Correction Appended
The College's 91 alumni clubs provide central locations for alumni to maintain contact with the College and develop connections with other Dartmouth graduates. While the clubs aim to enable social networking and inform alumni about College affairs, they have also drawn criticism from some alumni as institutions through which the College can influence College elections.
The clubs provide one of the strongest professional and social networks of any college or university in the world, according to Craig Douglass '78, former president of the Dartmouth Club of Los Angeles.
Although they maintain close relationships with the Association and the Council, the alumni clubs are not tied directly to them. Many of the clubs are organized as independent corporations, according to the charters posted on their websites and the group's tax filings.
Former College President Ernest Martin Hopkins, Class of 1901, is responsible for fostering the strong relationship between the College and Dartmouth alumni that exists today, Martha Beattie '76, president of Dartmouth Undying and former Alumni Council president, said.
"I could never figure out to what purpose the College existed if it wasn't for the production of alumni," Hopkins once said, according to the Association's website.
Dartmouth clubs range in membership from 50 to 6,700 alumni and can be found in many countries, including France, India, China and Russia.
The Dartmouth Association of Alumni was founded in 1854 for the purpose of governing "the conduct of balloting among the Alumni of Dartmouth" and selecting nominees for a position on the Board of Trustees, according to the Association's website. More than 50 years later, the Alumni Council was created in 1913 to form a smaller body to manage elections.
The Alumni Council's role today "is to act as communication vessel between the College and the alumni," Beattie said.
Since its founding, the focus of the Association has grown to include providing interviewers during the admissions process, assisting recent graduates with job searches, offering scholarships, sponsoring community service and serving as an extension of the Dartmouth community outside of Hanover, and the clubs perform a significant role in this.
"Our most important task is giving alumni a way to stay connected to the College," said Jeffrey Weitzman '85, former co-president of the Dartmouth Alumni Association of New York City, the regional alumni club. "There are organizations that do similar things such as social events and lectures, but the alumni club's special bond to Dartmouth is unique."
Most alumni view the clubs as means of bringing the Dartmouth community together, according to Douglass, and keeping alumni who are involved in an impressive variety of professional fields involved in the College.
Douglass noted that alumni who are kept active by their local club are more likely to involve themselves in networking and providing job opportunities for other alumni and current students.
Alumni networking efforts have benefitted from the use of the Internet as an essential method of communication in recent years, according to Christine Pechter '06, co-chair of young alumni events for the Dartmouth Club of Greater Boston. The Internet has not only facilitated maintaining relations between Dartmouth alumni but also helped to connect current Dartmouth students with alumni, Pechter said.
"The majority of young alumni are using social networking tools to communicate, which helps us be flexible and spontaneous in organizing events," she said.
Current Dartmouth students have taken advantage of the Internet to connect with alumni and discover potential internship and career opportunities.
Adam Halpern-Leistner '10 used the alumni network at Career Services to find an internship at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia for the summer after his freshman year.
"The executive director of the Center was a Dartmouth alum," Halpern-Leistner said. "After talking to her on the phone and sending her my resume she offered my an internship. It worked absolutely perfectly."
According to Halper-Leistner, many Dartmouth students have found similarly rewarding experiences through the alumni network.
"I would definitely recommend using the alumni network to underclassmen," Halpern-Leistner said. "Probably more than half, if not all of your contacts, will get back to you and will give you information and other useful contacts."
Communication between the Dartmouth clubs themselves is also an important aspect of maintaining the College network, Beattie said.
According to Meg Sommerfeld '90, the vice president of the Club Officers Association and former president of the Dartmouth Club of Washington, the mission of the Club Officers Association is "essentially" for clubs to learn from each other.
"The Club Officers Association's primary focus is on planning the annual meeting of the club officers in Hanover over Winter Carnival each year," Sommerfeld said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. "It provides a chance for officers to get some training, compare notes and share each others' success stories and best practices, as well as learn from any events or projects that didn't go well."
Although the Dartmouth Club of New York City is the only alumni club in the world with a physical plant, other clubs such as the Dartmouth Club of Los Angeles have nevertheless been able to lay claim to a very diverse group of alumni interests, Douglass said.
"We keep interest among our participants by hosting social, networking, academic, sporting and business events," he said. "We also bring in lots of different special interest groups to get involved in planning events that will attract all kinds of people."
Because of their role in fostering alumni unity, alumni clubs all over the country have chosen to remain unbiased in the College's political affairs because taking a political stance on College governance issues would alienate members, Douglass said.
To maintain unity among their alumni membership, many Dartmouth clubs around the country "try to keep their noses clean," he said.
"We are totally independent of the trustee elections," Pechter said. "We try hard not to show any bias or sway people in any way."
Many of the clubs have hosted trustee forums and debates in the past as a way of informing alumni about the relevant issues at the College, Douglass said.
While serving as co-president, Weitzman also worked to inform alumni members of the issues in the election and encouraged them to vote, he added.
The candidate debates at Dartmouth clubs around the country, however, have at times caused controversy and become "bellicose," Douglass said.
During the most recent Board of Trustees election, for example, then-Trustee candidate Joe Asch '79 alleged that alumni clubs would not allow him to speak to alumni in the same rooms as then-candidates John Replogle '88 and Morton Kondracke '60, who were selected to run by the Association, he said in a prior interview with The Dartmouth.
Although he was told he could rent a room next door to the other speakers, Asch said, the decision kept him at a distance from alumni in the room where other candidates and College President Jim Yong Kim were speaking.
Kondracke said that as part of their campaigning, he and Replogle could find supporters at the alumni clubs to introduce them to other alumni in the area who attended the events.
Beattie said she believes the College's goal, above all, is to produce the finest alumni it can and to maintain relations with them and should not serve as a divisive force in elections.
"The clubs themselves really try to stay out of politics," Beattie said. "The College itself wants to serve every member of the alumni body, and so they try to stay away from something that would polarize people."
Instead of taking divisive action, members of the College community should work to unify divergent alumni, she said.
"Dartmouth is for everybody who ever went here," she said. "The Board of Trustees should not be concerned with politics or ideology. They should be elected based on their ability to guide the College we've got to get back to being one big family at Dartmouth."
