The Powerline bloggers and a couple of others are Dartmouth Grads, so I have been following this story. What makes it interesting is the extreme reaction of the Academics to any interference in their running of the College. True all over the country. The Loony Left has control of Academia now, and they aren't going to give it up. The NYT writer is on the Academics side.
The New York Times
September 8, 2007
Battle Over Board Structure at Dartmouth Raises Passions of Alumni
By TAMAR LEWIN
Even for an Ivy League institution with a long and storied history, it is remarkable that Dartmouth College has created such a stir with a governing fight: full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, furious discussion among conservative bloggers and publications, a new Committee to Save Dartmouth College and charges of power grabs by a “radical minority cabal.”
Cabal or not, it is true that since 2004, four conservative or libertarian candidates have been elected to Dartmouth’s board of trustees after petition drives to get on the ballot to challenge candidates backed by the official alumni association.
Now the college administration is reconsidering the entire trustee structure and in the process has set off a battle over whether alumni will be disenfranchised. The advertisement in The Times ran under the headline: “Q: Who won’t get to vote in New Hampshire? A: Dartmouth College Alumni.”
The showdown over how Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., will be governed will probably come this weekend at the board’s annual retreat, when a five-member committee including the college president and the chairman of the board but none of the petition trustees presents recommendations for change.
As with many Ivy League disputes, there is a question of tradition. Since 1891, Dartmouth alumni have elected half the board’s members, giving them an unusual degree of alumni power. Then, too, the board is unusually small, with just 18 members: the New Hampshire governor, the college president, eight trustees appointed by the board, and eight chosen by alumni.
Now there is debate about whether all this democracy is such a good thing. Some in the administration, and some alumni, see the petition trustees as a throwback to the more conservative Dartmouth ethos of years ago, bent on undoing the liberalization of the campus under President James O. Freedman, from 1987 to 1998, and, since then, President James Wright.
“My feeling is that the alumni have been very vocal and very powerful, and that a lot of them are trying to recreate the Dartmouth they went to, with the drinking and the ‘Animal House’ behavior, which somehow resulted in extreme success in business after college,” said Mary Lou Teel, who attended Dartmouth shortly after it became coeducational.
David P. Spalding, Dartmouth’s vice president for alumni relations, said that despite the ferment, most alumni were content with the administration. “Dartmouth alums are very passionate about the institution and always have been,” Mr. Spalding said. “But our surveys show that 80 percent plus of our alumni are satisfied with the direction of the college.”
Still, in recent elections, alumni have repeatedly chosen petition candidates over official candidates, and they voted down an effort to change election procedures to make it harder for petition candidates to win.
Just what the governing committee is planning is not clear, although many alumni predict it will give more power to the college administration and its closest allies and biggest donors. Mr. Wright, the college president, declined an interview request this week, and Charles E. Haldeman Jr., the chairman of the board and president of Putnam Investments, said he could not discuss the recommendations.
But Stephen F. Smith, who was elected as a petition candidate last spring, said the proposals would profoundly dilute alumni power. “I can’t discuss specifics, but they just decided to ram this through, and radically change the structure of the board,” said Mr. Smith, a law professor who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. “And I think they have the votes to do it.”
The recent challenges began in 2004, with the election of T. J. Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, a libertarian known in business circles for his entrepreneurial skills and his long, blistering 1996 reply to a form letter from the Sisters of St. Francis criticizing his company for having no female or minority directors. Mr. Rodgers replied that “a ‘woman’s view’ on how to run our semiconductor company does not help us, unless that woman has an advanced technical degree and experience as a C.E.O.”
Then, in 2005, came Peter M. Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, and Todd J. Zywicki, a law professor. Mr. Zywicki’s meetings with an all-male secret society, the Phrygians, prompted a recent posting on the society’s Web site, congratulating Mr. Zywicki for, among other things, helping to recruit Mr. Smith and discussing “our efforts to overthrow the Wright administration.”
The petition trustees say the issue is not politics but keeping up quality at their alma mater — the only Ivy institution that calls itself a college rather than a university — by maintaining its focus on undergraduate education.
In a letter to the board chairman last month, Angus King, a Dartmouth graduate and former Maine governor, said he, too, felt that under the last two presidents, Dartmouth had competed too much with other Ivy League institutions to be a small-scale research university, rather than focusing on being the best undergraduate college.
Mr. Haldeman denied that the governing review was a direct response to the petition trustees, but he did say he was troubled that recent elections had been divisive, especially last spring, when Mr. Smith was elected.
“There was a lot more spending this time,” he said, “and where in the past, people ran based on their qualifications, their résumé, their commitment to the college, in this most recent election, it was a very strong issue-based campaign in which one of the candidates ran, in effect, against the college.”
Others say the review is aimed squarely at the petition trustees.
“To an outside observer, the conclusion is inescapable that the real motivation for this project is the fact that insurgent candidates keep winning and that the changes in the constitution last year failed,” Mr. King said in his letter.
“I realize that these events must be frustrating to many of the trustees and certainly to the college’s administration,” he wrote, “but suggest that a better response than an alteration of the rules would be to listen to and try to understand the reasoning and motivation of those who keep electing dissident (if that is the right word) trustees.”
Yesterday, The Dartmouth, the college newspaper, editorialized against the “demagoguery” of Mr. Smith and Mr. Zywicki, and in favor of changing the board structure to ensure that it would be made up of “stewards, not politicians.”
“The alumni should not be able to take the board; it is not theirs to take,” the editorial said. “We agree with Board Chairman Ed Haldeman ’70 that alumni will sometimes resist beneficial change and that tough decisions are not always popular.” |
