After last year's defeat of the anti-petition-trustee constitution, it was only a matter of time before another attempt would be made to stop the election of the College's popularly elected petitioners.
After all, the alumni movement is gaining strength: Stephen Smith '88 won his seat on the Board with a greater number of votes (9,984) and a higher percentage of the voters (54.9 percent) than any previous petition candidate. Yet Smith's campaign consisted only of two mass-mailings to alumni -- each consisting of several pages of closely argued text -- and a website/blog.
The latest anti-petitioner effort kicked off on May 18 when Rick Routhier '73, the outgoing head of the Alumni Council Nominating Committee, told the Council that in future elections his Committee would be "unable to find any qualified candidates" for the Board of Trustees. The burden and cost of election campaigns made finding qualified candidates impossible, he said, and therefore he was obliged to ask the Board of Trustees to seek a better way to fill the Board.
The following day, outgoing Board Chairman Bill Neukom '64 told the Council that the governance committee of the Board had been reviewing the same problem. He informed listeners that the committee would soon submit a proposal to revamp the way that trustees are chosen.
I asked Chairman Neukom from the floor if he would commit to continuing the historic composition of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees, which has been composed since 1891 of trustees evenly divided in number between alumni trustees (directly elected) and charter trustees (chosen by the Board), along with the College's president and the governor of New Hampshire.
He categorically declined to do so.
By way of background, after decades of effort by Dartmouth alumni to gain representation on the Board, a decision was made on June 22, 1891, that half of the Board would be composed of alumni representatives. Under the "Williams plan," five of the College's ten appointed trustees subsequently resigned and were replaced by five new Board members directly chosen by the alumni.
This understanding has been respected ever since then: in fact, the numerical parity of Alumni Trustees and Charter Trustees has been observed even as the Board increased in size from 12 to 18 trustees over the years. As recently as 2004/2005, when the Board grew from 16 to 18 members, Al Mulley '70 joined the Board as a new Charter Trustee and Peter Robinson '79 was voted in as a new trustee by the alumni.
Let's examine for a moment Routhier's claim that his Committee would be unable to recruit qualified candidates.
The three candidates put forward this year by the Nominating Committee certainly evinced stellar professional achievement. But beyond this, they also seemed to have passed two other litmus tests: They believed that the College, in President Wright's words, "is in great shape"; and various protestations of independence aside, they supported Wright quite unconditionally.
Could Routhier's committee find qualified candidates for the next election? Certainly there are many alumni who meet the test of professional excellence, but it is now evident that candidates who also pass the latter two tests would be unelectable when opposed by a petition candidate.
As a consequence of these facts, should responsibility for choosing Trustees be thrown back to the Board in violation of the spirit of the 1891 agreement?
I don't think so. To fulfill its mission, the nominating committee need only choose candidates who respond to the concerns of the majority of alumni as expressed in the last four elections. There is no shortage of accomplished critics of the present administration.
So what can we expect from the members of the governance committee at its September meeting? They might attempt to "pack" the Board with additional charter trustees and thereby effect a proportionate reduction in the number of democratically chosen alumni trustees. Or they might even roll back the number of Alumni Trustees to the original five spots dedicated to them in 1891.
In doing so, a system that has worked well for 116 years will end.
Of course, Dartmouth has seen this attitude before. In his 1932 book, "The History of Dartmouth College," L.B. Richardson archly described the 1891 trustees who resisted alumni efforts to gain a role in College governance. He wrote that they were motivated by a desire "to retain the unlimited power which had been theirs so long" and "they were aware that if the changes were made, the management of the institution would be likely to fall into the hands of men unfriendly to the President."
I might add that today, as in 1891, it remains a sad spectacle to watch tired, entrenched leaders clinging to power in the face of democratic opposition. For the good of the College, let's hope that they fail.
