A Grand Opportunity for Reform: Alumni Vote for Trustee Representative

By Nathaniel E. Ward | Sunday, April 11, 2004

Just four months after defeating a proposal to strip them of their governance rights, Dartmouth's alumni are faced with another election, this time to choose another of the six alumni representatives on the Board of Trustees. While the December vote was simply to maintain the status quo—or worsen it—this election offers all alumni the opportunity to enact changes for the better.

Trustee candidates are officially not supposed to campaign, but T.J. Rodgers '70 has nevertheless drawn considerable attention to his dark horse petition candidacy. Rodgers hopes to stave off the three "official" candidates, nominated by the College-influenced Alumni Council, and win the election. Balloting, both via mail and electronically at Dartmouth.org, ends May 8th.

Rodgers, chief executive of a Silicon Valley technology firm and a respected advocate of liberty whose essays have appeared in national newspapers, said he hopes to reform the College's governance and leadership and return Dartmouth to a position of "academic superiority." As CEO of Cypress Semiconductor since 1982, Rodgers advocated then-radical programs like stock options for employees and other incentives to keep workers motivated.

"He is not a reiteration of stereotypical administration-selected Trustees or the selfperpetuation which the Board produces for its own self-indulgence," said Quentin Kopp '49, a superior court judge in San Mateo, California. Instead, Rodgers was selected after a lengthy process to nominate a reform candidate, an effort led by Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance. Rodgers gathered nearly 2,500 signatures on his petition to be placed on the Trustee ballot, five times the required minimum.

As a Trustee, Rodgers wrote in a statement on the election website, he would look to overcome one obstacle in particular: the College's limits on free speech. Even its Trustees are unable to express dissenting opinions, he said, limiting the institution's ability to reform. Materials sent to alumni are simply "glossy infomercials" that avoid real debate, he continued, while the College's speech codes encroach on First Amendment rights.

Further battering the College and the Board, Rodgers wrote that Dartmouth's curriculum suffers a series of gaps "not only in math and science, but also in life's basics: thinking and reasoning, writing clearly, understanding the economy—and even understanding the basic principles and history of our American Democracy." The bureaucratic campus orthodoxy, which limits what opinions can and cannot be expressed at Dartmouth, further exacerbates these failings, he said.

Kopp noted that Rodgers is "grounded firmly in the value of a Dartmouth education, which is in turn not based on a smorgasbord of every contemporary educational fad." This variation from basic education is reflected in the roughly 350 courses Dartmouth offers, Kopp said, "the most superficial curriculum I've ever seen, since I first read a catalog of Dartmouth courses in 1945."

Rodgers also derided the College's approach to inclusivity, suggesting that efforts today do more harm than good. He proposed instead that Dartmouth admit students on the basis of merit rather than by quotas; a similar practice at Cypress has resulted in a racially diverse workforce, he said, where everyone understands they deserve to be there. "Diversity by mandate is wrong precisely because it demeans those it intends to help," he wrote. In the 1990s, he gained notoriety by dismissing a nun's criticism of the lack of women on Cypress' board by calling immoral any advancement except that based on merit.

Finally, Rodgers proposed a revision to Dartmouth's mission statement, emphasizing its liberal arts tradition of "educating America's leaders." This can only be achieved through academic superiority, he wrote, which in turn derives from a strong curriculum "taught by an exceptional faculty to small classes of the best students, who enjoy broad access to the faculty."

These proposals to remove academics from bureaucratic control have not gone unnoticed. Rodgers' candidacy has been featured in several national news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Journal called Rodgers "a real choice" who would combat the "gooey Diversityspeak" of the other Trustee candidates, while the Chronicle presented Rodgers as a "crusader" for higher ideals.

Rodgers' petition candidacy is not unprecedented. In 1980, John Steel '54 successfully challenged an incumbent alumni Trustee through a petition campaign, becoming the first and only winning petition candidate. Most recently, a 1988 drive to elect Wid Washburn '48 to the Board by petition nearly unseated the sitting Trustee. The theme in each of the earlier elections, according to a statement from Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance, "was the College's abandonment of its traditions, values and curriculum." DAOG last year successfully opposed a move to merge the Alumni Council and the 62,000-member Association of Alumni, which would have further limited the alumni Trustee selection process.

DAOG did consider other Trustee candidates, including Kopp, who declined because he didn't believe himself to be the strongest option. Instead, he asked Rodgers if he would be willing to run, Kopp said. Rodgers, who met Kopp in December after the Alumni Association meeting, quickly agreed and set about organizing the petition drive.

Like Dartmouth, many Ivy League universities prohibit open campaigning for trustee positions, but politicization of elections is not unheard-of. Yale University's 2002 election for a place on the Yale Corporation saw the Reverend W. David Lee seek endorsements from politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman and other notable Yale alumni. Ultimately, Lee did not win the position despite a vocal campaign.

The other three Trustee candidates, nominated by committee, are not nearly as notable and are hard to readily distinguish. In contrast to Rodgers, the candidates very much follow the lead of many before them in academia: they boast their commitment to gender and racial diversity and, in rather dry language, explain their vague desire to expand Dartmouth's reputation as a leader in the liberal arts.

N. Bruce Duthu '80, the most interesting of the establishment candidates, brings with him long experience as a Dartmouth diversity-crat and anti-speech activist, starting with his position as director of the Native American Studies Program in the late 1980s. Later, he worked to degrade the quality of Dartmouth's academic offering by serving on a 1993 committee examining race relations at the College that recommended the creation of a full-time racial harmony administrator. The proposals the committee put forward later manifested themselves in the Office of Pluralism and Leadership.

If Mr. Duthu were elected Trustee, these types of initiatives would only expand. He said would encourage programs to educate students "within an environment that reflects the diversity of the broader society," a proposal that smacks of further limitation on free speech. Furthermore, he "would maintain and enhance the College's commitment to the recruitment of students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds," implicitly at the expense of those who are not sufficiently diverse.

Dartmouth, he said, should tailor its curriculum not to reinforce the Western ideals but to foster ambiguous ideas of "justice." He hopes to provide, he wrote in his personal statement, "an experience in what former President Freedman called 'transformative values' of a liberal education." Presumably, these "transformative values" Freedman spoke of include intolerance of those with whom you disagree politically. He also said he would continue support for "academic programs and faculty who give voice to the experiences of people from diverse or minority backgrounds" since "we have not reached the point where such academic programs may be regarded as redundant." He left unclear when this academic affirmative action might be deemed sufficient.

Finally, he is the sole candidate to explicitly stand behind the 1999 Student Life Initiative, an unpopular measure whose undisguised goal was to remove or dramatically overhaul the Dartmouth Greek system. "I support the aspirations and values behind the College's Student Life Initiative," he said, perplexingly adding that the Initiative is "now operating to enhance the quality of students' out-of-classroom experiences." To date, the Initiative has been largely a headache for students, who are forced to deal with restrictions on social life even as the College spends grand sums on unused entertainment venues in the Collis Center and elsewhere.

When contacted by The Dartmouth Review, Mr. Duthu's office at Vermont Law School mysteriously replied that he had taken a trip to China.

Perhaps the most nuanced of the "official" candidates, Daniel Papp '69 said in statement on the elections web site that "students must be exposed to diverse outlooks and positions on the issues of the day" and not only to racial variation. Not wanting to alienate those in the College establishment who oppose free speech, however, he cited College President James Wright's comment that "not all views are equally valid."

A lifelong academic, Papp has served in various administrative roles, including as interim President of Southern Polytechnic State University and as Senior Vice Chancellor for Academics and Fiscal Affairs for the University System of Georgia, a post he continues to hold. Papp is also a scholar and a professor in addition to a bureaucrat. He has written various works on international politics, especially with regards to the Soviet Union, and has held various honorary professorships at military academies.

As with the other College candidates, Papp devoted many words to Dartmouth's image—the BuzzFlood, but with the power to actually do things. In his statement, Papp explained his personal philosophy of success: "Get it done, get it done right, and get it done in a way that you would be proud to see on the front page of the New York Times." Whether the second point takes precedence over the third may well determine the effectiveness were he to be elected Trustee.

The final candidate, Laura Stein '83, brings to the table years of experience running a ketchup company and the ability to speak a half-dozen languages. A vice president at H.J. Heinz, Mrs. Stein says she has experienced at "reputation building, strategy development, operational oversight, investment and fiscal matters, risk management and education issues."

Her vision for Dartmouth's future is of a strong University; she never neglected to mention the professional schools when discussing the College, and even proposed that Dartmouth invest more in those areas. For example, Mrs. Stein explained in her personal statement her support for increased investment in the Dartmouth Medical School, since that—and not Dartmouth's undergraduate experience— will attract good students. She also suggested that Dartmouth needs to further abandon its colorblind admissions process so it can match "an American culture whose demographics continue to change."

While the alumni are empowered to select half of the total members of the Board, the candidates they chose do not necessarily sit as members. The Board of Trustees ultimately elects its own members, and the alumni only nominate candidates for the Board's approval. Under an 1891 agreement, seven of the sixteen Trustees shall be selected by alumni and seven directly by the Board, with the other two consisting of the College President and the Governor of New Hampshire.

In early March, the Board selected two new charter Trustees, Putman Investments chief executive Charles Haldeman '70 and Albert Mulley '70 of Massachusetts General Hospital, both to take office in July. That month also marks theretirement of Chairwoman Susan Dentzer '77, who presided over much of the implementation of the Student Life Initiative that sought to impose on students from above a new, politically correct social order.

The Board voted in November to add, over the next decade, six seats—three alumni Trustees and three appointed Charter Trustees—after the New Hampshire legislature voted last summer to allow such changes to be made without explicit permission. Under the College's 1769 charter, the legislature must approve any changes tothe charter, including changes in the composition of the Board.

A Grand Opportunity for Reform: Alumni Vote for Trustee Representative

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