The Association (sort of) Meets

By Andrew Grossman | Monday, November 12, 2001

Candidates being excluded from elections, amendments rejected from the agenda, and the whole thing scheduled for a particularly skewed attendance, anyway. Yes, it's time for another Dartmouth Association of Alumni meeting on December 1 in Hanover.

Dartmouth's alumni relations office, apparently the de facto organizer, posted a meeting agenda and new 'Guidelines for Conduct' on Dartmouth's website on October 18. The agenda has since been updated, as recently as Sunday, November 11.

Missing from the revised agenda, though, are candidates from the Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance (DAOG), which has recently been a major source of criticism of the current Association's leadership.

According to Patricia Fisher-Harris, associate director of alumni relations for the College and member of the Association's executive committee, the DAOG's nominations were received past the nominating committee's filing deadline, though they were supported by the requisite fifty members of the Association. Nevertheless, Theodore Cooperstein '84, one of the DAOG's nominees, will be allowed to run, as 'the publication of the original slate inadvertently omitted the secretary-treasurer nomination,' the position for which Cooperstein is running. Alumni, however, will be unable to vote for the DAOG's other candidates.

The Constitution of the Association of Alumni contains no mention of nomination deadlines for the Association's officers. The only place such a restriction is noted is in a set of 'Guidelines for Conduct of Meetings of the Association of Alumni' released by the current Association leadership this past July. It is in this document, released just three months prior to the originally scheduled meeting, that mandates that nominations be received 'by the 1st day of the fourth month preceding the next annual meeting.'

According to DOAG member William Tell '56, the 'Guidelines' document 'came out of the blue' in mid-July, disrupting his group's efforts to take part in the election.

Tell argues that the new 'Guidelines,' put to use for the first time this year, are 'in conflict with the Association's constitution,' and that the executive committee, which wrote and implemented them, 'does not have the authority' to do so.

Intrigued, I read the 'Guidelines for Conduct' and the Association of Alumni's constitution, both of which have been recently made available on the College's website. Tell is right.

These 'Guidelines' have been implemented by the Association's leadership but without informing, consulting, or asking the vote of alumni. The Association's constitution requires 'a three-fourths vote of the alumni present' to pass an amendment. But are the 'Guidelines' an amendment? Well, they do modify, rather than simply complement or codify, several articles of the constitution.

According to the 'Guidelines,' members unable to attend the meeting are unable to vote on business by proxy. The constitution includes no such restriction. The 'Guidelines' mandate that amendments to the Association's constitution be submitted by at least fifty members, again meeting a four-month deadline. The constitution includes no such restriction. The 'Guidelines' require that at least 25 alumni submit any proposed Association business, again, four months before the meeting. And—surprise!—the constitution includes no such restriction.

Finally, the 'Guidelines' must be modified by a majority vote of the executive committee; the same committee that conspired, functionally, to amend the Association's constitution without putting the matter to a vote, claims the right to modify its modifications, without asking anyone. The constitution, by the way, does include such a restriction.

This is the group that is responsible for electing one-half of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees, and it's been shanghaied by a group that can't stand to involve its membership, alumni, in its own internal affairs. This hardly bodes well for alumni involvement in Dartmouth, which has decreased dramatically in recent Trustee elections and fundraising drives.

Taken together, the 'Guidelines' bolster the power of the Association's leadership at the expense of alumni involvement. It's no wonder they were never put to a vote.

And that's not all that's been done to push alumni out of Association deliberations. The Association's leadership ignored requests to schedule its meeting on the Tuesday following Commencement, when it has traditionally been held for the convenience of alumni wishing to attend, or, for this year's rescheduling, on November 17th, the day of the Dartmouth-Princeton football game. Either date would have ensured a broad-based alumni attendance. Instead, the original meeting was scheduled to coincide with a gathering of class officers, who are more likely than most alumni to agree with the College's controversial Student Life Initiative.

The date of the rescheduled meeting has been made a part of the schedule of the Alumni Counselors' weekend retreat.

Alumni who are able should attend the Association's upcoming meeting and let the Association's executive committee know that they will not stand idly and let their rights as Association members be trampled. The executive committee has shown great arrogance in excluding alumni from its operations, and they must be taken to task for breaching the 1891 agreement that gave Dartmouth's alumni great say in the election of Dartmouth Trustees and, thereby, in the course of their alma mater.

The Association (sort of) Meets

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