Now that the 2005 alumni trustee election is over, Dartmouth's Association of Alumni should reassess its voting procedures and rules on campaigning.
To the credit of the petition nominees, Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88, they ran vibrant campaigns and won. But do the results reflect the will of a majority of the alumni who voted?
A majority of alumni voted for the four Alumni Council nominees, but with these votes dispersed among them, the petition candidates now take seats on the Board. As a group, the Alumni Council nominees received 47 percent more votes than the two petition nominees -- 20,887 to 14,220 votes. Voters may cast up to one vote for each candidate of their choice. 15,334 alumni cast votes, with each voter casting on average 2.3 votes among the six candidates. Assuming that each voter selected at least two candidates, 4439 votes were cast for third, fourth, fifth or sixth choices. Even if all of those votes were cast for Alumni Council nominees (the actual figures are not published), after deducting such votes, the Alumni Council nominees would still have received 16 percent more votes than the petition nominees -- 16,448 to 14,220 votes.
The Alumni Association should follow the lead of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, which this year implemented a voting process where voters rank their choices for Student Body President in order of preference. Until a candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last place candidates are eliminated and their votes are redistributed to their supporters' successive choices until a majority is produced. In this way, the will of the majority is respected.
Mary Conway '82 and I skirted with the Alumni Association's rules on campaigning two months ago when we launched Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth to raise awareness of the election issues within the Dartmouth community. We set up a web site, strongdartmouth.org, as "concerned alumni who remain supportive of the College and would like to ensure that responsible leadership remains on the Board of Trustees." We elaborated in detail our positions on Dartmouth's undergraduate focus, the faculty, athletics, fraternities and sororities and Dartmouth's future, often taking issue with the information put forth by the petition nominees.
Rather quickly, more than 100 alumni signed up to show their support for Strong Dartmouth, many of whom have distinguished themselves over the years through service to Dartmouth as trustees, Alumni Council representatives, or class or club officers. In addition to specifics on our own platform, we offered a rebuttal to the petition nominees' campaign emails and coverage of election press, including articles that challenge and support our positions. During the past two months, over three thousand people have visited the Strong Dartmouth site.
The Alumni Association's Policy on Campaigning in its Alumni Trustee Nomination Guidelines states: "All candidates will be allowed to send out two emails to the alumni body during the election Campaigning by the candidate or his/her supporters beyond the two emails is inappropriate. Campaigning is defined as any effort to garner votes and may take the form of written, electronic or telephone communications."
Did Conway and I violate the Alumni Association's campaigning policy? Were we acting in the proper spirit of this trustee election?
The Dartmouth reported John Walters '62, President of the Association of the Alumni Committee and Chair of the Ballot Committee, as stating, "It's incorrect to say that [Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth] is in violation of the guidelines. It probably is a violation of the spirit of those guidelines." ("Squabble Colors Trustee Election," March 30) In a trustee election where free speech at Dartmouth had become a prominent issue, the question of free speech became a central issue to the election campaign itself.
The Alumni Association's restrictions on campaigning date back to an alumni trustee election in 1980, when John Steel '54 ran a successful campaign as a petition candidate against an incumbent alumni trustee, employing resources that included an independent postal mailing to all alumni. The Alumni Association put into effect its current policy on campaigning to ensure that there would be a level playing field for all candidates -- whether nominated by petition or the Alumni Council -- but this policy has backfired: instead, it offers a campaign opportunity to petition candidates as they garner signatures among alumni, while the Alumni Council nominees wait on the sidelines for the official campaign to start.
The current policy against campaigning also opens the possibility for petition candidates to advance their campaigns by misleading alumni on the issues, either by intent or neglect, leaving all but two emails for the other nominees to engage in debate. This scenario unfolded in this trustee election, as discussed in my opinion piece on these pages, ("Petitioning and Misleading," March 1) and in much detail in the Strong Dartmouth web site. Conway and I took a stand and spoke out.
Regardless of the result, elections are not only about choosing representation but also about engaging a community in open discourse. I live in Kiev, where this winter I was proud to be amongst the Ukrainian people at the time of their "Orange revolution." It really hit home for me that the process of democracy transforms people and societies.
Many Dartmouth alumni, parents, students, faculty and administrators took stands on the issues in our trustee election, through columns in The Dartmouth, other independent papers and numerous web blogs. This is the spirit of democracy; we should always err toward more debate and more open debate.
Robinson was right in his second email to alumni, in writing that whatever your views, voting is an "opportunity to participate in the life of the College." So is participation in informed debate. If the "spirit" of these trustee elections were to require alumni to refrain from an open exchange of views, this would be antithetical to the essence of Dartmouth.
Now that the election is over, let's rethink the policy on campaigning and 'bring down those rules!'
