About one-fifth of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees, composed of 26 members, graduated from the Class of 1991 — including some of the Board’s biggest celebrities. From television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes ’91 H’14 to journalist Jake Tapper ’91 H’17 and former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal ’91, the former classmates stand out in number and stature. The Dartmouth spoke with some of the ’91 Trustees to learn more about their role on the Board — and investigate whether they might have an outsized influence (or perhaps some friendly class rivalry).
In total, five members of the Board are ’91s, according to the Board of Trustees webpage. During the 2023-2024 academic year, the number sat at six — but dropped after former Amazon executive Jeff Blackburn’s departure from the Board in June 2024. Katyal, Tapper and Rhimes are currently joined by Stanford University School of Medicine neurosurgery professor Odette Harris ’91 and venture capitalist Gregg Lemkau ’91. The ratio of members of the Class of 1991 to other Trustees, however, does not affect the Board’s decision-making dynamic, the group said.
“We are all so different, and sure, we ’91s are all friends, but the entire Board is composed of people who respect and admire one another,” Katyal wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. “There is no ’91 bloc or anything like it.”
Lemkau agreed that “no little ’91 factions” exist on the Board.
“No one actually thinks about, ‘I’m going to represent the ’91s’ or even, ‘I’m representing this generation of alums,’” he said. “You are representing the [College] writ large and all the alumni.”
In fact, the ’91s highlighted how different they are from one another. During their time at the College, Blackburn was an athlete, Rhimes participated in theater and Tapper was a cartoonist for The Dartmouth, Tapper pointed out.
“[The ’91s] come from different backgrounds, and the diversity of what they bring is really cool,” Blackburn said. “It is, in some ways, a microcosm of what we try to do with the Board overall: different backgrounds, different experiences — it just happens to be the same class.”
According to Tapper, the Board has now forged connections between classmates who may have run “in different circles” as undergraduates.
“I didn’t really get to hang out with [Rhimes] or [Blackburn] or [Lemkau] when we were students,” he said. “We ran in different circles — [Katyal] too, but we did have common friends. So [the Board is] a great way to really make new friends in the Class.”
Blackburn attributed the abundance of ’91s to former College President Phil Hanlon ’77’s focus on the Board’s “criteria.”
“[Hanlon] didn’t care what class you were from,” Blackburn said. “He cared whether you met the criteria that we were looking for to be on the Board and were going to be a great partner for him. And Phil was adamant about that. He didn’t care if we had a lot of people from one class or the other, or which class it was, and I shared that view — and so that’s how we got to having six [’91s] on the Board.”
Blackburn added that members of the Class of 1991 are in a common age bracket for the Board.
“People in their 50s who care a lot about [the] school, have leadership positions out in the world and fit what the Board needs at the moment [often fit the profile],” Blackburn said.
While the ’91 presence is notable, this is not the Board’s first class-year cluster, according to Lemkau. From 2012 to 2015, four members of the Class of 1978 served on the Board, he said.
While Lemkau said that the five remaining Trustees from the Class of 1991 all have at least four years left in their tenures, they also have “a good amount of experience under [their] belt.”
“I certainly hope we shape the future of the Board and the future of the College,” Lemkau said. “But not in a, ‘Let’s go ’91s’ kind of way. … I feel like we’re now in a spot where we can really be adding meaningful value to [College President Sian Leah Beilock] and the Board as they kind of go execute on the College strategy.”
While the prevalence of ’91s on the Board does not affect much in practice, the ’91s and other Trustees alike have taken note of — and poked fun at — the ratio, according to Lemkau.
“There’s snide little comments from time to time … because there are so many of us,” he said. “But the reality is it’s all in jest and fun. … Every once in a while, I think there’s a little bit of a chip on everyone else’s shoulder, but we have a pretty good thing going.”
Tapper echoed Lemkau’s sentiment.
“All the other Trustees give us crap for having a cabal of ’91s in the Board,” Tapper joked.
Jake Tapper ’91 is a non-voting member of The Dartmouth’s Board of Proprietors. He was not involved in the editing or production of this article.
