TDR Interview: Peter Robinson '79

By Scott L. Glabe | Monday, May 16, 2005

Peter Robinson '79 is one of Dartmouth's two new Trustees. Running for one of two seats in a six-way race against four establishment-backed candidates, the Hoover Institution fellow and former Dartmouth Review correspondent earned the support of nearly half of alumni.

Portions of his interview with The Dartmouth Review are published below. See the next issue of The Review for a complete transcript.

The Dartmouth Review: Congratulations on your victory. What are your initial reactions now that this seemingly never-ending campaign is finally over?

Peter Robinson: My first impulse? To quote Bill Buckley in the 1964 mayoral campaign when he was asked what he would do first if elected mayor of New York: Demand a recount.

I was genuinely surprised. I thought the chances of winning were never better than 50-50. I ran to have a say, to give a place a shake. But my inbox began filling up very quickly with emails of congratulations. It's just amazing how many people love Dartmouth College and feel tremendously strongly about it. So the second and more enduring response was a deep sense of satisfaction that I was able to speak up for so many alumni who feel so strongly about the College.

TDR: What was that like during the election, being attacked from all sides while you couldn't speak in defense of yourself? Also, the head of the Alumni Association has come out and said maybe the election rules should be changed. How do you feel about that?

PR: This may sound a little bizarre, but the closest parallel I can offer you is a dream in which some horrible thing is happening and you open your mouth to scream, and no sound comes out. That's what it was like to see websites popping up in which Todd Zywicki and I were being whacked around.

Now, I have no objection to those websites and to taking that whacking. To the contrary, I was actually never able to feel terribly indignant about having other people speak their minds. That never troubled me. On the one hand, if you have a group of alums who feel so strongly about the College that they take the time to put up a website, put up the arguments, attack a couple of candidates, and on the other hand, you've got a set of rules that inhibit them from doing that, it's the rules that are out of line, not the alums.

What I did find frustrating was that the rules prevented me and Todd from replying. I'm all in favor of a give-and-take. I'd just like to be able to participate.

TDR: Could you discuss the importance of blogs in this election, and the importance of the blog-o-sphere in giving alumni a voice in the future?

PR: The importance of the blog-o-sphere to this campaign can't be overstated. Really bright undergraduates and recent graduates slapped up websites. And there you found fresh argument and fresh reporting. Voices in the Wilderness and Dartlog were putting up information about what was taking place at the College, budget information, information concerning class sizes, and so forth—really first-rate, original reporting as well as opinion journalism.

What that showed is that it is now possible for the alums of every institution in the country to get direct, unfiltered, unmediated information about what's actually taking place at their alma maters from sources that are completely independent of the well-oiled, humming propaganda machines run by college administrators. That's a tremendously important development.

TDR: You focused on three issues in your campaign: smaller class sizes, freer speech, and more of an emphasis on a stronger athletics program. What's the next step for making concrete changes?

PR: Smaller class sizes were one aspect of the larger issue that I tried to frame, a need for the College to rededicate itself to excellence in undergraduate education. Smaller class sizes are one aspect of that.

How would I hope to proceed? Although we think of the power of a Trustee as the ability to cast votes in Trustee meetings, there are a couple of ancillary powers that are worth noting. One of those is the ability to ask questions. When it comes to this notion of how resources have been allocated—how it can be, for example, that in certain departments students have a lot of trouble getting in to courses they need to complete their majors?—that is the kind of question I certainly intend to ask.

And the other power, of course, is the power to make a case. Even when T.J. or Todd or I might lose a vote in the Board, we'll have an opportunity to make our arguments, to state our cases.

Maybe I can begin using this power right now by suggesting that the administration needs to be much more careful about saying what it means. When the president says, as he has said repeatedly, that Dartmouth College is a research university in all but name, I have two objections to that. One is that, in my judgment, that is simply a misunderstanding of the College's strengths and heritage. The other, though, is that the statement implicitly endorses a mode of operation that consists of saying one thing but doing something else. "We'll call it one thing, a college, but we'll turn it in to something else." There's a gap between what is being said and the actions that are being taken.

Fast-forward to the Dean Furstenberg incident. Even as the football team was collapsing in recent years, what alums heard from the administration over and over again was, "Tut-tut, worry not. We're thoroughly dedicated to sports at Dartmouth College." And then this Furstenberg letter comes out, and alums say to themselves, "What? How can it be that if the administration was thoroughly dedicated to the sports program, a man at a key position in the administration was able to frame such a thought in his head, let alone to commit it to writing on College stationary?"

So when the administration says to alums, "Trust us," alums very reasonably begin to reply, "Why should we?" That just has to stop.

TDR: One issue that wasn't in your platform is the decline of education. It's impossible now to take quality classes in what was once the core curriculum. How do you plan, if at all, to try and address that?

PR: One critical aspect of providing excellence in undergraduate education is, obviously enough, the content of the curriculum, and I have the feeling, from talking to undergraduates and from talking to members of the faculty, that the situation is indeed just as you described it. But what I don't have is the facts, the figures. I haven't yet sat down with course catalogs and studied how the curriculum has changed over, say, the last decade. I need to inform myself about that before I begin to develop any notion of what I think ought to be done.

This, though, is true: resources are limited. There are only so many faculty members who can be hired, so many buildings that can be erected. The implication of this is that there are only so many courses that can be offered. Who is being served? Are the resources being dedicated, as they should be, above all to undergraduates? And does the content of the curriculum, what will and will not be taught or offered, does it really reflect the institution's best efforts?

Every so often, in my judgment, an institution needs to pull itself together and think these things through afresh.

TDR: A recent Student Assembly poll showed that only 24 percent of students agreed that the administration is responsive to student concerns, but for many students, the Board of Trustees is a very mysterious organization.

PR: Well, there's nothing mysterious about me. I will be the peoples' Trustee—maybe even the peasants' Trustee. Some of the members of the board, I'm told, attend Trustee meetings by flying into Lebanon in their own private jets. I will be taking the red-eye Jet Blue to Boston and then going north to Hanover on the Greyhound bus.

Again though, you touch on something tremendously important. When I popped up a website, asking people to sign petitions on my behalf, I was concerned that the petitions would come from members of my class and earlier years, in other words from middle-aged to old fogies. But that isn't what happened at all. There turned out to be a great deal of support among very recent graduates, and I started getting e-mails from people who were still undergraduates who wanted me to know that they would have signed petitions if they could have.

It would be one thing if the administration could argue, "Look, times have changed, so has the institution, and Peter Robinson and the old fellows who signed his petition are just going to have to console themselves with memories of what Dartmouth used to be. We have transformed the institution, and today's undergraduates and recent graduates are thrilled with it as it is." That is not an argument that anybody can make. The dissatisfaction runs from classes in the early '40s, the earliest classes from which I received signatures, right up to last year's graduates.

TDR Interview: Peter Robinson '79

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