There is, as Peggy Noonan is fond of saying, so much to savor. The College on the Hill has two new trustees, and they are something quite new. Inasmuch as Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88 were deemed "insurgent" candidates, we, the undergraduates of Dartmouth College, are fortunate enough to be the beneficiaries of their rebellious cause. Though the affairs of a stodgy Board may seem distant, in truth they affect us all. There is much that is now possible because of this win. But for the benefits of the peaceful insurgency to accrue to us -- while we still have some time left on the Hanover plain -- we must be open-minded.
Both men are conservative, but their ideas are hardly reactionary. Like the Cedar and Orange Revolutions of late, the election of Robinson and Zywicki promises to bring wider democracy to Dartmouth: as liberal an ideal as they come. Their very candidacies embodied the possibilities of democracy. Unlike the four other trustee candidates, who were selected by the College, both Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki had to earn their places on the ballot just as we earned our letters of admission. Through websites and letters and e-mails and petitions, they did just that. Then, in spite of significant efforts to derail their campaigns, both were elected. Alumni were able to vote for as many of the six candidates as they wished. Forty-eight percent of alums gave Robinson a vote and 45 percent gave Zywicki a vote. Far more significantly, the average alum chose 2.29 candidates on their ballot. That means that a whole lot of Dartmouth alums selected just Robinson and just Zywicki. The organizations attacking the two petition candidates had advocated voting for all four College-nominated candidates, but 15,334 alumni roaming the girdled Earth sent in ballots online and through the mail, and politely declined that suggestion.
In Robinson and Zywicki, we will have two responsive trustees. Both have proposed closer relationships with the student body. Both have extolled the virtues of student websites, with Robinson saying, "I learned far more about what is actually taking place in Hanover, N.H., from blogs, for the most part run by undergraduates and recent graduates than I did in the last 25 years reading the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine."
And we will have two academics on our Board of Trustees. Currently, the seventeen members are COOs, CEOs, presidents, directors, attorneys and even an urban planner and a doctor. But now we've two academics: a professor of law at George Mason/Georgetown and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. That is a victory for students. It is true: Dartmouth has been able to raise a lot of money -- some might say not enough -- but a lot. And that is what should be expected from a group of extremely smart, extremely talented executives. But what seems to have been missing was a clear vision for the intellectual life of the College. Both Robinson and Zywicki made that challenge an integral part of their respective campaigns. To light a clear, unmistakable path from the present to a smarter -- not just richer -- Dartmouth down the road.
Rather than the perennial bureaucratic hodgepodge, the path is now laid for fewer deans, and for more professors. For freer speech, and for greater tolerance. For fiscal transparency and financial responsibility. For diversity of thought -- not merely of skin -- that we may be wiser. And for support of athletics, that we may be prouder.
The four other candidates did not really lose. We appreciate their efforts to better Dartmouth and their continuing love for it: neither will end with this election. But the advocates of great centralized power have lost. Anyone who sought to limit speech in the interest of feelings lost. Anyone who dismissed crowded classrooms and scant housing as attendant to Dartmouth becoming a large and impersonal research university: they lost today. Those who allowed the office of speech to die lost today. Anyone whose confident embrace of academic freedom quails at the border of political correctness suffered a grave defeat indeed.
With this election, a shot across the bow of academic autocracy will be heard far and wide. A vicious cycle will be broken. This billion-dollar company we call Dartmouth, good as it already is, will actually have to turn an ear towards the vox clamantis of its customers, present and past.
