By Joe Malchow
Given their common characteristics it's often difficult for a person of even superior discernment to tell, from a slight distance, the difference between an accomplished university bureaucrat and a robust brick wall. Both seem witlessly to beg for the wrecking ball. The nation's nine colonial colleges---not to mention the hundreds founded since---are thronged with administrative employees whose job it is to justify the outsized administration of the college or university that employs them. On the whole, these congeries of deans report that things are not going very well, that manifold "issues" of tremendous consequence beg resolution, and that, darn it, they just need more manpower. They recommend more deans.
And they are generously obliged on that score. The fact that, on the margin, American colleges now privilege the task of thickening the ranks of bureaucrats over that of educating their students is one reason that alumni---whose gifts are the lifeblood of the colonial institutions, at least---are in "revolt" mode, to use The Wall Street Journal's word. At the front of the fight, facing across the wind-swept college green the marshaled deanery, are the students and alumni of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Reacting to all manner of absurdities---such as the fact that from 2001 to 2006, Dartmouth added twice as many administrators as faculty members---Dartmouth alumni have voted in, four times in a row since 2004, activist trustees who pledged to hold the College's executives to account. At most publicly traded companies the election by the shareholders of an activist board-member cues, if not a resignation, then at least an episode of doleful reckoning on the part of the chief executive. At Dartmouth, the election of four independent trustees resulted in ever more pitched protests from the cocksure deanery; like any bureaucracy, it had become so thoroughly insulated from external inquiry that the notion of it having erred was imponderable.
After the fourth independent trustee was elected in May of 2007, the rubber-stamp set decided to attenuate the fractious independents by "packing" Dartmouth's board. Traditionally half alumni-elected and half self-appointed, the Board under a September 2007 plan would become two-thirds self-appointed and one-third elected - in consequence castrating the elected minority.
The Dartmouth Association of Alumni, which conducts trustee elections and which bargained successfully in 1891 for the half-elected arrangement, immediately filed suit to forestall the abrogation of its contract with the Board of Trustees. It is this lawsuit whose fate was decided earlier two weeks ago.
Alas, this fledgling reformation, previously unseen in American academe, may now have rustled back to ground. On June 10 Dartmouth alumni voted for new Association of Alumni leaders who have pledged to end the lawsuit. Democratic elections will not continue untrammeled. The vote followed a months-long campaign in which one slate of candidates endorsed "parity"---the notion of equal numbers of elected and appointed trustees---and another slate endorsed nothing more than dismissing the Association's attorney and withdrawing its complaint. This latter slate proved victorious, though for no reason other than its insistence that the lawsuit was distracting the College from its core mission. (A regular tragedy, of course: it is the very stakeholder activism the lawsuit sought to preserve that returned Dartmouth at long last to its core mission.) The anti-lawsuit slate members kept their own support for what has been termed "the Board-packing plan" silent, since according to a poll 92% of alumni oppose the scheme. Running by stealth---hired public relations professionals ran their campaign; an erstwhile Mitt Romney pollster conducted nationwide internal polling on their behalf---this cabal slotted themselves in and are now preparing to withdraw the complaint against the trustees.
Their victory is an empty one. Empty in the sense that four years of earnest ad rem argumentation on the part of reformers was thwarted not on the merits, but on procedure; empty in the fact that Dartmouth's establishment did little more than tucker out the outsiders. It was ultimately, as ever, the ability of bureaucrats to wait in brick-hard silence---not their powers of suasion---which won the day.
Each of Dartmouth's four petitioners---Silicon Valley businessman T.J. Rodgers, writer Peter Robinson, and law professors Stephen Smith and Todd Zywicki---won free and open elections by writing simple letters to the alumni body detailing, by prose and by statistic, what needed to be fixed at Dartmouth. They undertook to provide alumni with data beyond what they received in periodic glossies distributed by the school's gangling public relations apparatus. Not since William F. Buckley slipped New Haven's halls and wrote his first book has a college president suffered such an exhaustive public performance evaluation as at Dartmouth College. For their part, the other trustees consider that their responsibilities do not proceed past the consumption of a lobster dinner and the initialing here and there of whatever documents they find in their briefing binder.
In the fury over these free radicals on the Dartmouth Board, one is liable---beckoned, really---to overlook the substance of the fight. Since 2004, when Dr. Rodgers assumed his seat, the Dartmouth administration, which initially denied each candidates' criticisms, has somnolently confessed and endeavored, lightly, to rectify every one of them. A new Western studies center has just been opened in honor of alumnus Sen. Daniel Webster; the College speech code has been rescinded; the speech and rhetoric department has been reintroduced; the College's stellar government and economics faculties have finally been permitted to hire more professors; insider candidates for top positions are now more likely to be rejected in favor of freer-thinking outsiders; the student disciplinary procedures are under revision; the crusade against student-run fraternities has been surrendered; the hiring of administrators has slowed somewhat; and the effort to sacrifice the quality of undergraduate education at the altar of research has given up its ghost.
There is comedy in it: even though, after each successive petition candidate took his seat in Dartmouth's boardroom, the College administration attempted to change the rules (this covered the previous assay, from 2006) substantive argument trumped procedural whining each time. And at the very apogee of the scrap over the democratic election process, a judge was set to rule on the College's desperate abrogation of a century-old contract enshrining this process. Yet this judge, now, is prevented from weighing in---because the long-vested functionaries at Dartmouth mounted a campaign to prevent him from ruling on the procedural question.
Put another way, the College at every turn plied its muscle at thwarting the election process, not at winning the debates taking place under that process. (Not once since 2004 has an establishment candidate won election to the Board.) When the process was finally thrown into the courts to be adjudged by a professional, the College refused to fight there, too. It intrigued the takeover of the committee which employed the attorney who was pursuing the case, and will now sack him, causing the case to be dismissed. Courage? Intellectual integrity? Conviction? No, the modish academic prefers machination.
This latest episode at Dartmouth is not in toto a rejection of the democratic reformation. Rather it seems little more than an indication that one particular instrument---the legal complaint---is too uncouth to be countenanced by alumni, in what is after all a modestly undertaken effort to improve one's alma mater. The alumni rejected the tactic but reaffirmed the cause; this, their gentle spirit, mustn't be lamented. Along with a menagerie of bad policy, the consistent election of independent directors at Dartmouth has prompted the fading-away of the College's current president, James Wright, who preannounced his resignation after seats occupied by petitioners reached a full quarter of the board. His policies cannot now be taken as cues for his successor, whomever it will be; and that successor ought not, by rights, to encounter an alumni revolution his first day on the job. A certain honeymoon is expected.
One now recognizes that Dartmouth, the smallest and nimblest of the pre-Revolution institutions, shares with its bulkier peers the crust of age---whole offices stocked with hidebound sentinels who prevent the institution from truly connecting with the two constituencies which represent (or threaten to represent) the wider world: alumni and students.
In The New Criterion recently, University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors wrote: "A model of higher education that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to 'seize' a major university for such an experiment..."
Well. The success of four years of serious alumni inquiry seems, if not to have seized, then at least to have touched the heart of Dartmouth College. Who its next president is will determine whether those brick walls at the border are, as one hopes, melting down, and the bloom reflushing the rose.
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Joe Malchow is a 2008 graduate of Dartmouth College and a writer based in Northern California. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and National Review Online. In 2004 he founded Dartblog.com, a widely read running commentary on culture, politics, and American higher education.
Comments (9)
Dartmouth alums should feel privileged that they were allowed to participate even for a limited time. At Princeton, the elected alums are hand picked by the existing trustees, with no campaigning of any sort allowed. The only thing we're allowed to know about the candidates, other than what we google, is a brief biographical summary. Our vice president explained that if candidates were allowed to campaign, then they might have an independent agenda when they came to the board:
"The board works best if every trustee comes to each issue with an open mind, the ability to consider all evidence and an overarching commitment to arrive at the best decision for the University as a whole, not as an advocate for a particular constituency or point of view... But trustees who arrive on the board having already staked out positions on issues without access to full information can undermine both the workings of the board and their own effectiveness if they are perceived as beholden to a position they took while campaigning or to a particular constituency that is expecting them to hold to that position."
(He was specifically referring to the Young Alumni trustees, but the logic is the same.)
Posted by David Nieporent | June 20, 2008 9:08 PM
Posted on June 20, 2008 21:08
Excellent. I have followed this story through the blogs, and have found it fascinating and inspiring. I was disappointed in the outcome of the election two weeks ago, but found some hope in your view of this situation.
Good luck to you all.
Posted by Darcy | June 21, 2008 9:19 AM
Posted on June 21, 2008 09:19
From a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1974, who voted for all four "insurgents", Joe, I don't think the numbers lie. Nearly 60 percent of the alumni who voted voted for the slate of candidates who promised to end the litigation. For my part, I split my vote somewhat, voting about 2/3 -1/3 for pro-parity candidates, but choosing candidates based on their record of past contributions to the Dartmouth community. I don't think this vote can be airily dismissed as a consequence of Administration machinations. I was not alone among alumni sympathetic to the arguments raised by Messrs. Rodgers, Robinson, Zywicki and Smith who first tired and then grew suspicious of the eagerness of "conservative" alumni to try the Wright Administration on the pages of the Wall Street Journal and National Review. Many of us became concerned that the politicization of Dartmouth trustee politics, the endless fund raising appeals, and the strong scent of hidden agendas and backchannel financing did not reflect well on where the insurgency was headed, nor bode well for Dartmouth. Frankly I was surprised by the outcome, and I suspect more than a few from the pro-parity camp were as well. But I think it has to be understood and studied as an expression of opinion from thinking alumni, and not as the consequence of facile manipulations by those in the Administration.
Respectfully yours,
Richard Ranger Dartmouth '74
Posted by Richard Ranger | June 21, 2008 1:11 PM
Posted on June 21, 2008 13:11
Joe could use a double dose of honesty and reason, starting with the headline. Since when has a singular proper name (“Dartmouth”) required a plural pronoun (“their”)? Since when has the administration of any insitution been the same as its board?
Naturally his personal bias against deans has nothing to do with the subject of his editorial, which is an Ivy League alumni association. Alumni are graduates of an institution, not those who work there. Intellectual integrity is an empty concept for the author, who trys to twist unrelated trends into an argument in favor of his (or his masters’) weird viewpoint. Joe naturally fails to mention that he was hired and paid by the minority of the Executive Committee of the Association of Alumni – the losers who supported and in many cases belonging to the overwhelmingly defeated “parity” slate – for work on one of its websites. How much should we believe his editorial when he’s in the pockets of the very people he pretends to support?
Joe knows, but pretends not to, that any “democracy” in the process of selecting trustees is and always has been a gift, a concession, by the Board. There is nothing “democratic” about the running of a private corporation, and the radical agitators’ shameless employment of the bland general concept of “democracy” in favor of their extremism is not only inaccurate but dishonest. For example: nonprofit educational corporations tend not to issue stock or have shareholders. Nor do their self-perpetuating board permit outsiders to vote in their internal elections, and Dartmouth’s is no exception. The four “independent” trustees were elected by the Board of Trustees, not by Joe or anyone else, and their election did not require the successful, lauded, well-regarded, and long-serving president or the deans he employs to take any particular action. There is no such thing as “stakeholder activism” here, and that phrase is a lie.
Joe’s friends and employers were defeated overwhelmingly. Alumni did not reaffirm the cause, they rejected it forcefully. The “rubber-stamp set” now includes the four independent trustees Joe prefers; they voted on the expansion question, and they are sophisticated enough to live with the democratic result of their vote. There is no “castration,” only people who should be man enough to live with defeat, fair and square. Sometimes you have to wonder whether your ideas are unpopular because they are flawed…
How does Joe justify the word “packing” when the board, always self-appointed, will be the very body to elect the new trustees, not some outside force (such as FDR in relation to the Supreme Court)? Does Joe understand the foolishnes of the “mixed metaphor”?
Naturally the “half-elected arrangement” is a fallacy: only 8 of 18 trustees were nominated before the expansion, which is significantly less than half. There was no “contract,” and the lawsuit’s claim to the contrary was never taken seriously, even by the suit’s backers.
What “reformation … previously unseen in American academe” is Joe talking about? It is very likely that boards previous to Dartmouth’s have reformed themselves by expanding. The “reformers” here were the Board of Trustees, who voted to reform the governance of Dartmouth by expanding and implementing other changes.
Democratic elections will continue. Joe has not deigned to read Dartmouth’s historic Charter, wherein it is stated in the clearest terms that every trustee elected by the board (now 24 of 26) will be elected by majority vote.
Naturally Joe is not honest enough to admit that the “92%” survey was a fraud, or that “hired public relations professionals” ran both campaigns, or that the losing party that Joe supported was defeated in conclusive, overwhelming fashion, garnering only about 30% of the vote. The powers of suasion of the right candidates – the legitimate, honest, non-misleading, non-fraudulent – candidates won.
Joe overlooks “the substance of the fight.” It was an alumni association election, for crying out loud – not a referendum on Dartmouth’s very direction, nor an extension of the petitioners’ election campaigns. The only issue was whether the childlike meritless suit – doomed to failure no matter what -- would needlessly continue to drain resources from both sides.
It’s obvious why Joe felt compelled to write his screed, but it’s not clear why Minding the Campus chose to print it. Surely the Institute could have found an essayist who was neither personally invested nor willfully ignorant of the facts?
Posted by Old Alumnus | June 22, 2008 1:28 PM
Posted on June 22, 2008 13:28
Joe's observations are on target; the brickbats thrown at him among the comments are ill-founded.
What does the fact that conservative voices backed the pro-parity slate have to do with parity? Did the WSJ give us an outline of what they wanted Dartmouth to do? Did the Dartmouth Review (whose resident adviser, Jeff Hart, backed the so-called Unity slate) choose our candidates?
Our issues were neither conservative nor liberal, Republican nor Democrat. They had to do with Dartmouth and Dartmouth governance. I am quite certain that Ed Haldeman is more "conservative" (as that term is generally understood) than I. What specific policies that we advocated did our opponents object to? That was never stated--just as there was no evidence for the truly scurrilous charges that we are bigots and anti-female.
Our opponents' campaign hewed to the principals laid down by Josef Goebbels and created phantoms to scare the alumni. "Hidden agendas?" "Back-door" financing? Please.
No manipulations by the administration? Oh no. We were just denied access to our own membership's updated addresses. And at the start, when we sought to alert alumni to the previously secret intentions of the board to violate the 1891 agreement, Spalding, Wright, and Haldeman refused to fund a mailing, which included a poll. I laid out an interest-free loan of $30,000 of my own money to pay for the printing and mailing. (Contributions from alumni/ae subsequently reimbursed me for roughly half the amount. If there are "back-door" resources who wish to reimburse the rest, I will accept their aid with a clear conscience, now that I am out of office.)
Lies, misrepresentations, and gross distortions were poured over us. We were accused of being "bigots" and "anti-female"--all without a scintilla of evidence. It was said we would "turn the clock back," but to what was never articulated.
I used to be proud of being a Dartmouth alumnus. No more. And it is NOT because we lost, but how we lost.
Posted by Frank Gado | June 23, 2008 4:18 PM
Posted on June 23, 2008 16:18
PS I did not know Joe was paid for his technical assistance--or for anything else. I do know that Dartmouth Undying paid students $100 to phone alumni. We didn't. Not a pfenning, or a drachma, or a baat.
Posted by Anonymous | June 23, 2008 4:21 PM
Posted on June 23, 2008 16:21
In writing "I will accept their aid with a clear conscience, now that I am out of office," Frank seems to suggest that his conscience would be other than clear if he were to continue accepting donations after winning reelection. Perhaps he was planning to use his office for personal benefit. It's probably not a good idea to let anyone run for office in an organization he believes owes him money. At least this problem erases his credibility with regard to Joseph, who -- no one has yet pointed this out -- is also "employed," as a volunteer or otherwise, by the Power Line Blog. Yes, the very same conservative media organization that supported the campaign of Petition Slate member and Power Line blogger Paul Mirengoff.
Posted by Anonymous | June 24, 2008 3:23 PM
Posted on June 24, 2008 15:23
"Their victory is an empty one. Empty in the sense that four years of earnest ad rem argumentation on the part of reformers was thwarted not on the merits, but on procedure; empty in the fact that Dartmouth's establishment did little more than tucker out the outsiders."
Very nice.
Posted by Chester White | June 26, 2008 8:48 AM
Posted on June 26, 2008 08:48
I had read all of the many letters and statements issued by both sides on this
issues and the more I read the arguments of the establishment (anti-parity)
supporters, the more convinced I became that they were specious and misleading.
Their characterization of the parity group as a shadowy force bent on recasting
the college back to its 1950's form was nowhere apparent in the pro-parity
arguments. Neither did I note any politically right-wing agendas among the
parity writings. I did read the anti-parity group's mischaracterization of an
organiztion used to funnel funds from alumni wanting to remain anonymous as a
font in a deceptive effort to make this point, however.
Also irrelavant was the argument that Dartmouth issues should always be decided
by internal processes. That the process was not working in this case was the
very reason for the lawsuit. It was my feeling that, even if the suit went
forward, it would be settled (an internal process) rather than taken to trial.
Now, we may never get that restlt.
In essense, the establishment apoligists created a strawman with obviously
negative charcteristics to convince the electorate to accept the arrogance of
the trustees' powwer hoarding decision. It's not a new trick, but apparently an
effective one that works even with an electorate as enlightened as the alumni of
Dartmouth Colleg. Sleaze still sells; I was hoping for better.
I hope that his threat, supported by 40% of the responding alumni/ae, will
encourage meaningful negotiation. (I wonder that 64% of the total group is so
disaffected that they don't even care.) Unfortunately, without an active suit,
the motivation for this outcome is much diminished.
Stuart C. Clark '58
3430 Chaney Trail
Altadena, CA 91001
Posted by Stuart C. Clark | July 23, 2008 4:58 PM
Posted on July 23, 2008 16:58