What is important for readers to take away from The Dartmouth's recent article on the actions of the Dartmouth Association of Alumni executive committee ("AOA exec. comm. fights over interests," Aug. 7) is that the committee and alumni in general are not united in frustration with the College. As anyone who has paid attention to recent controversies will tell you, the Association is not a unified group. But what is currently most troubling is that the Association's executive committee has experienced a major internal split and is unable to move forward in a consensus fashion that reflects the breadth of alumni opinion. Worse still is that since the May 2007 election, the nature of the relationship between the executive committee and the College has changed from one of historic cooperation to one of antagonism and confrontation. Yet, it is only seven alumni -- the committee members that voted to mail the "survey" of opinion on College governance to the alumni -- that is charting this course for the Association, and it is that small group that is rapidly moving the organization toward total independence from the College, regardless of the desires of the alumni body as a whole. This is a dramatic shift in dynamic and needs to be better understood.
How it came about is important. With the defeat of the Alumni Governance Task Force constitution proposal last fall, alumni governance remained unchanged. Whether this was what most alumni really wanted is unlikely (both "sides" proposed changes), but nevertheless we are left with the status quo: alumni represented by two organizations, the Association of Alumni and the Alumni Council, each with its own constitution (the Association's, especially, is antiquated and deeply flawed) and each with its own role in governance. The Association's role, which has always been fully supported by the College, is to run alumni-wide elections for alumni trustees and Association officer positions and to hold an annual meeting. No one on the new executive committee thinks it should remain so restricted, but there is a dramatic difference in tactics. The seven-person majority unilaterally asserted that it has the right to operate the Association outside of its current role and that the College should pony up for the activities they deem appropriate to that new role. The College has demurred, and the caustic rhetoric has begun. Never mind the fact that, in the case of the letter/survey about College governance, the College is already spending large sums to do the same job, the amount requested to mail the letter would pay about 75 percent of a student's annual tuition and alumni in-boxes have seen many notices about the same subject and will see many more. Further, a minority on the committee, including me, the Association President, Kate Aiken '92, the First Vice President, and David Spalding '76, the Secretary/Treasurer, see the communication as biased advocacy and would prefer a more cooperative and less combative approach to transforming the association and dealing with the current governance review.
Unfortunately we are not operating by consensus or compromise, but by winner-take-all majority rule. Sure, that's democracy in action, and it's a heady time for the new majority on the executive committee and some would say that it should have its day. But what does it mean for alumni and their association? While many of us have been fighting for years for consensus solutions and to have the opinions of the minority properly heard and included, what worries me is that a new, rigid orthodoxy is simply being substituted for the old one in a shift from one extreme to another. If minority opinions are not integrated into association actions, especially within the executive committee, it's just more of the same but with a different group in charge: The insiders are out and the outsiders are in (long live the outsiders). The latter, largely critical of the College, if not vehemently so, has taken dramatic steps towards creating an association that is financially and structurally independent in order to press an agenda that eclipses the viewpoint of thousands of alumni. The ramifications of their actions are huge and most alumni are unaware of this rapid sea change in the elemental nature of the Association. Perhaps over time it will be a good idea to create distance from the College, but that is an important subject for alumni to debate at length. The current actions of the association should better reflect the entire alumni body, not just those that want to throw grenades.
It would seem that, despite all the effort over the last decade or more, alumni as a whole are not better represented by their alumni organizations. That is shameful, and if what is happening in the Association's executive committee is any indication, the divided house evidenced by the recent constitution and trustee votes shows little sign of mending itself.
