AoA Election: What Now?
By Aditya A. Sivaraman & David W. Leimbach | Monday, August 11, 2008
After the votes had been tallied, the Dartmouth College Office of Alumni Relations announced on June 10 that the anti-lawsuit slate took all eleven positions on the Association of Alumni (AoA) executive committee. The voting, which began on April 28, saw a record 38 percent of alumni cast votes. The “Unity Slate” won with approximately 60 percent of the total number of votes cast. The newly elected members acted promptly on their promise to end the lawsuit, which was officially dismissed a few weeks later on June 27. As the election chapter of this story comes to a close, several new issues remain to be resolved.
Foremost among the questions left to be resolved is the future of alumni representation regarding the Board of Trustees. Some supporters of the “Unity Slate” had argued that their platform was anti-lawsuit but not anti-parity, and that there would be attempts by those elected to address the parity issue. Given that there were divisions within the 60 percent majority that voted against the lawsuit regarding parity, the question now remains if anything will be done to address the concerns of the 40 percent of the alumni who felt that the costs of a lawsuit against the College was worth preserving Dartmouth’s tradition of parity. Will external parties play a role? Some alumni, possibly including John MacGovern, the founder of the Hanover Institute, have indicated an interest in pursuing independent legal action. Such action, however, would have very little hope of success because of a previous legal ruling from the 1990s. That ruling found that individual alumni do not have standing for a suit against the College. The Association of Alumni cited this ruling in the just-overturned lawsuit as an argument their favor.
Furthermore, how will the results of this election affect the dynamic between the Alumni Council and the Association of Alumni? For some time, certain individuals, often associated with the administration, have sought to expand the influence of the Alumni Council at the expense of the Association of Alumni. Many of those same forces argued that the pursuit of legal action on behalf of alumni was outside of the authority of the board of the AoA. This election is likely to accelerate the withering of the Association of Alumni, and, if this is to be the case, we can only hope that the Alumni Council will do two things: first, it needs to become more democratic and representative of the alumni as a whole, and second, it must step forward and become a stronger advocacy body on behalf of the recently disenfranchised alumni base. Fortunately, there has already been movement in this direction. The Council recently announced that it is restructuring itself to become more democratic. The results of the changes will only be fully assessable in the coming years.
The results of the election also have implications for the selection of James Wright’s successor as President of the College. Often, the pro-lawsuit candidates were accused of being associated with a conservative conspiracy. Is it possible that a similar smear campaign will be waged against any presidential candidate that does not fit the typical administrative (i.e., bureaucratic) mold? What effects is this likely to have for the possibility of administrative reform in the foreseeable future? The highly politicized nature of the recent AoA elections bode poorly for the prospect of an objective and non-partisan search for Dartmouth’s next president.
There is also something to be said for the irony in the alumni effectively voting to permanently relinquish part of their own right to vote. As current undergraduates at Dartmouth, we are disheartened to learn that the majority of alumni are disinterested enough in the future of the College to give up part of their right to have an active role in its governance, and that we will no longer inherit the same measure of voice that our proud alumni fought for at the end of the nineteenth century. How many consider the passionate devotion and continued involvement of our alumni to be the strength of this College? If the Board of Trustees and the administration willingly reached out and explained with actual arguments why parity is a bad thing, it would be a good start.
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