Dartmouth's Board of Trustees -- the only trustee board in the Ivy League in which alumni elect as many members as the board selects itself -- may soon receive a new structure. The board's governance committee, the group tasked with considering possible alterations to the representative body, announced in a June statement that it is exploring changes to "the size and composition of the Board and the method of Trustee selection."
This announcement follows the first trustee election that allowed open campaigning. This most recent contest -- which saw some candidates spend over $100,000 during the campaign -- resulted in the election of Stephen Smith '88, the candidate most critical of the College's administration and the fourth consecutive petition candidate elected to the board. Prior to this election a "no-campaigning" bylaw of the Alumni Balloting Committee forbade qualified trustee candidates from speaking publicly, except through College-approved mechanisms.
Apparent politicization and campaign hostilities during trustee elections prompted the board to reexamine its policies and procedures, according to several of the trustees and alumni officials involved.
"The Alumni Trustee nomination process has recently taken on the characteristics of a partisan political campaign, becoming increasingly contentious, divisive and costly for the participants," the governance committee said in its June statement. "Alumni have also raised questions about the fairness of the multiple-candidate, approval-voting and plurality-winner features of the process. We believe these issues must be addressed, lest many highly qualified alumni be dissuaded from seeking nomination."
Several leaders within the alumni body, however, do not believe these reforms will bring positive changes.
"I think we will see what the governance committee comes up with, but if they thought the fight over the new constitution was contentious, I guarantee you they haven't seen anything yet," John MacGovern '80 said. "They will lose the support of alumni, Dartmouth will suffer and ultimately it will be decided by [Chief Justice] John Roberts, and they would lose that."
MacGovern is the founder of the Hanover Institute, a non-profit organization that supported Smith's campaign and is often critical of the College's adminstration and policies.
MacGovern, along with several other members of the alumni body, has said that any change to the board's composition would violate an 1891 agreement that they believe requires parity between the number of trustees selected by the board and those elected by alumni. Currently half of Dartmouth's trustees, designated "charter trustees," are selected by a sub-committee of the board, while the other half are elected by alumni. Alumni-elected trustees are either nominated by the Alumni Council or through petition.
This structure, despite its long history at Dartmouth, is not present elsewhere in the Ivy League. While all of Dartmouth's peer institutions have alumni-elected members on their boards of trustees, this alumni-elected group is almost always in the minority. General elections of trustees involving entire alumni bodies are also relatively unusual in the Ivy League, as is the nomination of candidates by petition.
At Brown University, two-thirds of the members of the board of trustees are nominated by a Committee on Trustee Vacancies as "term trustees," which are analogous to Dartmouth's "charter trustees." The remainder of Brown's trustees are selected by its alumni body in general elections after being nominated by an association of alumni.
Only eight of Cornell University's 64 trustees are elected by alumni, while at Princeton and Yale alumni elect 13 of 40 trustees and six of 19, respectively.
No more than 14 of the University of Pennsylvania's 54 trustees can be "alumni trustees," however, few are directly elected by the alumni body. Penn, like Dartmouth, does allow for alumni candidates to be nominated by petition.
Alumni, however, elect all of Harvard's overseers, which are comparable to trustees. Harvard also allows overseer candidates to be nominated by petition.
Columbia's press office did not respond to inquiries by press time.
Whether or not these systems will influence the future of the structure of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees remains uncertain; however they do represent possible alternatives. In exploring changes, recently-installed Chairman Charles Haldeman, Jr. '70 has stated that the board does not have preconceived notions in regards to structural changes. The board will release its report and make public any recommended changes in September.
