To the Editor:
The Letter to the Editor of Bill Dean '89, president of Dartmouth's Alumni Council ("Alumni Representation on the Board of Trustees," April 8), is very misleading. Dean takes issue with the reporter's statement in his article ("From Outside, Rodgers Campaigns on Change," April 1) that described the proposed merger of the Dartmouth Alumni Council and Alumni Association. This merger was on the agenda of the Association annual meeting on Dec. 6, 2003, as a proposal which would have restricted alumni voting rights for alumni trustees from Dartmouth's 62,000 graduates to a mere few hundred council members.
Bill Dean implies that the proposed merger to be accomplished by a new joint constitution would serve no threat to the important rights of 62,000 Dartmouth alumni to elect half the board of trustees. He is just plain wrong.
Specifically, the proposed and finally defeated constitution, in Article VII, sections 1 and 2, planned to give the newly configured Alumni Council, with 122 members, exclusive power to initiate any future amendments to the constitution affecting alumni nomination and voting for trustees. According to the plan, if the Council approved an amendment, it would then have to be adopted by a two-thirds vote of the alumni voting as the Council may designate.
Furthermore, the proposition effectively gave the officers of the Council the power to determine the place and time for the Association meeting at which such a potential vote would be taken, with no requirement that proper notice of the meeting and its agenda be given to the broader body of alumni. In short, the rights of 62,000 Dartmouth alumni to select half of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees could have been eliminated by an affirmative vote of fewer than 90 alumni meeting in Hanover on some cold December day. The proposed joint constitution was seriously flawed and deserved to be defeated. Bill Dean knows that. If my memory serves me, the only way he was able to get the Alumni Council to approve it in the morning of December 6, prior to its defeat by the Association, was by promising Council members that some of its most noxious elements would be removed at a later date.
The Dartmouth's article of April 1 was essentially correct. This whole episode was one of the events that inspired Dr. TJ Rodgers '70 to run as a petition candidate for Dartmouth trustee.
