Wherever green is worn

Today’s New York Times picks up the Dartmouth story we’ve been covering here over the past year: “Dartmouth alumni battle becomes a spectator sport.” Diana Jean Schemo writes:

Back when Daniel Webster, class of 1801, defeated an attempt by the governor to take control of the Dartmouth College board, his argument before the Supreme Court gave rise to a line famous among Dartmouth students: “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.”

Now those passions for the Ivy League institution have it embroiled in a new and bitter battle over its board, this time pitting alumni critical of the college against loyalists who have risen through the ranks of the Alumni Association.

The fracas has drawn the attention of conservative bloggers and publications all over the country.

It began when candidates for the governing board of trustees endorsed by the Alumni Association were unexpectedly defeated two years in a row by outsiders who got on the ballot by petition. The outsiders accused the college administration of sacrificing free speech to political correctness and of abandoning Dartmouth’s historical focus on undergraduates to turn it into a “junior varsity Harvard.”

Now the officers of the Dartmouth Alumni Association have canceled a coming vote for new executive officers and are proposing a constitution with new rules for how candidates get on the ballot. Critics say the effort is intended to block outsiders from gaining yet more seats.

Conservative publications and blogs that accuse academia of a liberal bias have lionized the three insurgents at Dartmouth and are tearing into the proposed constitution. The blog of one student, Joseph Malchow, describes the process of drafting the constitution in a “Timeline of Dirty Tricks.”

But supporters of the constitution say the effort began well before the outsiders’ triumph and was spurred by simmering alumni discontent and a steep decline, until recently, in alumni donations to the college since the 1980’s.

John Daukas, a lawyer and an alumnus on the task force that drafted the rewrite, said, “It might not be perfect, but it’s definitely better than what we have now.”

Dartmouth is not the only private college where dissidents are trying to get a foothold on the governing board through alumni elections. The unfolding controversy is being watched closely by other universities.

“The old way of doing business, where people get their degree, lead their lives and the only source of information about their institution is the alumni magazine, that’s just gone,” said Peter Robinson, Dartmouth class of ’79, a speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan and a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, who was one of the insurgents who won election to the board last year.

Conservative alumni at Colgate University and Hamilton College in upstate New York have also tried to reach the board as petition candidates, so far unsuccessfully.

At Hamilton, the dissent flared after a campus club issued a speaking invitation to Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who has called victims of the Sept. 11 attacks “little Eichmanns,” and after the college invited Susan Rosenberg to teach a seminar on memoir writing. As a leftist in the early 1980’s, Ms. Rosenberg was linked to the armed robbery of a bank in which two police officers and a security guard were killed.

At Colgate, the opposition reached critical mass over the college’s efforts to curb Greek life by taking over ownership of fraternity houses.

“What we’re seeing at Dartmouth, Colgate and Hamilton are alumni who are profoundly troubled by the direction of those institutions,” said Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council for Trustees and Alumni, a group whose founders in 1995 included Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. “It’s time for those looking in from the outside to provide some input.”

Yale saw a spirited but futile petition challenge from the left in 2002 by a labor-backed minister who was a graduate of the divinity school.

About 25 colleges and universities allow alumni to elect trustees directly. At Dartmouth, alumni elect half of the college’s 18 trustees, either Alumni Association nominees or independent challengers.

The alumni challenges have their roots, in part, in recent conflicts that grew out of the college’s decision to strip the Zeta Psi fraternity of recognition after it published newsletters describing the supposed sexual practices of specific female students. Subsequently, the college president, James Wright, posted a letter on Dartmouth’s Web site that was taken by conservative alumni to infringe on free speech.

“In a community such as ours,” Dr. Wright wrote, “it is hard to understand why some want still to insist that their ‘right’ to do what they want trumps the rights, feelings and considerations of others.”

Alumni upset by the doings looked into petition candidacies, something that the first insurgent elected, T. J. Rodgers, said he was “so pleased to find that Dartmouth had in its DNA.”

In the last two elections, alumni voted in Mr. Rodgers, class of ’70, a self-described libertarian and president of Cypress Semiconductor; Todd J. Zywicki, ’88, a law professor at George Mason University; and Mr. Robinson.

Their campaigns attacked Dr. Wright’s letter, defended fraternities and strong sports programs and criticized efforts to shift Dartmouth’s emphasis from undergraduates to research and doctoral programs. Dr. Wright said in an interview that the letter, since removed from the Web site, was never intended to police speech, and he has spoken publicly to support free speech unambiguously.

For all the ideological fervor in the blogs, Mr. Rodgers, the first outside candidate who won, said he was irritated by groups and publications that portrayed the controversy as a left-right battle. He said his primary concerns were increasing the budget for teacher salaries and preserving the primacy of Dartmouth’s role as an undergraduate institution.

The proposed constitution would permit Internet voting for officers of the Alumni Association and allow alumni to elect directly half of the members of committees that nominate trustee candidates. It would also change the rules for petition candidates and, perhaps most important for both sides, the timing.

Currently, petition candidates can declare their candidacies after the Alumni Association has announced its official slate. The new rules would reverse that, so the Alumni Association would know of any outside challengers before selecting its candidates.

Mr. Daukas said the current system put the official candidates at a disadvantage because they did not know whether they would face outside challengers at all or who they might be. The chairman of Dartmouth’s board, William H. Neukom, class of ’64 and retired general counsel for Microsoft, in an interview called the proposed constitution “a sincere effort” to create “a more democratic, more participatory form of alumni self-governance.”

Merle Adelman, a vice president of the Alumni Association, said the election for new officers, which had been set for October, was not postponed to extend the terms of incumbents but because the new constitution would change the structure of the association’s leadership and could render the election results moot.

But critics said the changes upended the whole rationale for petition candidacies — created as a mechanism for expressing discontent with the status quo — and gave the official Alumni Association the upper hand.

Editors of the on-campus Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth Free Press, conservative and liberal publications that seldom agree, called the new constitution “a slap in the face to open democracy” that “makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech.”

Mr. Robinson agreed. “This is as much a reform as when Joseph Stalin decided to hold elections in Eastern Europe,” he said. “Voting? Yes. Democracy? Not at all.”

The photos of Peter Robinson (below) and Merle Adelman accompany the article. Mr. Robinson speaks for me.

pr.jpg

As do Anne Neal and Charles Mitchell at the American Council of Council of Trustees and Alumni. Yesterday they issued a press release:

The leaders of Dartmouth College’s Association of Alumni have refused to hold an election that they arbitrarily “postponed” last month. This move comes in response to inquiries from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

“Since when are alumni forced to remain silent when fundamental fairness is at stake?” asked ACTA president Anne D. Neal. “What is so radical about holding an election when it is scheduled?”

On May 24, the leaders of the association announced that they were “postponing” the group’s scheduled October 15 annual meeting—and thereby the elections for their own offices. ACTA protested in a June 1 letter, which resulted in media coverage in the Boston Globe and New Hampshire Union Leader, as well as on talk radio and many weblogs.

The Association of Alumni responded to ACTA’s letter on June 15, but failed to answer any of ACTA’s substantive criticisms. The group’s executive committee claims that its constitution gives it “the right to set the meeting date, and to change it if required.” But the group’s “Guidelines for Conduct of Meetings” clarify that “the executive committee shall set the date for the Association’s next annual meeting” not whenever it wants, but “at each annual meeting.” As ACTA’s letter pointed out, “there are no provisions for a unilateral decision to postpone the meeting date” to some indefinite time in the future.

The letter also claims that the election should be “postponed” so that alumni can “focus on one set of issues at a time.” The other issue would be the vote on a proposed new constitution for the alumni association, which will end on October 30.

“The leadership’s claim that duly-scheduled elections should not go forward since alumni can only ‘focus on one set of issues at a time’ is simply incredible,” Neal remarked. “Even worse, their letter did nothing to answer the widespread public concern over changes to Dartmouth’s trustee election procedures.”

As ACTA’s letter made clear, the proposed new constitution would make it nearly impossible for petition candidates to win election to Dartmouth’s board—as three reformers have done in recent years. They would be required to collect 250 signatures in 30 days, before the establishment even announces its candidates (that is, before it would become clear that outsiders are needed on the ballot).

“Those in power at Dartmouth are clearly intent on discouraging diverse voices on the Board of Trustees,” Neal noted, “and they are using this blatant power grab to make sure none are elected ever again.”

“Simply saying ‘trust us,’ as the recent letter does, will not suffice,” Neal concluded. “The October 15 election must be held as scheduled, and a full and open debate over the proposed constitution must continue.”

Charles Mitchell also posted a related note yesterday at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons. Dartmouth undergraduate Joe Malchow has provided the go-to coverage of these events at his Joe’s Dartblog. Last year I devoted a Standard column to the trustee election whose outcome apparently produced heartburn among the powers-that-be at Dartmouth: “Bucking the deans at Dartmouth.” Last month I took a look back on Power Line: “Why the Wright stuff is wrong.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses