Interview: John Steel ’54, The First Successful Petition Trustee
Sunday, October 14, 2007
By John Bruce
Dr. John Steel ‘54 was the first successful petition nominee for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees in Dartmouth’s histor. His election also spurred a number of disaffected Daily Dartmouth staffers to found a new newspaper, The Dartmouth Review.
The Dartmouth Review: The overwhelming majority of alumni, of course, will never serve on the Board of Trustees, and most of us know very little about its operation. Can you give us a picture of how Board members see their responsibilities, how meetings are conducted, what sorts of subjects come up, and the general tone of meetings?
John Steel: I served in the Board for ten years, from 1980 to 1990. The big thing I want to say here is that all the members of the Board I knew during that time were, and I’m sure still are, outstanding people. Every one of them came to every meeting. It was a major priority. Only if you were hospitalized, or one guy worked for the State Department and sometimes had to be out of the country, did people not come to meetings. The Governor, by the way, usually didn’t come to meetings – the exception was John Sununu. He came to every meeting. In fact, he was the best Board member ever, in my opinion. He was most knowledgeable about everything related to the College, energy, oil prices, education, faculties, and New Hampshire law. He was out in the world, and he was informed on everything.
Regarding how we worked, we got together on things. Meetings were very polite. The Board wasn’t inclined to make big changes on its own. The Board will typically only make big changes if the students, faculty, or alumni are in revolt about something. Or if money isn’t coming in, that’s a problem as far as how the Board sees things. But if any of those sorts of problems comes up, the Board does what it needs to do to fix the problem. I would also say that if anything came to a close vote – say, 7 to 6 (when I was on the Board) – the Board in my experience would postpone action to the next meeting, talk it over, see if it could come to a better consensus.
During Board meetings, the members are well-fed, well-treated, and well-entertained. It’s quite a two or three days. They’re so well treated that they’re happy to give anything the College asks of them. This may sometimes make them a little too willing to believe all the administration tells them in meetings. They sometimes need to get out and dig a little on their own and get to the bottom of things. If there’s an area where the Board needs to be better informed, it’s the curriculum. But the big thing is that we worked together. To hear that some group on the Board thinks some other group is a bunch of right wingers trying to take things over is just not how the Board worked in my time.
This whole business of individual Trustees speaking out on Board matters, by the way, isn’t new. The Board absolutely discourages it. I spoke out when the College suspended The Dartmouth Review staffers for “vexatious oral exchange” in a set-to with William Cole, a Music professor. I said it was the wrong thing to do, and the College should rescind the suspensions. So did John Sununu, and so did William Simon, the President of the John M. Olin Foundation.
TDR: In a recent interview with The Dartmouth Review, Frank Gado ’58 mentioned an initial difficulty you experienced in taking your seat on the Board as a petition nominee. Can you be more specific about this difficulty and the remedy you used? Does this have any relevance to the current views of the Chair and other Board members on whether to abrogate the 1891 Agreement?
Steel: What happened was this: the ballots were counted, and I won the election with 62% of the vote. I went up to Hanover for the June meeting—you don’t join the Board at that meeting, but you meet them. Just before that meeting, they told me there had been an irregularity, and they were holding up my seat. The three guys who’d talked me into running and backed my election were astounded. “The irregularity was that you won the election,” they said.
It turns out that an alumnus in San Diego, an African-American, had had problems with some of the phraseology I’d put in my election statement to alumni. I met with him, listened to his recommendations, and made changes to the wording. He seemed happy with the changes, and I then listed him as a supporter.
Then James Campion, of the Hanover clothing store, whom I’d listed as a supporter based on something he’d told one of my campaign people, also turned around and said he wasn’t a supporter after all. It wasn’t a coincidence that he leased property from the College.
Both of them apparently complained to the Board via the Association of Alumni, which ran the election. I hired an attorney in Hanover. The college hired its own attorney. He met with me and my attorney, and at the end of the meeting he recommended to the College that they seat me on the Board.
TDR: What were your main objectives in seeking and gaining election to the Board of Trustees as a petition candidate? Do you feel the other Board members were sympathetic to any of your viewpoints? How did they react? How successful do you feel you were in advancing the viewpoints that you brought with you to the Board? Are there things you would do differently given your current perspective?
Steel: In 1978, I bought a house in the Hanover area. I had five kids go to Dartmouth, I was living in the San Diego area, and I purchased this house so I could visit now and then.
I had a meeting in early fall 1979 with maybe half a dozen people, some professors—Jeff Hart in particular, though not just Jeff—and some coaches, and several students. One was the Greg Fossedal, the Editor of the D, who later started The Dartmouth Review, and the president of my fraternity, the Alpha Delta house, and the president of the Interfraternity Council, and all of them came up with a list of issues. Then I wrote up my views on that and sent them to a friend of mine in LaJolla. He sent copies around to about 70 of his friends all over the country.
The issues I identified were:
1. A need for administrative change. This offended President Kemeny, of course, but once I got to know him and see how he worked, I wound up admiring him.
2. Return of the ROTC to campus.
3. Control over administrative costs. For instance, the graduate schools were losing money, and the Alumni Fund was on a downward trend.
4. Renewed emphasis on athletics. Our teams were losing 70% of the time. John Sloan Dickey said in one of his books that when the football team was doing well, the funds rolled in.
5. The importance of tradition, including the Indian mascot. I still don’t think the Board or the Administration fully understood the meaning of the Indian symbol.
I went to a couple of football games each year. After one game in 1979 when I was in Hanover, three alumni from classes in the mid and late 1920s, whom I didn’t know but who were among those who’d been mailed copies of my issues list, came to me and said they wanted to get my approval to submit my name as a petition trustee candidate. They spoke about various things they weren’t satisfied with, how President Kemeny had been doing things, and they wanted, as they put it, to send a message. I was running against Ray Rasenberger ’49, who is an attorney in Maryland Anyone who’s nominated for a Board seat is, let’s face it, an outstanding individual, not least Ray. I called Ray and explained that there was nothing personal against him in my running, it was a set of issues.
(By the way, the 1980 race was just head-to-head between Ray and me. The Association of Alumni implemented approval voting with three candidates nominated by the Alumni Council after that election, as a way, they thought, of discouraging future petition candidates.)
The various students who were involved with my campaign would go to Blunt Hall every day and look at the mail coming in with the alumni votes. It was easy enough for them to see through the envelopes and get an idea of how the voting was going—they knew before anyone else, I was going to win with something like 60% of the vote.
At that time, the Board understood what the message was. They started making changes even before I took my seat on the Board. Within a short time, John Kemeny announced his retirement. The Athletic Director was replaced, new coaches were hired, including Buddy Teevens—and after that, we had two Ivy championship football seasons. I really didn’t need to say much myself. The Vice President for Alumni Relations, Ad Winship, was replaced too, and it was said the reason was that he’d allowed me to get elected! My election as a petition candidate really said it all for me. One of the Trustees, Ralph Lazarus, a year or so after I was elected, said in a meeting, “At first we didn’t know what to think of this John Steel fellow, but frankly, I’m happy he’s here!” When David McLaughlin came in, he was able to put the graduate schools on a better financial footing.
In fact, subsequent to my election as a petition candidate in 1980, there were three people who ran for nomination to the Board as alumni petition candidates in the next several years, and they lost. I think the reason was that, for the time being, the alumni were saying it looks like things are working out well. I’ve told some of the current players in the Trustee controversy that if the alumni see evidence that things are being taken care of, petition candidates have a diminishing chance of success, as you saw in the 1980s.
If I were to do things differently, though, I would have stood more firmly for bringing the Navy and Air Force ROTC back on campus, not just the Army. And the Army was just a military science professor who came over from Norwich University and met with three or four students. That was the Army ROTC! I would also have stood more firmly against it when the women faculty brought Angela Davis on campus in 1989, with an honorarium of $10,000. Perhaps because of the amount, this came up before a subcommittee of the Board, of which I was a member. I voted against her, and one other Trustee did abstain from that vote.
TDR: Do you think the Board members who aren’t nominated via petition share any of the petition Trustees’ views? Is there a potential area for negotiation, or is there an overall polarization?
Steel: Naturally, I’m no longer on the Board, so I can’t say for sure. But it seems reasonable to think that there may possibly be one or two Charter Trustees or Alumni Trustees nominated by the Alumni Council who share some of the petition Trustees’ outlook—but if so, they’re probably hesitant to express those views. At this point, the petition Trustees are thoroughly marginalized, and the views on the Board are polarized. As a result, I don’t see much room for negotiation.
TDR: It seems as if the most recent Presidents of the College—McLaughlin, Freedman, and Wright—have been, at best, highly controversial and will likely not rank with, say, Hopkins or Dickey. Do you feel that adjustments in the way the Board has gone about selecting Presidents might improve this record? What suggestions can you make?
Steel: Well—yes, I guess your characterization of those Presidents is accurate. Poor David McLaughlin. He was a classmate of mine. Even as an undergraduate, you could see he was going on to great things. He was a great athlete, and then he went on to a brilliant business career. His problem when he became President of Dartmouth was that his Achilles heel was the faculty. He kept trying to take a middle-of-the-road position, and it never worked.
I’ve heard that once or twice, John Sloan Dickey said to the faculty, “We’ve got a problem here. If you’re greatly dissatisfied with the direction of the College, come see me, and I’ll get you a good position at another school. But we can’t continue with this problem of faculty discontent.” McLaughlin was never able to do that, and the Board never got to a position where it would support him over the faculty. It needed to do that.
Board members need to get out more and do digging on their own, find out what’s really going on. When I was on the Board, I would come up a day or two early for meetings, go around and meet with students, faculty, and coaches and get a feel for what they were saying. Those were expensive days for me, too, since I was doing surgery every day, and I couldn’t do it if I was up in Hanover.
TDR: What sorts of objectives do you think, based on your own experience, are realistic for petition Trustee nominees in the future? What strategies do you think are most effective in securing agreement on the Board with viewpoints put forward by petition Trustees?
Steel: My own experience is that if petition nominees are sent to the Board, that’s a message, and it ought to be enough of a message for the Board to understand it. From my time, if alumni see problems diminish, then they don’t elect petition nominees. Petition nominees are a sign that the alumni are in revolt, and as I said earlier, that’s when the Board has to get together and do what’s needed to stop the revolt. If you grease the squeaky wheel, the squeak will go away. You won’t keep getting petition nominees.
When I was on the Board, the way you got a consensus for something new was to raise a subject informally and keep mentioning it, informally, first with one or two people who might be most sympathetic, and then with a few more, until everyone talked it over and went back and forth on it, and then you had a chance for a broad agreement.
TDR: In light of the Board actions of September 8 to expand the number of Charter Trustees without giving parity to Alumni Trustees, and charging the Association of Alumni to change its Trustee nomination procedures, how do you evaluate the position of Dartmouth alumni? What road do you see ahead?
Steel: In my opinion, this was a most inappropriate and wrong decision on the part of the Board, to “preserve democracy” by reducing the vote of the alumni nominated Trustees from half to a third of the Board members. At this point, I have no special knowledge of what the Association of Alumni may do, and I don’t know what the current petition Trustees may do. [Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before the Association of Alumni announced their decision to sue.]
Irrespective of any other action, the alumni will have to determine where things are going. Seven members of the Association of Alumni Executive Committee are at direct odds with the administration and President Wright. The Association and the Board are going to have to find a new way to work together—it probably means the Association will need to incorporate and operate on a separate basis from the College, with its own budget and funds.
Individual alumni can consider acting on these issues by withholding annual donations and changing bequests. Some, of course, have already done that. The current Board recognizes the potential for this, but some members apparently feel that the movement will pass. n
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