Correction appended
The question of restoring parity between alumni-elected and Board-selected members of the Board of Trustees dominated Association of Alumni candidate statements recently posted on the Vox the Vote web site. The four-week long elections to determine the Association's executive board will begin March 10.
J. Michael Murphy '61, the leader of "Dartmouth United," the slate of petition candidates that filed in January to enter the election and challenge members of the current Board, said restoring parity on the Board of Trustees is the most important issue of the election.
Murphy was defeated in his 2008 bid for the Association by current Association President John Mathias '69.
"I think there is a need for some clear communication of how harmful the parity decision has been," Murphy said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
The petition slate seeks to reverse the Board of Trustees' 2007 decision to increase the number of Board-appointed members from eight to 16, ending parity that previously existed between alumni-elected and Board-appointed trustees.
Following the 2007 decision, the Association filed a lawsuit against the Board of Trustees in September 2007, arguing that a decision made in 1891 to maintain parity was legally binding.
In the 2008 spring election for the Association's executive board, alumni voted in the "Unity" slate of candidates led by Mathias which had run on a platform of ending the lawsuit. In June 2008, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. A lawsuit with the same intention of restoring parity, backed by a separate group of alumni, was filed in November 2008, but was dismissed by the Grafton County Superior Court in January 2008.
The controversy over the parity agreement has divided alumni, Murphy said, adding that he believes the debate has coincided with a decrease in alumni involvement and financial contributions to the College.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Mathias said the Association has continued to meet with the Board in order to try and increase the number of elected trustees.
Mathias added that lawsuits were not an appropriate means of achieving progress.
"The hallmark of what we propose is to continue civility and collegiality and persuasion as the appropriate means for alumni to address their political differences and not lawsuits, which is people yelling at each other and calling each other names and insisting upon having their way," he said.
While Mathias had promised to work with trustees on Board parity, he has made little progress in doing so, Murphy said, and almost no time has been spent on restoring parity in the last two years.
Murphy said he hopes the Association will be able to restore parity on the Board if the petition slate were elected, observing that ten of the current trustees were not in office when the decision to end parity was made three years ago.
"We accept the fact that the alumni are divided and so our mission is to make them united again, and if we can ever get parity restored, we will," he said.
Murphy said the petition slate is not associated with the alumni who brought the second lawsuit.
"[The lawsuit] is not relevant to this campaign," he said. "It's a red herring, a smoke screen, but we're not connected to it."
The Association also seeks to continue its work toward reforming its election and campaign finance rules, Mathias added.
Last year, an Association committee explored a series of increasingly expensive and contentious elections, including a race for an alumni-elected seat on the Board of Trustees in which top candidates spent over $100,000 in the course of campaigning.
Mathias, who was a member of the Association review committee, previously stated that alumni agreed that candidates should not have to spend large sums in the hope of winning an election, although many disagreed that more restrictions should be implemented to address the issue.
The committee ultimately proposed a reduction in the length of the election voting period and raised the word limit of Board campaign statements as a way to mitigate costs, which was ultimately passed. The current race for the Association's executive slate, in addition to the current race for two alumni-elected seats on the Board of Trustees, are the first campaigns to operate under these new regulations.
Staff writer Greg Berger contributed to the reporting of this article.
