God and man at Dartmouth
When William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the modern conservative movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety -- if not celebrity -- with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. He attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism. He sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility, calling on them to grasp the nettle of university governance.
Yale was, of course, only the example that laid closest to Buckley's hand. The necessary changes having been made, Buckley could undoubtedly have written the same book about any of America's most prestigious universities. In the ensuing decades the conservative movement as a whole has experienced successes that must exceed even Buckley's visionary imagination. Yet the university remains untouched by Buckley's call to action. In fact, it understates matters considerably to say that circumstances on campus have not improved since 1951.
That is why the Lone Pine revolution underway at Dartmouth was of such interest. At Dartmouth, alumni have been answering the call Buckley delivered more than 50 years ago. Given the role allocated to elected alumni trustees on the Dartmouth board, the opportunity existed at Dartmouth for alumni to participate substantially in the governance of the institution. With the election of alumni petition candidates T.J. Rodgers, Peter Robinson, Todd Zywicki and Stephen Smith over the past three years, Dartmouth alumni were undertaking precisely the kind of supervision of the institution that Buckley had called for -- the independent supervision that as a general matter is alien to elite nonprofit institutions.
In today's Daily Dartmouth, Professor of Economics Meir Kohn eloquently describes the miscarriage that the Dartmouth board of trustees has effected by resorting to its highhanded decree remaking Dartmouth's governance structure:
The governance problems of nonprofits are similar in general, but they also differ in some respects. Administrative misbehavior takes somewhat different forms. For example, since nonprofit administrators cannot award themselves huge salaries and lavish stock options, they tend to take more in perks (houses, private jets, generous pensions). They also find other ways to use the institution’s resources to their own benefit. For example, they promote political causes close to their own hearts even when these bear no relevance to the goals of the institution. These causes tend to be leftist, because most administrators are of the left. But conservative administrators would promote conservative causes. The issue is not one of politics but of governance.Thanks to Professor Kohn for telling it like it is, with the indignation appropriate to the occasion.A more important difference is the lack of external constraints on the misbehavior of nonprofit administrators. For corporations, SEC regulations require public disclosure of a great deal of information, making it easier to monitor managerial performance. Disclosure requirements for nonprofits (to the IRS) are much more modest. Not surprisingly, nonprofit administrators release as little information as they can to avoid having to account for their actions. Moreover, if corporate management performs badly enough, it faces the danger of being removed by a hostile takeover. But however bad things are at Harvard, its administrators need have no fear of a takeover by Yale.
It is in the context of the general problem of governance — and of the particular problems of nonprofit governance — that we should understand recent events at Dartmouth. It is not that administrative misbehavior is unusually bad at Dartmouth. What is unusual is the ability of Dartmouth alumni to elect to the board some trustees not hand-picked by the administration. This peculiarity offered a potential mechanism of governance, and a number of alumni were sufficiently public-spirited to try to turn this potential into reality. It is hardly surprising that the administration did not welcome this initiative. With remarkable brutality, the administration and its friends on the board have acted to neutralize it. Contrary to the pronouncements of the Ministry of Truth, the board did not vote to strengthen governance at Dartmouth: it voted to prevent it. With this avenue cut off, we remain without any effective mechanism of governance. There is therefore no constraint on the potential misbehavior of this or any future administration.
This is unfortunate for Dartmouth. But the impact is much wider than that. Had the alumni initiative succeeded here, it would have been imitated elsewhere, to the ultimate benefit of all institutions of higher education. That now seems unlikely.
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