The Lone Pine Revolution Continues

By Scott L. Glabe | Friday, October 7, 2005

While no trustee elections are currently scheduled, critically important voting will take place on Homecoming Weekend. On Sunday, October 23, alumni will select a new executive committee for the Alumni Association, the body that consists of all 62,000 living College alumni.

Contenders for the committee include a petition slate of candidates who have collected signatures to appear on the ballot. Running for President is D. Dean Spatz '66, founder and former Chairman and CEO of Osmonics, Inc, a $215 million water purification and fluid processing company. River Valley Club owner Joe Asch '79, creator and patron of the Departmental Editing Program, is a candidate for 1st Vice President. Other petitioners include Quentin Kopp '49 of Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance and Alex Wilson '01, former staffer at The Dartmouth Review. (For more on each of the candidates, see http://www.daa-petition-slate.org/).

All 11 petition candidates have committed to restore to the Constitution of the Association of Alumni the right to vote on alumni trustees' second term, a right abrogated in 1990. The petitioners have pledged to repeal the guidelines for Association meetings which define presence at the Association's meetings to mean "physically present." This rule will, of course, still be in effect on Oct. 23, meaning that only alumni who travel to Hanover and come to Alumni Hall by 11 am will be allowed to vote. Members of the Alumni Council, the non-elected body that selects official candidates for the Board of Trustees, will be flown in for the weekend by the administration.

Good attendance by supportive alumni will likely lead to a victory of the petition candidates, predicts Asch, but he notes that, if they fail, they might not get another chance to run if the Association of Alumni Constitution is modified as suggested by the Alumni Governance Task Force. This proposed change will be discussed (but not yet acted upon) on Oct. 23 following the voting, the second time in recent years that a new constitution has been proposed; previous reforms narrowly failed in December 2003.

Like its predecessor, the new constitution would subsume the Alumni Association within the Alumni Council, eliminating the executive committee and eviscerating the representative function of the Association. At the present, a popularly-elected exec committee is not only empowered to make rules changes such as those listed above but also gives the whole body of alumni a platform from which they can communicate their wishes to the administration. Under the new constitution, however, alumni would be able to vote only for the president of the Alumni Council (who must have spent at least a year on the Council) and half of the members of several new committees. In this Politburo-style system, popularly-elected members could never compose a majority of the Nominating Committee and several other important panels.

This change has been disingenuously portrayed as an attempt to make the Alumni Association more representative. In the 9/26/05 issue of the Daily Dartmouth, assistant director of young alumni and student programs Rex Morey '99 said of the Association and the Council: "we're trying to combine the groups and have one constitution. It's allowing for more direct leadership of the Alumni Association, and, I think, we would say that it is in fact a more democratic association."

Morey's claim is deceptive at best: the Association is democratic, but will lose that characteristic if the new constitution succeeds. And, in a particularly Orwellian maneuver, the Alumni Council would change its name to the Alumni Assembly—and remain unrepresentative—while the Association would retains its name—and lose nearly all its power.

The proposed constitution also marks a transparent attempt to make it more difficult for petition candidates, who have been victorious in the last three trustee elections, to get on the ballot. Petitioners have sixty days following the announcement of official candidates—who are selected by a nominating committee of Alumni Council members—to file. This functions, according to Asch, as a safety valve, since petition candidates should file only if they are displeased with the official nominees. The new constitution turn this function on its head, requiring that petition candidates file a "Statement of Intent" 45 days before official candidates are named.

It is easy to see how the Alumni Council, which is composed of active alumni known to be loyal to the administration, might use those 45 days to choose candidates that are particularly well-matched against the petition candidates. Moreover, the selection committee might very well choose one of the petitioners as an official candidate. In a 10/4/05 op-ed in the Daily Dartmouth, Alumni Governance Task Force chair Joe Stevenson '57 portrays this as a good thing: "Petition candidates will notify the Alumni Association Nominating Committee"—one of the new, semi-democratic committees to be created by the constitution—of their intention to run and may be placed on the ballot without having to go out and get signatures.

Sounds great—except for another provision of Trustee elections the constitution endeavors to "fix": the stipulation that multiple official candidates must be nominated for each vacant spot on the board. This rule, enshrined in the constitution in 1990, was intended to prevent petition candidates from winning an election. The thinking was that, in conjunction with the system of approval voting in which alumni choose as many candidates as they want, at least one of the official candidates would defeat any petition candidate.

This logic, however, backfired last spring when petition candidates Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki defeated four Council-nominated candidates. Following the election, critics of the petitioners claimed their victory was de-legitimized by the fact that neither Robinson nor Zywicki was selected by a majority of alumni, even though they defeated their opponents soundly and nearly garnered an absolute majority. The corollary of this fact is that official candidates received a majority of the votes. This is meaningless as voters were free to select all four, but Stevenson labeled the approval system confusing (the unspoken assumption being that alumni who voted for only two Alumni Council candidates would have voted for all had they known what was good for them). The easy solution to the problem: pick a petition candidate as an official candidate, thereby reducing the number of actual official candidates to the number of vacancies and depriving the petitioner of outsider status.

In case that fails, the approval voting system is set to be replaced by a preferential or instant-runoff system in which votes are transferred once a candidate is eliminated. It seems that the multiple candidates rule, conceived to defeat petition candidates, has wrought unexpected consequences—that is, more petition candidates—and must be corrected with a new rule. Notwithstanding the political crassness of this move, preference voting is flawed in its own right in that the supporters of the losing candidates decide who wins. In other words, the least representative voters are the most powerful, and, according to nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, preference voting is not as representative of voters real preferences as the approval system currently in place.

All this smacks of political maneuvering from an administration flummoxed by last spring's results. Stevenson denies this, claiming AGTF "has not been influenced by the College Administration or by the Board of Trustees in any way." The veracity of this claim is questionable. For example, the acting secretary-treasurer of the Association of Alumni is Patricia Harris '81, who just happens to be the director of Alumni Leadership in the office of Alumni Relations, i.e. a high-ranking college employee. But it hardly matters. The Alumni Council is a body composed of the Dartmouth grads most loyal to the administration and its members are undoubtedly unhappy that its Trustee candidates have been defeated three times running. Their goal is clear—no more petition victories; it makes little difference whether they consulted with the administration in setting out to achieve it.

The Lone Pine Revolution Continues

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