Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/06/02/tdr_interview_peter_robinson_79.php
Thursday, June 2, 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.
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: Do you have a favorite Dartmouth memory that you look back upon?
PR: Gosh, I have a flood of Dartmouth memories, starting with the green eggs and green orange juice that were served at Moosilauke Lodge the last morning of the freshman trip. My closet buddies and I so enjoyed the freshman trip, by the way, that we organized a senior trip among ourselves, and we went hiking up through the Presidential range our senior year.
But I suppose the most vivid memories when I think of Dartmouth are of the superb instruction. A class with Vincent Starzinger on constitutional law was an electric event. Or a class with Jeff Hart on Pope, or Dryden, or Samuel Johnson was unlike anything else I had ever encountered in my life. You had someone at the front of the classroom who was more literate, better-read—who in his own mind comprehended more of civilization—than I would have thought possible.
TDR: How did you decide to run?
PR: T.J. Rodgers gave me a telephone call—quite how my name reached him, I don't know—but I got a telephone call from him on a Friday evening and he said, "come to such and such a place" (he named a well-known restaurant in Palo Alto) "and I'll be there in an hour." T.J. Rodgers and I ended up talking until pretty close to midnight.
I had only even met T.J. Rodgers once before—some years earlier, he had been a guest on the television program that I host. But that was my total contact with T.J. until this five-hour dinner that we had.
We discovered very quickly that we felt much the same way about the College, both in how much we loved the place and how profoundly frustrated we felt about the way in which it had been going in recent years. T.J. laid out for me how I might go about becoming a petition candidate, the time commitment involved in actually serving on the Board, and so forth, all in the greatest detail. Over the following weekend, I thought it over with my wife and we decided that the kids were old enough to permit me to take on an outside obligation like this.
So there you have it. It was a long talk with one of the persuasive men on the face of the planet, T.J. Rodgers, that persuaded me that, instead of griping about Dartmouth I ought to try to do something about it.
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: The campaign was somewhat acrimonious on both sides, and now that you are on the Board, how do you plan to work with faculty, other Board members, and President Wright in particular?
PR: I'd want to revise your premise a little bit. I think if you looked at every statement that I published, and likewise for Todd Zywicki, you would discover that although we were openly critical of the administration in a number of regards, we were always respectful and we always made arguments, not mere accusations. That is to say that we supported our assertions with facts. We took great pains not to be acrimonious, but to be reasoned.
But you ask how I'd behave on the Board of Trustees. The first point I'd make is that I do not see this victory as a scene in a Wagnerian opera, with peals of thunder and flashes of lighting. At an institution dedicated to the life of the mind, it must not be the case that the only way the governance of the institution can be adjusted is through a revolution or a putsch. That's nonsense. We ran independent campaigns, but— I'm sure in this regard I can speak for Todd—we will continue to do what we did on the campaign, which is to remain respectful and to make our arguments.
The other thing I'd say is that despite my disagreement on a number of points with the administration and with Jim Wright in particular, I respect Jim Wright immensely. Oliver Wendell Holmes made that famous remark about FDR: "a first-rate temperament but a second-rate intellect." Nobody would say that about Jim Wright. This is a guy with a first-rate temperament and a first-rate intellect. And if you want proof that, just look at the body of work he published when he was a still a working historian. This is a guy with a formidable mind. What Jim Wright and I have is a few clean, honest disagreements. But at an institution devoted to the life of the mind, reasonable people ought to be able to disagree reasonably.
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: You said President Wright is headed in an exactly antithetical direction to the College's history and tradition and from the direction you and I say it should go.
PR: I'm sure there will come a moment when I get to say that to Jim Wright himself. I'm sure Jim Wright will have a reply. And that's when the conversation will begin.
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: In 1999, President Wright tried to "end the Greek system as we know it," as he said, with the Student Life Initiative. You were a member of a fraternity during your time at Dartmouth. What was your reaction to that?
PR: That's another example of a gap between words and actions. In more recent speeches, President Wright has said, in effect, "No, no, no, we support fraternities." Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. That's not what people are telling me who are in fraternities and sororities.
Take the very striking fact that the Greek system has been frozen. X number of fraternities and X-over-two number of sororities—that is, only about half as many sororities as fraternities. Why? There are equal numbers of men and women at the College. Why would the formation of sororities be frozen?
The only possible explanation I can see is that sororities and fraternities, the whole Greek system, are viewed as something distasteful and very nearly evil. The administration will tolerate it if it must, but it will freeze it in place. I don't view the Greek system as evil. People who join fraternities and sororities often look back on those as some of the most positive experiences of their time at Dartmouth.
I would not want to push sororities on women at Dartmouth if they have no interest in them. But for goodness's sake, as a minimum opening step, why not unfreeze the sororities? Let's see if we can't complete the work of coeducation by permitting women, should they wish to do so, to form new sororities.
TDR: You mentioned that you've learned more from the blogs in this election than you had from reading the Alumni Magazine for the past quarter century, and it seems there is a new awareness of campus issues thanks to the Internet. How do you plan to convert the awareness that's developed to change and influence?
PR: Well, the details of how best to work within the Board are something I'll have to learn as I go. But the campaign itself has already proved that the most important thing Todd or I can do is to argue our case.
Compare last year's election with the election this year. Last year, nearly anyone would have said that T.J. Rodgers was in all kinds of ways the most impressive of the candidates: obviously brilliant and a hugely successful entrepreneur, he'd come to California with nothing and ended up with a company that employs 5,000 people and is on the cutting edge of half a dozen different technologies. This was just a hugely impressive person.
But in this year's election, all four of the candidates nominated through the usual process were impressive people. There's just no way, zero, that anybody could have argued that Peter Robinson or Todd Zywicki was more impressive in terms of his career or what he's accomplished than were the other candidates. In other words, last time around, what T.J. had to run on was not just his issues but his own persona and accomplishments, but this time around, what Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson had to run on was the issues and the issues alone. All we could do was argue our case. And you know what? It turned out that was enough.
The lesson I'll cling to over the next four years is that if you make your argument, people will respond. They won't always respond positively, but there's nothing wrong with that. I learned a lot by reading Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth, both about the counterarguments and also the depth of their feeling.
Make the arguments. That's what I intend to do.
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 people's 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: Those folks seem to be some of the most frustrated—the folks that are here well after coeducation is long established, well after Dartmouth became more diversified, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, open-minded, tolerant people—they've seen Dartmouth's traditions in the last ten years very much eviscerated and the administration very much engaging in copious amounts of double-speak. They're the most frustrated.
PR: I invite them to let the administration know they'd like some changes made. I also invite them to let themselves season for a couple of years and then run for the Board of Trustees themselves.