Last June, the College's Board of Trustees voted to "freeze" its membership until the Association of Alumni's lawsuit against the College had been resolved. Over a year has passed, however, and the freeze remains in place. As a result of the Board's decision, trustee elections, which were scheduled to take place this spring, were postponed indefinitely, and the two-term limits of alumni-elected Trustee Michael Chu '68 and Board-selected Trustee Russell Carson '65 -- both of whom were slated to finish their final terms in June 2009 -- have been indefinitely extended. In addition, the Board put off the reelection of several first-term trustees.
Ostensibly, this freeze should have ended after the newly elected Association executive committee withdrew the Association's lawsuit in the summer of 2008. However, while the Board took the time to add five new charter seats in September 2008, and to hold the postponed reelections for the first-term trustees this April (reelections are administered by the Board itself), it has yet to say anything about the fate of Chu or Carson.
It appears that the Board initially remained silent on the status of these two seats in order to ensure that certain reforms were made to the trustee election process before another election occurred. Yet the reforms enumerated by the Board were enacted nearly two weeks ago with the passage of an amendment to the Association's constitution ("Alumni approve amendment to AoA constitution," May 9), and still no announcement has been made.
While we expect that the trustees will make a decision on the matter at their meeting during Commencement, that meeting will come more than a month after the passage of the amendment, further pushing back the date of a future trustee election. This delay is fundamentally at odds with the democratic principles that underlie alumni-elected representation, and we believe that the Board should address the issue with all possible haste.
Although precedent would seem to dictate that the next trustee election be held in the spring, the current circumstances call for more immediate action. Given how long this election has already been delayed -- purportedly for the purpose of creating a better democratic process -- any further postponement would be hypocritical at best.
As the recent lawsuit demonstrated, the trustees have considerable leeway in their efforts to fulfill their fiduciary duties. And, as we have previously noted, the Board lacks a set of bylaws ("Verbum Ultimum: Wrongful Termination," April 17). Still, despite this flexibility, the Board is not justified in extending trustee term limits arbitrarily, or in postponing elections indefinitely. If alumni democracy is to be preserved, and trustee integrity maintained, the Board must act immediately to lift the freeze on the seats occupied by Chu and Carson, and to begin the election (and selection) process.
