the importance of freedom of speech on campus, and the need for Dartmouth to strive to remain the best undergraduate institution in the country. Employing a seldom-used petition mechanism to get his name on the ballot, Mr. Rodgers required 500 signatures. He received thousands. Then he defeated the three official candidates in a walk.
The following year Mr. Rodgers persuaded two more alumni to mount petition candidacies: Todd Zywicki, class of '88, who teaches law at George Mason, and me, class of '79. We addressed the same issues Mr. Rodgers had addressed, and, like Mr. Rodgers, we won.
The response in Hanover? Remarkably uniform. Everyone became hysterical.
This spring a nine-person panel, the Alumni Governance Task Force, figured out how to prevent outsiders from gaining any more influence. It proposed replacing the current alumni constitution, which has served the college for decades, with an entirely new document. The central provision in this new document would force petition trustee candidates to announce their intentions before the nominating committee announced the official slate, allowing the committee to game each election by choosing its candidates to split the opposition vote. Balloting on this new constitution, which is open to all 66,500 alumni, began in mid-September and will continue until the end of this month.
If the new constitution was brazen, the way the Hanover establishment has been promoting it would leave any reasonable person agape. The chairman of the Alumni Governance Task Force is warning of an "attempt . . . to take over the board of trustees"--as if Mr. Rodgers, Mr. Zywicki and I intended a coup. A co-chairman of Dartmouth's capital campaign is decrying a "radical minority cabal" intent on forcing the college into "a downward death spiral." Kill Dartmouth? By insisting on academic standards and free speech?
The uglier the combat, goes the old rule in academia, the lower the stakes. But the fracas at Dartmouth is different. Far from representing a spat among alumni, it proves that the tides of technology are at last lapping up against the ivory tower. In one sector of American life after another, technology long ago began shifting power from insiders to outsiders, from the few to the many. Mainframe computers have given way to personal computers. The old media have lost ground to the blogosphere, the Library of Congress to Wikipedia. In each instance, technology has taken a top-down structure and flattened it, making it incomparably more democratic. Now higher education is experiencing the same leveling force.
The old model--the one many provosts and deans seem to assume will remain in effect forever--is simple. First colleges spend four years teaching students to engage in critical thinking. Then they treat the same people like ciphers, instructing them to write checks every year while leaving the governance of the institutions to the administrators.
The new model is still taking shape, but a couple of its features have already become clear. One is the ease with which technology now makes it possible for alumni to circumvent the clumsy propaganda in alumni magazines to gather reliable, first-hand information about the state of affairs on their campuses. Perform a Google search on "Dartmouth," for example, and you'll discover that all the student newspapers appear online and that blogs cover every aspect of life in Hanover--sports, campus politics, and even college architecture.
The second feature of the new model follows irresistibly from the first. If alumni are able to learn as much about their alma maters as can administrators, then why shouldn't they have a say in running the places? For now this second feature takes the form of a question, not a demand. Alumni at most institutions ask to be heard only when they're particularly annoyed. What makes Dartmouth distinctive is that as a result of its current constitution--and in particular of the petition trustee mechanism, which has few parallels elsewhere--the college is already wide open to alumni involvement.
The response of the Dartmouth establishment is unsurprising, I suppose--insiders always resist outsiders--but disappointing all the same. As a petition trustee I've corresponded with hundreds of alumni. They recognize the college remains a superb institution. They'd simply like it to remain true to its own character. Radicals? Cabalists? Nonsense.
As the fracas in Hanover continues, a couple of words. To Dartmouth alumni: To ensure democracy at the college, vote against the proposed constitution. And to the Hanover establishment--and, for that matter, the establishment at every college and university: The alumni are coming. But they won't sack your institutions, just reconnect them with American life.
Mr. Robinson is a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a trustee at Dartmouth College.
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