Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/10/01/the_alumni_constitution_in_brief.php
Sunday, October 1, 2006
In several weeks, Dartmouth’s alumni will likely undergo a radical change in governance, a fait accompli—on October 31st, the men and women of Dartmouth will find out whether the much contested Alumni Constitution, has been approved by a majority vote of the alumni. The constitution was proposed by the Alumni Governance Task Force (AGTF)—a group of volunteers selected by the alumni governing bodies and charged with producing the unwieldy document. Unable to win at the polls—the recent victories of three petition (read: conservative) candidates to the Board of Trustees have frustrated these efforts—the AGTF taken it upon itself to change the rules of the game entirely.
Despite seeming “transparent, democratic, and encouraging of all viewpoints,” the proposed Alumni Constitution in fact submerges and dilutes the democratic process, as has been reported in The Dartmouth Review, The Daily Dartmouth, New Hampshire’s Union Leader, and most recently, in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and a host of snappy blogs. So, it’s kinda a big deal—PCism and the other perfunctory motions of campus liberalism may be fly and right on time, but gadflies like the low-ridin’ Lone Pine Revolutionaries of Dartmouth are putting up a good fight—Larry Summers, they are not: This ain’t Harvard, fool.
The single-most important issue in the Alumni Constitution fiasco is petition candidacies. First, however, this merits a bit of background. You see, Dartmouth is one of only a handful of American colleges and universities that allows its own alumni to elect half of the members of the Board of Trustees. (The other half, like the full board at every other institution, is hand-selected by sitting members.) This remarkable aspect of College life dates back to a tenuous 1890’s court case, when the alumni sued the College to obtain the right to elect their own Trustees. As you pea-green freshmen will often say to yourselves many mornings during the coming years, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Presently, an alumnus can get on the ballot for a seat on the Board one of two ways: by being the “official” candidate, endorsed by the Alumni Council, or by collecting 500 signatures on a petition to get his or her name on the ballot. Petitioning is frowned upon. Like a butterfly flapping its wings on the shores of Siam, petitioning causes unforeseen chaos on the Hanover Plain.
The AGTF recently released a newsletter to the alumni which claims that the nomination of candidates to the Board of Trustees “makes it easier to be a petition candidate.” If this were a sitcom there would be a laugh track; this is not a sitcom. The constitution will have the reverse effect, making it nearly impossible for a petition candidate to be elected to the Board of Trustees.
The new constitution requires petition candidates to announce their candidacies to the Nominating Committee prior to knowing the official nominees appointed by the Nominating Committee. In loopy language, the proposed constitution explains, “prior to the date…at which the Nominating Committee Trustee slate will be selected, 250 of the voting members of the Association may …file with the Secretary of the Association a petition …selecting an eligible member of the Association as a candidate for nomination as an alumni trustee.” Got all that?
Needless to say, there are several problems with this move. The petition candidate only decides to seek a spot on the ballot if Dartmouth alumni are dissatisfied with the official candidates put forth by the Nominating Committee. A petition candidate, in other words, reacts against what they consider to be the officially-nominated candidates, considered by them, unrepresentative. This allegedly progressive strategy fails when the petition candidate is forced to announce his candidacy before the official nominees are revealed to the Association. That is to say, the candidate is reacting against nothing in particular.
Second, by having a petition candidate announce his candidacy before the official slate is determined, the Nominating Committee has the option of choosing the petition candidate as one of its official candidates. The AGTF admits as much when it writes in a newsletter sent to alumni that “a trustee nomination process that encourages two-candidate elections…makes it easier to be a petition candidate.” The problem is that this destroys the incentive for the Nominating Committee to choose a diverse, representative slate. If the Committee can convert a petition candidate into an official candidate, which the AGTF advertises as a good thing, then first, the candidate has almost no electoral chance of victory and, second, it deflates the philosophy behind Petition Candidacy, i.e, running as a gadfly, an outsider.
While the AGTF contends that a two-candidate election—with one candidate as the officially-nominated candidate and the other as the petition candidate—“levels the playing field for all on [the] campaign[…],” this is obviously not the case. In the ideal election, there will be two or more candidates chosen by the Nominating Committee — candidates who are meant to personify the manifold will of Dartmouth’s alumni.
Thus, everything else being equal, these candidates will likely run on platforms that represent the established needs and wishes of the alumni. But when this is not the case—when the governance system is inadequate for whatever reason—it is only then that a petition candidate is needed and therefore motivated to run. The petition candidate should only intervene in the event that the candidate senses a lack of diversity in the slate of officially-nominated candidates; his status as a “petition candidate” is symbolic and, in that symbolism, necessary.
Essentially, the role of the petition candidate is to check the established alumni, and in so doing, draw attention to the perceived imbalance in the agenda of the alumni as is. But in the proposed constitution, such checks and balances are lost in the jargon that insists that more democracy means more of the same—a status quo that at least some of the alumni are displeased with, given the history of the last three petition candidates winning the only open seats on the Board of Trustees.
The proposed constitution is at best a thin veneer of democracy covering intent to subvert the same. In a markedly undemocratic move, it consolidates the current bicameral structure of an Alumni Council and Association of Alumni into one overarching legislative organization, called the Alumni Association. Subsumed within the Alumni Association are four bodies: the Alumni Assembly, the Alumni Liaison Board, the Nominating Committee and the Balloting Committee.
In effect, the proposed constitution dissolves the current Association of Alumni , and expands the powers of the Alumni Council, which through time, has come to represent the interests of the Dartmouth administrations recent turn away from its hallowed traditions and standards.
As it stands, the Association of Alumni is a group of all living alumni—about 66,500 individuals who have matriculated at Dartmouth College or her graduate schools. Under the current structure, members of the Association, only if present in Hanover, elect an Executive Committee which is meant to control the Association. Through no coincidence, these elections are held the same time the Alumni Council holds their annual meetings—so despite two distinct constitutions, one for the Council and one for the Association, the Alumni Council ran the show on both stages under the old system.
Despite the AGTF’s claims, the new constitution doesn’t change much here, and it in fact exacerbates the problem. Under the new Constitution, the Alumni Council remains functionally intact, and expands its membership to 125 individuals. Yet, indicative of the mindless thirst for diversity (almost always at the cost of actual diversity of views) 20% of this extension is unrepresentatively handed out to Dartmouth’s Affiliated Alumni; that is, the Dartmouth Asian Pacific American Alumni Association, the Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Alumni Association, and the Dartmouth African American Alumni Association. Then, with Orwellian undertones, the Alumni Council is renamed the Alumni Assembly, maintaining its prior responsibilities and picking up still more. The Alumni Association is stuck below the Assembly with amorphous duties like deciding the date of “association-wide elections and meetings” where all alumni will have “an opportunity for the expression of alumni sentiment”; it will “present information and views concerning the activities and direction of [various] bodies and the college.”
The Assembly (the current Council) is entrusted with many more responsibilities that lack the wishy-washy quality of the Alumni Association’s chores. The Assembly will appoint “one-half of Association Nominating Committee and one half of the Association Balloting Committee.” It will further “appoint the members of Assembly committees,” “conduct business as may come before the Assembly,” “elect representatives to the Alumni Liaison Board,” and “Act on proposed constitutional amendments.”
With the stroke of a pen, it could be the case today that all alumni are afforded the right to choose who fills these important seats of power. With a few keystrokes, the proposed constitution could have done this, but has not. This omission is neither the first nor the last time that the AGTF and its allies on the Council and the Association Executive Committee passed over a chance to create a straightforward, representative, and transparent system.
They have succeeded, however, in painting their opposition in the ugliest of colors; anyone who opposes the Constitution is a dissident, a Dartmouth-hater, an ignoramus, a conservative, a Dartmouth Review writer (we kid you not; this argument has come up more than once). Admittedly, this does not exonerate the opposition itself from some similar low-brow maneuvers. The fatal flaw in this name-calling is that the battle over the constitution is anything but a conservative versus liberal issue. Rather, it has dissolved to insiders versus outsiders within the power ranks of alumni and both sides trying their damnedest to keep the other out of their way. The Constitution, as proposed, will inevitably perpetuate this turf war.
But we digress. It gets better.
Under the proposed constitution, power is consolidated such that the leading officers of the Alumni Association are also the leading officers of the Alumni Assembly and the other sub-organizations. Only the Vice-President of the Association, “with primary responsibility as Vice Chair of the Assembly,” is elected by the Alumni Association through all media voting. That is, the Vice President is the only elected officer, aside from the secretaries.
It is questionable then how “markedly more democratic and transparent” the new constitution is when one half of each committee is appointed by the Assembly. Of the twelve-member Nominating Committee, six members are appointed by the Assembly, and of the six-member Balloting Committee, three members are appointed by the Assembly.
Further, the half that is democratically elected is nominated by the Nominating Committee, half of whose members are again appointed by the Assembly. There’s structural self perpetuation here: the democratically-elected half of these committees is nominated (distinct from appointed) by another committee, half of whose members are appointed by the Assembly.
The passage of the Alumni Constitution is not a partisan or political issue—all can understand that consolidation is less democratic than a system of checks and balances, and that an election of candidates that lack diverse platforms is really no election at all. In politics, justice and power, liberals and conservatives, freedom and security, among many other factors, are often at odds. Rightly so.
In a democracy, the tension between factions and forces reconciles into compromise or, short of that, leaves well-enough alone. By gilding the proposed Constitution with faux-democracy, going so far as to say the process is transparent, when it is not, the AGTF wants to have its cake and eat it too, though stingily not passing around even a slim-slice to others.
Let them eat cake. Indeed.