Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2003/11/03/silencing_alumni_voices_alumni_lose_rights_of_selfgovernance.php
Monday, November 3, 2003
Over the past several years, the College has sought to consolidate its unofficial hold over the Association of Alumni, a 60,000-strong body whose most important function is electing seven of the sixteen Trustees.
Under the unassuming auspices of "giving alumni a stronger voice," members of the Alumni Council?which serves officially as an advisory committee to the Association?worked with former Council members who now govern the Association to draft a new constitution that would apply to both groups, effectively merging the two bodies. This proposed constitution would strip the democratic leadership from the Association, which would instead be governed directly by the Council, which is composed largely of unelected alumni officers from special interest alumni groups?many nominated by Dartmouth's official administration. The Council was not designed to lead; it was intended instead as a public face for the alumni.
One group of alumni, Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance, seeks not only to block the new constitution but to end alumni apathy and restore true democratic leadership to the Association by electing new officers. DAOG hopes to have a strong presence at the Alumni Association's December 6 meeting in Hanover, co-founder William Tell '56 said, since it will need the support of one third of present alumni to reject the constitution. If the constitution is accepted by the Association meeting, the vast majority of alumni will simply vote "yes" or "no" on a ballot mailed to them in April to approve the meeting's decision?a step necessary under current rules regarding amendments to the constitution.
At stake, though, is not simply the leadership of the Alumni Association but rather the governance of a multi-billion dollar corporation, one of the largest landowners in New Hampshire, and one of the world's most prestigious higher education institutions. Based on an 1891 agreement, the alumni choose seven of the sixteen members of the board of trustees, giving them great power to decide the future of the College, but this capacity will be severely diminished if the proposed constitution is adopted.
The Alumni Fight for a Voice
The battle between the alumni and the College is not a new one. Since its establishment in 1855, the General Association of Alumni has fought for greater alumni participation in governing the College. Despite its loud protests, however, the Association failed to garner attention or respect from the College administration, and in particular the Board of Trustees, until 1890.
When a spot on the Board became vacant in 1890, an alumnus presented himself for the job, sparking alumni protest when the Trustees passed him over. Writing in 1955 in the Alumni Magazine, President Emeritus Ernest Martin Hopkins 1901 noted that this rejection "created an exasperation among the recalcitrant alumni so violent and instantaneous that the Trustees were forced to the conviction that it must be given attention and that some compromise must be offered." The agreed solution was a system under which the alumni would elect seven trustees—half of the total.
Two decades after the alumni forced change from the College, the Secretaries Association—a coalition of alumni leaders founded in part by future College President Hopkins—recommended the formation of "some representative organization of the body, supplementary to the General Alumni Association." In 1913, the Alumni Council was founded as a derivative body of the Association to act as a conduit for alumni opinion to the administration and the Trustees, and to oversee various alumni functions. Two years later, the Association further asked the Council to be responsible for nominating alumni Trustees, a function it maintains to this day.
These decisions to assign greater responsibility to the Council were all carried out with the approval of the Alumni Association as a whole, Mr. Tell of DAOG said. In fact, most Association meetings in the 20th century were well-attended events held in June during reunions when many alumni were able to return to Hanover or already had plans to visit the College. This provided for considerable alumni input into decisions.
As early as 1914, some alumni, including some of the original alumni Trustees, expressed concern at Alumni Association meetings about the potential powers of the Council. With this in mind, the Association and the Council worked as originally intended over their first eight decades of existence. The only changes were superficial: though consisting originally of 25 members in 1913, the Council expanded to 40 members by 1956 and to 92 members in 1986, when four undergraduate representatives were added.
The College Takes Charge
In September of 1990, the process of stripping votes from alumni began as the College invited fewer than 200 members of the Alumni Association to a meeting in Hanover to discuss "housekeeping matters." At this meeting, the alumni amended the Association constitution to give the Trustees the power to re-elect an alumni Trustee for a second term without a general vote, reducing alumni influence over the Board by half.
In addition, the alumni amended their constitution to complicate the nomination of a candidate for Trustee by petition by adding layers of red tape and routing the process through the College's Alumni Affairs office. Partially in response to successful petition nomination campaigns in 1980 and 1988, this measure might perhaps have been passed off as saving hassle and depoliticizing Trustee elections, but it served to remove much of the democracy from the Trustee selection. What is a democracy if not a manner of choosing the best candidates? And how else can one choose candidates if not by picking sides and taking stands?
Alumni quickly challenged the loss of authority to the Trustees, but the Association stepped into the fray on two occasions, claiming first that the Association was a private organization and not subject to the courts and later that federal courts had no jurisdiction. In this case, the Association actually stepped in to defend its executive committee against its own constituents; from here it is not a large step to entirely remove the constituents from the elections.
The constitution remained unchanged for a decade until the spring of 2001, when the Alumni Association and the Alumni Council formed the Joint Committee on Alumni Governance and Trustee Nominations. The focus group was challenged with streamlining the operations of the two bodies; this committee was told, in essence, to find a way to merge the two organizations.
To the surprise of nobody in particular, the Joint Committee—composed of five members each from the Alumni Council and the Alumni Association—released in December of 2002 a recommendation urging the reunification of the two alumni bodies. That recommendation formed the basis for the draft constitution discussed and amended at the May 2003 meeting of the Council and the September meeting of the Association.
The Alumni Council met in May to discuss amendments to the new constitution, adding a provision granting extra seats to special interest "affinity" groups at the expense of the elected representatives. At a special meeting in early September, the Alumni Association considered the Council's recommendations, and, according to Mr. Tell, expressed reservations about adding seats to minority groups. Since the Council version and the Association version differed, a special committee comprising three members of each group met to work out the differences; the version proposed by the Council won the day after pressure from administrators, Mr. Tell said.
While the members of the Alumni Association present at the September meeting balked at many of provisions of the revised document, according to Mr. Tell, they ultimately were made to accept it after a special committee of members of both groups ruled for the Council's version.
At its December meeting, the Association will not honor mail-in votes from the tens of thousands of alumni unable to make their way to Hanover during the holiday season. They are instead to hope their executive committee, which nominates its own officers, makes the correct decision for them.
If both the Alumni Council and the Association of Alumni approve the new constitution at their December meetings, the proposal will be submitted to the membership of the Alumni Association for final approval next April. The approval form will likely be attached to the standard trustee election ballot, Mr. Tell said, potentially confusing alumni voters. Whether a copy of the new constitution, if approved by both alumni groups, will be included in the mailing with the ballots remains unknown.
Representatives of the Alumni Leadership office were unavailable to answer questions about what would happen if the new constitution is ultimately rejected, but it is difficult to imagine that a measure with strong institutional support will remain dormant for long.
More Counselors, Less Representation
The latest version of the draft constitution dates from late September, though it was released to the public a full half month later. This final version of the document—edited and nicely formatted—differs little from the version the Alumni Council voted to approve in May.
Inquiries made at the Alumni Relations Office did not divulge any of the details from the highly secretive September 6th meeting at which the Association's executive council approved its own demise; Bonnie Bourdon of the College's Alumni Leadership office said the minutes would not be public until they are posted on the official Dartmouth website. These things can take weeks, apparently.
Under the proposed constitution for the Alumni Association, the Council would nominate two Trustee candidates for the members of the Association at large to choose from; alumni can nominate candidates up to sixty days before the Council meets to discuss the slate of candidates. Currently, three candidates are nominated while 500 or more alumni can nominate another alumnus up to thirty days in advance.
The proposed 110-member Council, in charge of the revamped Alumni Association, would consist of only 18 "at-large" members voted on by the Alumni Association, compared with the current 21. As many as ten members would be appointed by "associated groups," consisting of the Black Alumni of Dartmouth, the Asian Pacific American Alumni Association, the Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alumni, and the Native American Alumni Association. A full 32 Council members would be selected directly by the Council itself.
In the lone similarly to the present arrangement of the Council, the 50 most recent graduating classes would each elect one Council member, while various other regional alumni groups would directly elect an additional 14 members.
The current situation provides a democratically-elected executive committee of the Alumni Association; this committee's members, however, are normally nominated for office by a nominating body, which in turn is appointed by the executive committee. The executive committee makes the decisions for the alumni as a whole and as such represents the 60,000 alumni at the College and in the world at large. The Alumni Council serves as an advisory board that nominates Trustees and serves various public relations roles; all of its authority to do this derives from
By contrast, the new arrangement would remove most democratic elements from alumni governance, creating a unicameral alumni group with minimal direct elections. Concessions to special aforementioned interest groups recognized by the College will further reduce the representative nature of the Association. Rather than represent all alumni, the Association will instead directly serve a variety of interest groups that already have a large voice in campus politics.
In this new leadership structure, only sixteen percent of the new Council—the government of the Alumni Association—would be elected by the membership of the organization it leads. The lack of accountability in the new arrangement is significant, since unpopular members of the Council could not be voted out of office if they maintain the backing of their particular constituents. This would be analogous to a United States Congress in which the most influential labor and business groups were entrusted with 360 seats in the House of Representatives...and told only to act responsibly.
A Cause for Concern
Most worrying about the potential changes is not their scope nor their apparent intent to further reduce alumni influence; rather it is the lack of information relayed to alumni regarding their potentially changed future role.
According to a letter endorsing the constitution co-signed by Alumni Council President Bill Dean '89, Association President Michael McClintock '80 and other leaders, the Joint Committee "reached out to alumni to gather their views through meetings with alumni volunteers, regional 'town meetings,' college publications and the Internet." Somehow, though, the message did not get out.
A nationwide survey conducted by Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance indicated that among graduating classes between 1980 and 2000, 94 percent of respondents were unaware of the proceedings in Hanover. This is really no better than the 90 percent lack of knowledge among the alumni as a whole
The general ignorance of this vital issue may be due in part to the lack of press the process has received. The Alumni Magazine—published by the Alumni Council—has not published any mention of the proposed modifications to the constitution. Dartmouth Life, a publication from the Development office and Alumni Affairs, gave a brief notice on the changes. No article on the subject has yet to appear in the Daily Dartmouth; in fact, that publication's only coverage of alumni leadership has generally been limited to brief biographies of Trustee nominees.
The College's Alumni Affairs office has no minor role in the drama. The Alumni Council has always maintained a fairly close relationship with the College administration because many of its representatives come from groups that tend to work closely with the Alumni Relations office. Additionally, minutes of meetings are made available months late on both the Association and Council web sites, perhaps related to the fact that official minutes are kept by a College official. Drafts of the proposed constitution have often been weeks late appearing on the web; since copies are not mailed to alumni, the Internet is the only way many alumni can follow the changes to the constitution.
Indeed, many of the key meetings in the process have gone largely unannounced and are held at what are for many alumni inconvenient times, such as early December. This means that many alumni are unable to attend key votes of the Alumni Association, leaving the executive committee to vote as it pleases.
Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance, perhaps mistakenly believing the Alumni Association to be democratic in nature, proposed the election of new leadership that could change the inward focus of the body's executive committee. DAOG proposed candidates for office and met with Association officers to discuss ways to reopen alumni governance to the alumni, but they were blocked at every.
The new constitution serves as a new challenge for DAOG, Mr. Tell said, since the new setup would prohibit any form of policy change as a direct election would affect a maximum of 16 percent of the leadership. Accordingly, the unrecognized alumni group seeks to increase knowledge of the problem and to block the passage of the new constitution.
Since the group in favor of the new constitution needs a two-thirds majority of present alumni to pass the new document at December's Association meeting, Mr. Tell said, optimistically, DAOG hopes to attract a small number of opponents to Hanover that could block the proceedings. Even were the measure to pass, he continued, DAOG would have time to mount a publicity campaign to explain its position before the April mail-in balloting concludes.
If the Council and its followers in the Association's leadership have their way, 60,000 loyal Dartmouth alumni will lose their stake in one of America's top academic institutions. A century-long relationship with the College would disappear in all but name, and the divide between the administration on one side and alumni and students on the other would only grow stronger.