Petition candidate Stephen Smith '88 has been elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, according to the Office of Public Affairs. Smith, who won with over 54 percent of the vote, marks the fourth consecutive petition candidate to be appointed as a trustee.
The nature of the campaign suggested that the election was, in many ways, a referendum on the administration of College President James Wright. In the eyes of the majority of those 28 percent of alumni who voted, Wright lost.
Smith differs from his opponents more in the extent to which he has criticized the current College administration than in his vision for the future of Dartmouth.
Currently a professor of law at the University of Virginia, Smith was the only petition candidate in the election. The three other candidates - Sandy Alderson '69, Sherri Oberg '82 Tu'86 and John Wolf '70 - were nominated by the Alumni Council's Nominating Committee.
Smith, on his own website and in other media, has said he hopes to affirm the "college" identity of Dartmouth, reform the disciplinary process, reduce the size of the administration and assure freedom of speech, among other goals.
"I believe it is time to stop bureaucratic bloat and to invest in excellence," Smith says on his website.
Smith's petition was signed by the three sitting members of the Board of Trustees who were former petition candidates, and ran on platforms critical of the College, including Peter Robinson '79, T.J. Rodgers '70 and Todd Zywicki '88.
The end of the election follows months of campaigning since voting began on April 1, with several of the candidates spending upwards of $50,000.
Smith, after obtaining a list of alumni from a source he would not disclose to The Dartmouth or the public, sent a mailing to over 60,000 alumni early in the campaign season.
Smith's financial backing has also been discrete, despite ties to the Hanover Institute, a non-profit organization founded by John MacGovern '80 that is often critical of the administration.
In apparent response to some of Smith's statements, the College launched a website in March. Wright announced a plan to "correct the record," generally speaking, in a Feb. 28 letter to the Dartmouth Community.
"There are a lot of statements about what Dartmouth is doing that I do not think are all that accurate," Wright said in an interview with The Dartmouth in April. "Classes are getting smaller, not larger, the faculty is getting larger, not smaller - these are simply statements of fact and surely as president I have a responsibility to make certain that the facts about Dartmouth are correctly stated."
The website, Ask.Dartmouth.edu, appears to counter directly several of the assertions Smith makes on his own campaign website.
"The real name of the site should be 'Ask Dartmouth if Stephen Smith is Lying,'" Smith said in a past interview. "I see nothing on the site that disproves anything I have said."
In joining the Board of Trustees, Smith becomes a member of an organization that has the final authority in the affairs of the College, including all academic, administrative and financial decisions. He will be the second black alumnus to currently serve the Board.
The results of the election for the executive committee of the Association of Alumni, which was conducted parallel to the trustee election, will be released on Saturday.
