During their three-day meeting over Green Key Weekend, the Alumni Council -- the representative body of sorts for the whole of the alumni -- voted unanimously to endorse the new proposed Alumni Association Constitution. This unanimity can only imply one of two scenarios. First, that the numerous concerns alumni and students have about the Alumni Governance Task Force's proposal have not been spelled out clearly enough, be it to the Council itself, the alumni community or even to the student body. The second scenario is that these concerns have been brought forth very loudly and very articulately, but were wantonly ignored.
A representative, well-informed body in tune with the wishes of its constituents would not have bequeathed its unanimous support upon this constitution. By definition, unanimous approval implies the absence of any serious problems or areas of concern, a patent falsity in regards to the constitution as it has been drafted. The problems with the constitution are real and obvious; so much so that I, along with the co-author of this piece, The Dartmouth Review Editor-in-Chief Daniel Linsalata '07 -- two people who would find little common ground otherwise -- can plainly see that the AGTF's proposal is a slap in the face to open democracy and makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech which has been so strongly supported throughout the history of our nation.
Dartmouth is unique among American universities in that the alumni have the power to elect half the members of the Board of Trustees. As such, the most important function of any alumni governance body at Dartmouth is to ensure that the selection of these trustees occurs in a fair, transparent manner in which anyone can run and every alumnus has an equal say. In other words, a simple democracy should not be much to ask. Regrettably, the AGTF's proposal cannot even offer that much. Only half the members of the Nominating and Balloting Committees, those charged with nominating alumni trustee candidates and orchestrating elections, respectively, are elected by the whole of the alumni body; the balance are hand-picked by members of the new Alumni Assembly (the replacement for the Alumni Council). The president of the Assembly is an ex officio member of the Balloting Committee while the Nominating Committee can vote to expand itself, giving Assembly members a de facto majority over popularly-elected members of each committee. The upshot, at least in respect to the Nominating Committee, is that the candidates it chooses will almost inevitably have a vision for Dartmouth that is very much in line with the current Assembly executives. We can only hope that a Balloting Committee with an unelected majority can resist any new sort of gerrymandering.
As is well known, any alumnus or alumna dissatisfied with the candidates proposed by the Nominating Committee may petition to get on the ballot by simply gathering the requisite number of signatures. In the last three years, T.J. Rodgers '70, Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88 have successfully campaigned via this process. The new constitution, however, effectively nullifies the petition option by requiring prospective candidates to file their petition before the Nominating Committee selects their own candidates: This reversal defeats the purpose of the option of petition candidacies -- to react against, or express dissatisfaction with, those candidates proposed by the governing powers. More alarmingly, the advance warning that this process gives the Nominating Committee nearly codifies the widely perceived existence of "insider" and "outsider" factions, rendering the Board of Trustees little more than a forum for a turf war between the two.
The so-called presidential "power arc" written into the proposed constitution further emphasizes the discrepancy between the insiders and outsiders. Rather than assuming power within a few weeks or months of an election, a president of the Assembly goes through a number of intermediate jobs before taking office. The elected candidate first serves as vice president, then president-elect and finally president in the third year. In the fourth year, he or she becomes immediate past president and only then is responsible for communicating alumni sentiment to the Board of Trustees, a task nominally performed at the present time by members of the Alumni Council. While this may seem trivial, it does have one very important implication: Alumni will not have a democratically-elected president until 2009. If the President of the United States can take the oath of office just 10 weeks -- the length of one Dartmouth term -- after an election, it stands to reason the an alumnus of Dartmouth College can do the same.
We see a common theme developing here: Those in "power" would very much like to set up a system that serves to keep them in power as long as possible; or, at the very least, hand-pick their successors. And it is here where the undergraduates lose.
So long as the system is designed so that a select handful of people can control alumni governance, and by extension access to trustee candidacies, regardless of their vision of the College, the paradigm becomes increasingly difficult to change. Consequently, alumni trustee elections will continue to play out in the same manner: a group of "outsiders" campaigns vigorously in an overt effort to displace the "insiders," with each group claiming that the other's vision of the College is somehow misguided and perverse. Lost in the mix are the voices of students, undergraduates who know exactly what is going on across every facet of the Dartmouth experience.
The Board of Trustees and alumni governance bodies are currently being used as a battleground for groups of all factions trying to impose their own vision of Dartmouth upon Dartmouth today, regardless of whether or not it is in the best interest of the undergraduate population. Students should be at the root of any change, rather than involuntarily bearing the ultimate brunt of the consequences. The AGTF's proposed constitution will only make this divergence more severe, not to mention self-perpetuating.
We make no claims to having a better solution at the ready, or at least not one upon which we can agree. We do, however, know that the AGTF's proposal is not the right solution. We implore you, for the sake of all current and future Dartmouth undergraduates -- the focus of the College, now as it has been for centuries -- to vote against the proposed constitution this coming fall. A better way will come along, and it is worth waiting for. That much we can agree on.
