Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/09/27/cutting_the_baby_in_two_a_trustee_primer.php
Thursday, September 27, 2007
To whom does Dartmouth answer? The stooges and sausage-makers at Parkhurst? So it seems, these days, when our ethically challenged College leaders are shoving the College through the sausage maker and out of the other end pours an amalgamated resolution, unseemly, uncooked and ill-conceived; a product that strips democracy from its source. It’s painful to watch and even worse to dine on.
Less than three weeks ago (September 8, 2007), the board’s new chairman, Ed Haldeman ‘70, announced that for the first time in 116 years, the College would expand its board without maintaining the long standing parity that existed between alumni elected board members and internally appointed board members, an arrangement conceived five score and sixteen years ago (in the parlance of the time). Dartmouth alums have been fighting a Wrong-headed Parkhurst… or “official Dartmouth”… or “the administration,”—various nouns that describe a body of individuals more interested in slouching towards Parkhurst than enlightening Dartmouth College now and into the future—for years. The alumni are, apparently, tired of the administration’s incessant obsession with its own percolating comforts, and are once again taking the school to court.
A lawsuit is pending which will determine if the 1891 agreement, which is designed to give Dartmouth alumni a real and on going stake in the college by maintaining an equal number of elected and appointed trustees on the board, should be held as a legal, binding contract. Precedent says yes; Parkhurst says no: a judge will now decide. Unfortunately for the would-be Majordomos, the administrators have endured the hard luck of having their mischievous fingers smacked under the judge’s gavel time after time in a legalistic smackdown.
Out of deference for and the benefit of the newly arrived freshmen, the long and droll history of alumni governance to follow will be condensed so as to put the following catalogue of shenanigans in context: after nearly two decades of Dartmouth leadership, first under President James Freedman and now James Wright, that has, indicatively, directed itself to assaulting, if not eliminating, the legendary and much beloved Dartmouth Greek system (see: the Student Life Initiative), reducing the number of humanities classes offered to students, cutting the number of tenure-tracked professors, nearly eliminating the College’s swim team, instituting an insulting speech-code, and prompting the college away from the undergraduate focus that defines it in the academic world—to name just a few of the signature moves—our well rounded alumni have had enough.
Do not be fooled: each of the above measures, as egregious as they appear, were systematically designed to tilt the college leeward, as a broke copy of Harvard, or Yale. Is it any wonder then that less than three weeks ago Chairman Haldeman invoked the authority of the Harvard governance plan when he justified his radical shake-up to the structure of the board? Is Dartmouth a wannabe?
Three years ago, T. J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, aware of a leadership crisis, sought to remedy the crisis in the most direct way possible: by embedding himself in the leadership structure of the college; running as a petition candidate for a trustee slot in 2004. In that same year, Rodgers ‘70, in an interview with the Review, noted “the College today has a credibility problem with the alumni body”—a credibility problem that was partially alleviated when Mr. Rodgers, taking a stand, was seated (“I’d prefer to stand”) on the board; the Dartmouth alumni now had a strong and independent trustee to fend off the origami masters of Parkhurst and speak-up for Dartmouth’s tradition, history and future—traditions that, when adjusted for the climate of our time, will be as appealing to the class of 2011 as they once were to the class of 1970.
After Mr. Rodgers ’70 dispatched the candidates that were officially slated (read: hand-picked) by the administration’s Nominating Committee, in the following year, Peter Robinson ‘79, a Fellow at the Hoover institute and former speech writer for President Reagan (of “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!” fame), and Todd Zywicki ‘88, professor of law at George Mason University, were nominated to the trustee slate by alumni disgruntled by the dog & pony show at Parkhurst. Both won by significant margins.
Needless to say, the do-hickeys at Parkhurst did not like losing at their own game—so they did what all too many losers lacking a better nature do: they changed the rules. It was merely a matter of months after Mr. Robinson ‘79 and Mr. Zywicki ’88 swore their trustee oaths when the patricians at the Alumni Council formed a double-secret committee (unique to Dartmouth lore) that was charged with the task of not just amending the alumni constitution, but scrapping the constitution in favor of a radically new constitution that would tip the balance between the myriad graduates of Dartmouth and the Administrative punters.
The document’s banal details are unimportant to the gist of this article save that the rear-guard constitution was a naked attempt to strip alumni of their power to elect from among themselves trustees which they actively, and with feeling, chose to do the last three times the possibility presented itself. Prior to Rodgers ‘70’s election in 2004, the last and historically first time a petition candidate ever took a seat on the board was in 1980 with John Steele ‘54. As former Review editor, Joseph Rago ‘05 wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The [failed constitution’s] details are complex and tedious, but last autumn they cooked up a new alumni constitution that would have ‘reformed’ the way trustees were elected. In practice, it would have stacked the odds, like those in a casino, in favor of the house.”
Despite the aggressive campaign surges in its favor, directed by the College’s own center for alumni relations and public affairs, the constitution was voted down and trounced without mercy by the College’s sensible alumni in the fall of 2006. Months later, in the spring of 2007, another trustee election was held and won by the fourth consecutive petition trustee to run for the trusteeship as a write-in candidate, Stephen Smith ‘88. With fifty-five percent of the vote, Mr. Smith was the most successful petition trustee to ever run for a position on the board. Not coincidentally, Mr. Smith was the only trustee running in 2007 who opposed the defeated alumni constitution. The College’s Nominating Committee, which handpicks the slated candidates, did not have the good sense to offer up candidates with platforms that would appeal to a sensible alumni base because the Committee was either lazy or didn’t care. The majority of alumni opposed the constitution; yet an out-of-touch majority of the four trustee candidates seemed to be oblivious of this fact, clueless as it were. So, despite the babbles and bangles of the other three candidates, the alumni voted for the fourth candidate, Steven Smith ‘88, a man who they believed would steer Dartmouth College into the future they envisioned.
Fooled once, twice and even four times over by petition trustees unsympathetic to their lugubrious needs, President Wright and then Chairman of the Board William Neukom ‘64 would not be fooled again. At that point, the board consisted of eight elected trustees, eight appointed trustees, and two ex officio trustees (President Wright and the governor of New Hampshire). As can be imagined, a strong-willed block of four who were unified in their belief that “the one substantive issue is the quality of education at Dartmouth,” as Rodgers told the WSJ, was not going to fly in the face of fat-cats and fish-mongers who wanted Dartmouth to nose their way up the US News and World Report rankings by any means necessary, even brown nosing, to be competitive with such XXX-schools which they prefer to Dartmouth.
Ex-Chairman and legal-gun-slinger Bill Neukom ‘64, who achieved his fame by losing Microsoft’s antitrust case, wasn’t, as above, going to lose again (“fool me once…etc”): neither President Wright nor Chairman Neukom ’64 wanted to give up the reigns while they were on board, so they gathered their compadres and sanctioned a governance review to examine the board’s structure and composition and determine whether it ought to be adjusted to fit their paradigm of high-on-the-hog leadership. The preliminary review was announced by Mr. Neukom ‘64 during the May 19-20, 2007 meeting of the Alumni Council, just days after Mr. Smith ‘88’s victory, and was kept on what might be termed “a need to know basis” from not only the public at large, but from three of their fellow trustees on the Board itself (by the time Smith joined, the Governance Review was well on its way; his ascension merely helped jack the pace of the process).
In that meeting, Mr. Neukom ’64 threatened to annul the 1891 agreement even knowing that this parity has been honored every previous time the board expanded its membership, including an expansion in 2003 which Mr. Neukom ’64 himself oversaw. Now that’s a clever guy. At that point, Mr. Neukom ’64 seemed enamored with the trustee process; the consecutive victory of four petition candidates, however, has had derogatory effects on not only Mr. Neukom ‘64’s demeanor, but on his abiding sense of fair play.
In his May 2007 speech, Neukom ‘64 mentioned that this review has been underway for a year (since May 2007) which means that plans to overhaul the board overlapped with the college’s attempt to ram through the flawed alumni constitution mentioned earlier in this article. While the college still, at least tacitly, valued democracy until it lost with the popular defeat of their crafty constitution, its new tactic was to remove democracy from the equation altogether and alter the board’s structure internally claiming that they never needed an election to enact infinitely worse measures anyway. What about the endless hours, not to mention dollars, spent on the constitution campaign? The deliberations? Panels? Debates? Editorials? Mud-slinging? And then the alumni vote? A hoax? Either the boys at Parkhurst have been deceiving—to use a euphemism—alumni all along or they are deceiving alumni now. We will allow others to judge them liars, spendthrifts or legalistic hooligans as the case may be.
On their June 10th meeting, the board announced that they have established a Governance Committee, composed of five individuals including President Wright, newly appointed Chairman of the Board Ed Haldeman ‘70, and three other trustees, to oversee the governance review, which is to say they needed reliable foxes to guard the hen house: stand-up guys, as they say in Jersey. When the Association of Alumni’s (AoA) executive committee, the only body of Dartmouth college governance that is wholly democratically elected and therefore representative of the 66,500 alumni-at-large—the majority of whom were elected by petition—pointed to the lack of petition trustees or Association members on the Governance Committee, their plea was ignored, repeatedly. When the Association submitted a formal letter explaining that traditionally the relationship between trustees and alumni has been governed by the AoA, and that the AoA should therefore be involved in the governance deliberations, the Governance Committee again shunned the Association and, in so doing, all too hastily cast aside the will of those whom the Association represents: the alumni-at-large.
After a summer of the Governance Committee’s back-room dealing, handshaking, and belly aching, Chairman of the Board Ed Haldeman ‘70 announced that the board will be expanded by eight appointed members, and offered this bit of brow raising consolation: “Given the divisiveness of recent elections we did not believe that having more elections would be good for Dartmouth. We also believe that the Board needs more trustees selected for the specific talents and experiences they can offer the Colleges—which elections can’t guarantee.” In Mr. Rodgers ‘70’s words, “If ‘divisive’ means there are issues and we debate the issues and move forward according to a consensus, then divisive equals democracy, and democracy is good. The alternative, which I fear is what the administration and Ed Haldeman are after right now, is a politburo—one-party rule.”
To end where this article began, the question of Dartmouth governance is essentially “To whom does Dartmouth answer?” The alumni? The existing student body? The faculty? Or the administration and its emporium of trustees? History favors a Dartmouth that belongs and answers to its alumni, and despite the wheeling and dealing of those who should know better, the alumni have prevailed in innumerable cases against the body-politic (“politburo”?) of Parkhurst. The administration’s most recent putsch would like to shift the spirit of Dartmouth away from its people and put it in the custody of those who believe they have bought and paid for their positions; in time, perhaps a judge will tilt the scales back to a Dartmouth that endures by and belongs to alumni, students, faculty, and the administration—each in its proper balance, each in its proper course, instead of, as those at Parkhurst would seem to have it, cutting our baby in two.