Dartmouth is mired in a lagoon of people who love it. Many of us feel so attached to our past or present experiences that we feel compelled to serve Dartmouth in some way. I serve by putting my snarky and (occasionally) informed commentary in all those issues of The Dartmouth littered around Novack Cafe and Berry Library. Alumni serve on the Alumni Council or the Association of Alumni, the spotlight organization of this column. If you haven't been paying attention to the ongoing Association campaign (and I really wouldn't blame you if you haven't), the best way I can think to describe it is disastrously misguided. The candidates on each slate seem entirely incapable of discussing issues that are relevant to Dartmouth, and it's having a negative impact on alumni involvement in the organization.
To begin, I should probably take a second to recap the Association elections. The Association is an organization run entirely by alumni whose purpose is to represent the alumni's opinions about current Dartmouth issues and bring them to the College. The Association should not be confused with the Alumni Council, a College-run organization with a similar mission. Currently, the Association is electing a new leadership for itself, and the two opposing slates are calling themselves "Unity" and "Dartmouth United."
In this heated election to represent an influential alumni organization, what are the hot button issues? Believe it or not, name-calling and mudslinging about who did or did not support the lawsuit over parity on the Board of Trustees is dominating the discussion. Discussing whether the candidates should continue to support parity is acceptable, and such a desire seems to be present in some sense within both slates. Negatively campaigning and judging candidates based on whether they supported a now failed lawsuit two years ago is just bitter politics.
Even more comical is an ongoing debate about the ethics of the mailings that each slate has sent to the alumni who will be voting. I'll spare you, dear reader, from the tedious details of the debate, but essentially the question at hand is solely about election ethics. There are many more worthy issues that could be discussed than these.
I'm not here to discount these issues altogether, but it's nothing short of laughable that these are the major issues in this campaign. There's no shortage of actually contentious issues to be concerned about this year, either! Candidates could be discussing how to rebuild our endowment, College President Jim Yong Kim's first year, or ways to maintain levels of alumni giving. But no, who funded mailings is a more important issue.
I should mention that each slate does have a published platform. In each case, though, this platform amounts to a disheveled mess of text littered with almost randomly bolded statements and accusations. Of these statements, my personal favorite comes from Emily Esfahani-Smith '09 on the Dartmouth United slate: "Dartmouth belongs to all of us: rich and poor, men and women, black and white, Greek and unaffiliated." I learned close to nothing about what each slate would actually do after spending a good hour on their respective web sites.
The biggest losers in this farce are the alumni themselves. For many, the Association is their principle means of continuing to influence Dartmouth and be a member of the Big Green community. It's not fair that these alumni that continue to make donations to the College have to suffer through this shallow debate instead of discussing their substantive hopes for the College in the coming years. These are the people that the Association is supposed to be representing, and yet I have only heard alumni trying to distance themselves from the arguments of the election. I am seriously concerned that alumni interest and involvement in the Association and the College will decline because of the embarrassing antics taking place now.
Everyone loves this College. Everyone wants to have a hand in shaping its future, and I hope everyone is allowed to have that opportunity. Yet the Association leadership candidates are so dead-set on wresting that control from their opponents, they have effectively alienated themselves and the alumni from the issues Dartmouth actually cares about. Even if the trustees started this process by eliminating parity, the Association's farce of a campaign and its continued inability to talk about real issues threatens to sabotage the organization's usefulness and relevance.
