Once again the whispers of discontent have spurred on drastic change. In my three-plus years at Dartmouth, hardly a term has passed without substantial criticism of the petition process to the College's Board of Trustees or the College's attempts to marginalize petition candidates in both the election and governance process.
I must say that I am far from a supporter of the petition candidates most recently elected. What began as a way to impact the Board in a positive way has turned into a battle of demagoguery. But the answer is not to change the structure of a board that has been composed in much the same way for over 100 years. The Editorial Board of The Dartmouth is right when it says "the College's current structure of governance isn't really a democracy" ("An Old Tradition Fails," Sept. 7), but neither does that mean the system needs to be made less responsive to alumni complaints.
The justified focus on the expansion of the Board of Trustees with eight more directly appointed "charter" trustees takes away from some of the very good suggestions in the governance committee's long-winded 53-page report. Since it appears that petition candidates are now to be a reality in every trustee election, reducing the number of candidates nominated by the Alumni Council to just a single one will make competition between the Council-nominated candidate and a petition candidate (or two) much simpler and more fair than a more complicated approval system with three alumni-nominated candidates.
Additionally, there does appear to be a need to expand the Board of Trustees past its existing 16 members (plus College President James Wright and New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch). The governance committee is right in stating that "a smaller board also provides less visibility among alumni, less successful fundraising, less Trustee diversity, and less capacity to communicate and interact with faculty, students, alumni...." However, there is little doubt that this expansion is a direct attempt to curb the influence of recent successful petition candidates like T.J. Rodgers '70, Todd Zywicki '88, and now Stephen Smith '88. The Board of Trustees has their concerns, just as I do, about these petition candidates. But until the appearance of these petition candidates, the Board of Trustees showed little enthusiasm for increasing the number of Board members.
It also must be noted that Chairman Ed Haldeman '70's e-mail to the entire Dartmouth community on the night of Sept. 8 was followed just over a day later by a statement to the community by much of the Association of Alumni leadership, which stated, "we deem unacceptable that the Board should now dictate the election process by which alumni choose Trustees." The Association of Alumni found, as did I, that the report, "seemingly reasonable on the surface, is revealed upon a more careful inspection to be problematic and at times misleading."
The report, in explaining the problem with the current election process, includes a statement that "Trustees must 'put the interests of the organization above all else'...trustees must 'set aside personal agendas' and see themselves, not as advocates for particular constituencies or points of view, but as proponents for the organization as a whole." Unfortunately, the expansion of the Board of Trustees seems to be part of a personal agenda designed to consolidate the interests of the Board in determining future members.
The Board of Trustees (at least the trustees sponsoring this report) would like you to believe that only they have the College's best interests at heart. I have no doubt they do sincerely believe that expanding the Board would be in the College's best interest, but it is also self-serving. The same argument can be made for petition candidates and the petition process. Neither side will acknowledge this, but we should not expect them to, either. But as the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it probably is one.
If the Board of Trustees wants to expand itself with more directly appointed trustees, it should put it to a vote of the alumni. The College's strength, as compared to many of its peer institutions, is the fervor of its alumni. We may not always agree with them, but at least to date, the system (from this student's perspective) has worked more than well enough. If an expansion of the Board is defeated, just as the Alumni Constitution was, so be it. At least some semblance of alumni democracy will have been exercised.
