Following the College Board of Trustees' 2007 decision to expand the total number of trustees, Dartmouth shifted from having one of the largest percentages of trustees elected by the alumni body in the Ivy League to having a comparable level of alumni-elected representation on its Board to that of Dartmouth's peers. The level of alumni involvement in College governance has generated two lawsuits and several contentious campaigns for trustee and Association of Alumni positions.
As the second of the two alumni lawsuits seems to be drawing to a close while another contentious election for trustee seats is heating up, considering how other universities approach alumni involvement in governance offers perspective on the level of involvement Dartmouth alumni have with their alma mater.
Prior to September 2007, there were 18 seats on the College's Board of Trustees, including two "ex officio" seats belonging to the College president and the governor of New Hampshire yielding the second-smallest full Board in the Ivy League. At that time, the Board seated eight alumni-elected trustees and eight Board-appointed trustees, creating a Board that maintained parity between selected and elected trustees, in line with a parity agreement made between the College and alumni in 1891. With this structure, 41 percent of Board members were elected by alumni, the highest percentage in the Ivy League.
In a August 2007 vote, the Board decided to add eight additional Board-appointed trustee seats, expanding the Board to seating 26 members and ending the parity that had existed since the 1891 agreement. This lowered the percentage of alumni-elected seats to 31 percent, which brought the percentage of alumni-elected seats more in line with other Boards in the Ivy League.
At peer institutions, Board-selected trustees often outnumber alumni-elected trustees by significant margins. Ivy League institutions average 34 trustees per university, and roughly half have a smaller percentage of alumni-elected trustees than Dartmouth does, even following the August 2007 decision to expand the Board.
The boards of Princeton University, Yale University and Brown University have a slightly larger proportion of trustees elected by alumni than Dartmouth's current Board. Alumni at each institution elect between 32 and 34 percent of trustees, compared to Dartmouth's 31 percent.
Cornell's 64-member Board of Trustees features the most varied structure in the Ivy League. In addition to four ex-officio trustees and three trustees appointed by the state governor, there is one life trustee descended from the University's founder, Ezra Cornell; eight trustees elected by alumni; two trustees each by faculty and students; and one trustee elected by staff members, with the remainder chosen by the board.
There has been no notable controversy over the composition of the board at Cornell, according to Simeon Moss, deputy spokesperson for the office of the vice president for university communications.
Following the Board's decision to end parity, Dartmouth alumni argued that the decision violated the 1891 agreement that they viewed as a legally binding contract, and resulted in the filing of a lawsuit against the College by the Association of Alumni. This lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice in June 2008 when the alumni body elected a new executive board to the Association, but legal action was revisited again to uphold the 1891 agreement by an independent group of alumni in November 2008. The latest lawsuit was recently dismissed from the courts, on the grounds that the prior lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice.
Parity remains a significant issue in the current trustee race between petition candidate Joe Asch '79 and Alumni Council-nominated candidate John Replogle '88. Asch has challenged both Replogle and Alumni Council-nominated Morton Kondracke '60 who is not facing opposition for his seat on their refusal to take a stance on parity prior to the election.
Replogle has proposed adding one member of each graduating class to the Board to serve one four-year term, as a compromise in the ongoing debate over Board parity. The proposal has so far gained little traction among prominent alumni who have consistently spoken in favor of restoring parity, despite its potential for increasing alumni representation, and is in fact similar to student representation systems at Princeton and Cornell.
Cornell currently differs from most Ivy League universities in that its board includes two student trustees who are elected directly by students at the university, according to Robert Gottlieb, the first student to serve on the executive committee of Cornell's Board of Trustees in 1970. Cornell added four student seats to its Board of Trustees in the 1970s when the university endured major upheavals resulting from several issues, including the Vietnam War, according to Gottlieb.
"We forced [members of the board] to articulate positions in areas they would have rather ignored," Gottlieb said, referring to his experience serving on the board. "If you're really interested in understanding what's going on on campus, how do you not have students on the board?"
Since then, two of the student-held seats have been eliminated, and a student trustee is no longer guaranteed a position on the Board's executive committee, he said.
"The question I've been asking is, What are they afraid of?'" Gottlieb said, referring to the reduction in the number of student-held seats. "It's not like the Board is going to be hijacked by 20-year-old juniors."
Princeton features a similar system. The Princeton Board of Trustees counting two ex-officio, 13 alumni-elected and 25 Board-appointed members, for a total of 40 trustees includes one member of the senior class among the alumni-elected trustees. The senior is elected by members of the junior and senior classes each year, along with alumni from the two most recently-graduated classes.
Cass Cliatt, director of media relations at Princeton, said she could not comment on any issues relating to the Board of Trustees. Other universities' boards have a considerably smaller segment of alumni-elected trustees. Columbia University alumni elect 25 percent of the board, while alumni-elected trustees comprise 23 percent of the Board of Trustees at the University of Pennsylvania. Harvard University's primary board, the Harvard Corporation, has no alumni-elected trustees.
Harvard is the only institution in the Ivy League that has no alumni-elected members on its primary governing board the Harvard Corporation, which consists of the University president and treasurer and five Corporation-selected members, according to Harvard Magazine. The other governing board, Harvard's Board of Overseers, consists of 30 alumni-elected trustees and is responsible for ratifying the decisions of the Harvard Corporation, including the selection of new university presidents, according to The Crimson.
The Corporation's involvement in much of the University's operations is limited, according to Harvard Magazine. Although the Corporation is technically the legal owner and final authority on Harvard governance, most decision making is done by the University president and subordinate administrators.
The Corporation is by far the more powerful of the two governing bodies, leaving the Board of Overseers to play an advisory role, according to Robert Freedman and Harvey Silverglate, two recent candidates for Harvard's Board of Overseers.
"The Board of Overseers is the quintessential rubber stamp in that it does not exercise any independent authority," Silverglate said.
Freedman referred to the Board of Overseers as "outsiders," adding that they have accomplished very little that is visible to the outside world.
"I suspect that at most colleges, the president would prefer the trustees to be docile because the president doesn't need another group giving him grief," Freedman said. "It's a problem on all boards that the people who raise a lot of questions are ostracized."
Silverglate added that Harvard would be a "much better place" if the alumni-elected Board of Overseers was given a more assertive role in university governance.
At Dartmouth, the most recently elected alumni-elected trustees include four individuals who ran as petition candidates for the Board T. J. Rodgers '70, Peter Robinson '79, Todd Zywicki '88 and Stephen Smith '88 each of whom ran campaigns on platforms critical of the College's administration at the time, and who have all supported the lawsuits hoping to preserve of Board parity.
In April 2009, he Board voted to not re-elect Zywicki when they reviewed him for his second term, a procedure that was previously routine. Zywicki speculated in a subsequent open letter to the Dartmouth community that he was not re-elected due to controversial statements made during his term, which many trustees believed reflected poorly on the College.
