Up in Flames: College Republicans’ Leadership Resigns in Disgrace

On February 18, 2020, following a span of rather controversial decision-making, the Dartmouth College Republicans (DCR) announced significant changes to their upper leadership team. Former Chairman Daniel Bring (‘21) and Alexander Rauda (‘21)—a member of leadership who held an indeterminate number of titles (we’ll explain this later in the article because it’s very confusing)—were removed from the leadership team by a six-eighths majority. Before this vote result was implemented, however, Bring and Rauda took the liberty to resign from their positions.

The departure of Bring and Rauda followed a mass Listserv email incident that has been the subject of controversy on campus. On February 16, 2020, DCR sent out an email with the subject line, “They’re bringing drugs…” DCR used this statement—a reference to a line used by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign—to advertise their border security event about “Building a Wall Against Drugs” with U.S. Senate Candidate Bryant “Corky” Messner. An event intended to foster healthy debate about the pressing issue of border security and ending the opioid crisis quickly gave rise to dissent on campus from all political aisles due to the poor decision to employ such a polarizing slogan.

DCR’s Leadership Board, excluding Bring and Rauda, were uninformed about the subject line prior to its web distribution. According to a recent DCR press release, “the email proved incendiary due to the racist and xenophobic nature of the subject line”—a sentiment shared by many Democrats and Republicans on campus alike. The current leadership team expressed in the press release that “DCRs’ Leadership strongly condemns all forms of racism and xenophobia, including the subject line of the email.”

A wave of opposition to the branding of the border security event ensued, including a simultaneous event held by Dartmouth CoFIRED for students to share their immigrant and diaspora stories. Disaffected members of DCR also voiced their grievances about Bring and Rauda’s event rhetoric in the GroupMe messaging app, the central platform for Dartmouth club communications. One ‘23 stated: “When cheap, inflammatory mantra [defines the] College Republicans, we lose our credibility, our ability to address critical issues at stake and alienate potential student supporters. This is not how an effective organization should be run.” Another ‘20, who had stopped attending club meetings due to dissatisfaction with Bring and Rauda’s leadership also expressed: “College Republicans has steadily lost respect on this campus, and it’s time we get it back. Let’s take a higher path than the one we are on and create a better and respected space for conservatism on campus.”

The following day, at 1:41 PM, less than three hours before the event, Bring informed the club over GroupMe that DCR were indefinitely postponing the “Building a Wall Against Drugs” talk due to “serious security concerns.” Nevertheless, in true Elizabeth Warren fashion, Bring vowed to persist; at 2:45, from DCR’s Twitter account, he decreed: “Due to mounting security risks from the #RadicalLeft “activists,” we no longer have the ability to guarantee the safety of our members and @CorkyForSenate. The event is postponed indefinitely, but we shall persist in supporting the #MAGA agenda. #LeadRight.”

Within a half hour following Bring’s event cancellation announcement, the publication Inside Sources released an article publicizing the event’s cancellation, complete with comments from DCR, the Dartmouth College Democrats, as well as the New Hampshire Federation of College Republicans. Inside Sources shared the link to this article at 2:44 PM. Given news outlets were publishing articles almost immediately after Mr. Bring informed his own club, it is clear the former chairman reached out to the media before informing his own leadership board. In turn, Bring’s allegation of violent threats contributing to the event’s cancellation was propagated by high-profile outlets including The Blaze.

“Given news outlets were publishing articles almost immediately after Mr. Bring informed his own club, it is clear the former chairman reached out to the media before informing his own leadership board.”

Violent behavior towards any campus group or individual is reprehensible; however, in this instance, there is little evidence that any legitimate threats were made. Three members of DCR’s leadership confirmed to The Review that neither they, nor the organization, received direct threats. The only evidence The Review could find was one now deleted tweet from a Dartmouth student stating: “I say Dartmouth Twitter should band together and jump the College Republicans for that email/event. I’m sure none of them can fight.” The Review reached out to Bring to elaborate on his allegations of “violent threats.” He cited the exact tweet mentioned above. However, it is difficult to understand how one person’s irresponsible online words amounted to a “security risk from #RadicalLeft activists.”

In their apology to campus published in the opinion section of The Dartmouth on February 27, 2020, Bring and Rauda claimed the following: “For the public record, Mr. Bring met with officers from Safety and Security and the Hanover Police Department on the Monday morning before the event was scheduled to report on threats posed online and, accordingly, discuss security provisions for the event. Safety and Security filed the threats and said they would look into them. They had not concluded their investigation by the time we made the decision late on Monday evening to postpone the event.”

When The Review contacted the Hanover Police as follow up, Chief of Hanover Police Charlie Dennis expressed the following: to the best of his knowledge, one member of the College Republicans met with Safety and Security on February 17th. However, he was not aware of any investigation that was going on. This statement from HPD casts serious doubt on the factual validity of Mr. Bring’s assertions that there were “security risks” that would justify postponing the event. The Review is still waiting to hear back from S&S and will update this article accordingly if we receive any additional information.

The Messner event wasn’t the first time that members of DCR—and campus—expressed frustration and anger at the events that were being hosted. This fall, DCR hosted a celebration for International Men’s Day. As recounted in the op-ed written in this issue of The Review by Carlos Wilcox, then Director of Communications for DCR, the event was treated flippantly by Bring and Rauda. Instead of hosting a legitimate discussion for issues that face men such as lack of parental leave and male suicide, the event was advertised with memes and alienated campus. Ultimately, nobody showed up for the event save for four Review members—one of whom was wearing a “feminist” T-shirt and a Barnard sweatshirt—and three members of DCR’s leadership team. Discomfort with Bring and Rauda’s leadership began far before any of these inflammatory events occurred, though.

Problems with leadership were evident to many members since the beginning of the 19F term. “There was an air in the room of ‘this organization is sick,’” one anonymous member of DCR’s Leadership Board told The Dartmouth Review regarding his attendance in the first meeting of Fall 2019. This member continued to say that, after attending the first College Democrats meeting of the term and seeing their attendance, “I was shocked at how few people were in the room for the College Republicans. It was obvious that Rauda [the member leading the meeting] wasn’t looking to engage in genuine political dialogue. After the first meeting of the term, membership dropped substantially.”

“Problems with leadership were evident to many members since the beginning of the 19F term. ‘There was an air in the room of ‘this organization is sick.'”

Many Republicans on campus avoided the group altogether. For quite a few meetings this winter, the only members in attendance were members of the leadership team. The first DCR meeting following the resignation of Bring and Rauda saw an attendance of approximately twenty-five members. However, there is room to believe that membership in DCR did not just drop because members felt uncomfortable showing up. A member of DCR filed a complaint with the Council on Student Organizations (COSO) over winterim after he spent an entire term trying to be let into an organization he was already a part of. We understand that this sounds confusing, so we will explain further.

This anonymous ’21 member of DCR joined the group as a freshman. He was actively involved and regularly attended meetings until he went on a study-abroad program during 19S. When he returned on campus for sophomore summer, he was surprised to witness several significant organizational changes. Namely, he was shocked to find out that friends of his that were invited to join the leadership of DCRs during Spring 2019 were soon alienated from the club over disagreements with Bring and Rauda; they were no longer active members of the club. When this member attended the first meeting of this year in Fall 2019, he requested to be added to the GroupMe which, at this point in time, defined club membership. He was not added to the GroupMe at any point during Fall term even though he requested to be added—and, other members of the club requested on his behalf—several times over. This was the main impetus for him filing the complaint with COSO as it proved that DCR was not behaving as an “open to campus organization” which is a requirement of receiving COSO funding.

All of these complaints were later confirmed by other members of DCR. Over the course of the last year, DCR was far from a democratic organization. Board members aside from Bring and Rauda had little to no say over any administrative decisions. Often times, decisions were not even brought up until a plan was already being executed, like the aforementioned email scandal. To make matters worse, a constitutional change done under ’19 leadership some time between the span of the Winter 2018 and Spring 2019 terms eliminated a fair election system for members of DCR leadership. In Article IV of the current DCRs Constitution, Section 4.04 reads:

“The Officers of the College Republicans shall be selected as follows. The Chairman will be selected at the end of every academic year by the outgoing Chairman. If the Chairman is not graduating at the end of each academic year, they may appoint themselves to serve as President for the following year, through a written statement submitted to the Secretary. The Chairman is responsible for the selection of all other Officers in the Organization.”

Now, our anonymous ’21 confirmed that there were discussions about altering the voting procedure while he was still allowed to come to DCRs meetings during his freshman and sophomore years. However, he explained that the concerns were about persons just showing up to open-to-campus meetings who weren’t members of the club and voting anyway. This was fixed—he thought—by making it a requirement of membership that you had to show up to at least two meetings to be considered a member and that only members could vote. These changes are a far cry from the changes that were actually implemented. As noted by this ’21’s complaint to COSO:

“According to their current constitution (which was most certainly not public, nor even available to members; not even a member of their executive board had access to it, and I had to have a friend ask a member of the COSO board to provide him a copy of it), the chairman has the power to appoint all positions, change the constitution at will, and appoint his successor. As such, there is no mechanism by which any club members can remove them from power. To my knowledge, they’re adding positions at will depending on how many new members they like. In essence, the club’s constitutional structure seems like a sort of dictatorship where the favorites are promoted at will until they act out of favor, at which point they are removed.”

“In essence, the club’s constitutional structure seems like a sort of dictatorship where the favorites are promoted at will until they act out of favor, at which point they are removed.”

Throughout Bring and Rauda’s leadership of DCR, there were reportedly “at least six” constitutions created unilaterally—without any knowledge from any members of DCR—by Bring. This was found out by COSO, after they were looking into the anonymous complaint, where they saw that the constitution had been altered several times during the 2019–2020 school year. Our anonymous source on DCR’s leadership confirmed the lack of a democratic process in a way that goes even further than these constitutional changes. According to this person, midway through fall term, leadership was assigned. Members applied for positions, but there were no elections. “Before the application process was over, Bring was already giving out roles. As soon as the people he knew he wanted to apply submitted the application, there was no real process. He just assigned positions,” our source noted. “Bring was off campus, but we had one Skype call with him for him to conduct the interview. He asked me about my positions on court cases… He asked us about whether there were people applying for positions trying to infiltrate the organization. ‘Infiltrators’ was the word that he used.”

There were also other ways that this odd way of assigning leadership played out. The Review gained access to an e-mail between DCR and a member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Student Group regarding the planning of a joint event between the two groups in the fall. In this email, Rauda signed his name and his title: treasurer. To members of DCR, Rauda was known as the “Chief of Staff.” In multiple news articles in The Dartmouth throughout the 2019–2020 school year, Rauda was referred to as the “acting vice-chair” of DCR. To clear up any misconceptions, The Review inquired as to what Rauda’s position was during the official COSO “big policy meeting” at the beginning of Fall 2019; he was listed as the organization’s treasurer. So, Rauda held three positions for the organization simultaneously. As the constitution allowed him to, Bring simply appointed Rauda to multiple positions. Another important issue regarding the appointment of positions was that positions were made that did not exist in the constitution. In the copy that The Review obtained, the only officers listed are “a Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Treasurer, Secretary, and Chief Whip…[and] any Dartmouth undergraduate officers of the New Hampshire State College Republicans, who shall be seated ex officio.” Chief of Staff is not a constitutional position. Neither was Director of Communications nor Deputy Chief of Staff.

Needless to say, these changes were extreme cause for concern. COSO took the anonymous ’21’s complaint extremely seriously. However, because COSO also doles out money to groups, there is only a small portion of their weekly meeting time devoted to large, ongoing problems with organizations. To think over the issues at hand and act with great care and prudence, it took the COSO board a few meetings to come up with a solution. They created a series of questions to ask Bring and Rauda during a meeting that was scheduled for Wednesday, February 19th sometime in early February. It should be noted that this meeting was scheduled far before the Messner event was scheduled and any controversy resulted from it.

Simultaneous with the actions of this anonymous ’21 and COSO, DCR’s leadership—who was unaware about the complaint given to COSO— raised concerns of their own to a different area of the College: the Student Organization Accountability Program (SOAP).

In an open letter, DCRs Interim President Charles Schneider stated that he initially refrained from criticizing Bring and Rauda’s operations due to the fear of being fired himself and was unaware of the leadership’s widespread dissatisfaction towards the duo. However, on February 10th, at an executive dinner in Manchester following President Trump’s rally, absent of Bring and Rauda, consensus against the duo was made clear, as several leadership members shared their experiences of being alienated and silenced.

“At an executive dinner in Manchester following President Trump’s rally, absent of Bring and Rauda, consensus against the duo was made clear, as several leadership members shared their experiences of being alienated and silenced.”

Following the dinner, Schneider devised a report detailing Bring and Rauda’s power abuses in leadership. Particularly, the complaints addressed Bring and Rauda’s arbitrary firing of board members, their antagonistic relationship with the Dartmouth administration, as well as “several hateful and discriminatory comments made directly about members of the Board behind their backs.” These remarks were echoed by another article published in DartBlog by Ishaan Jahodia on February 22, 2020 titled “Dartmouth College Republicans in Hot Soup over Email and Lies and More Lies.” On February 13, the memo was delivered to SOAP. SOAP is a group responsible for ensuring that every student organization on campus goes through an accountability procedure every three years. Organizations are alerted that they are up for review at the beginning of a term and required to ensure that all members of their organization are registered through OrgSync—a campus organization management system now called Engage—for SOAP to send anonymous surveys to. These surveys include questions about whether members believe their organization is sticking to their constitution and running the organization in a manner consistent with their stated goals.

Although slightly confusing to the narration of this story, it is important to go back once again to the events of the 2018–2019 school year. The last SOAP review of DCR was in Spring 2019. Prior to their SOAP review, leadership forcibly removed several members of the organization from both the OrgSync and their GroupMe. This likely allowed them to go through their SOAP review with very few unfavorable comments. The complaint from the anonymous ’21 noted: “I was never added to the OrgSync prior to the College Republican’s SOAP Review last year; if I had been, I would have voiced some concerns then.” Accordingly, SOAP did not know of the true problems facing DCR until Schneider brought these complaints to it this winter. Ultimately, though, neither SOAP nor COSO played a direct role in removing Bring and Rauda.

Bring and Rauda resigned late in the evening on February 18th—within forty-eight hours of the backlash from the email to campus advertising the Messner event and the previously scheduled COSO meeting to discuss their conduct. It is not clear whether it was pressure from the general membership of DCR in the GroupMe, internal pressure from the leadership of DCR, backlash from campus, or fear that they would be forcibly removed by the College that caused their resignation.

And here we have the full story of the drama with DCR: Bring and Rauda had been damaging the reputation and unity of the organization since they were appointed control of DCR towards the end of Winter 2018. They rewrote the constitution with neither the consent nor knowledge of the large majority of the club members they did not forcibly remove prior to the end of Spring 2019. These constitutional changes ensured Bring and Rauda a near-monopoly on the power to remove individual members from the group and members from leadership. They exercised this power on numerous occasions to settle personal scores and maintain control of DCR. Throughout their tenure, Bring and Rauda took actions to exclude other members of leadership from taking part in decisions to hold events that needlessly antagonized Campus. Finally, DCR’s leadership had had enough and voted 6–0 to remove Bring and Rauda from their positions, which led to the duo’s self-resignations. It took both action and pressure from two organizations within the College, leadership of DCR, and members of DCR to convince Bring and Rauda to relinquish control of their organization.

“In a world where right-leaning media condemns colleges around the country for favoring liberal students, Dartmouth College has done its due diligence in supporting DCR through this difficult time in its history. The Review remains hopeful that positive changes are on the horizon for the College Republicans as they enter this new chapter.”

According to DCR’s Interim President Charles Schneider, “it is essential for [the club] to disavow the unilateral power that Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda exploited.” Currently, DCR’s transition team is cooperating with COSO to develop a new, fair constitution. Both DCR and COSO are eager to re-write the club’s governing documents and restore democratic structures to the organization. In a sentiment echoed by the anonymous ’21 who gave the complaint to COSO, a member of DCR’s new leadership commented the following: “The College has been very fair and they have handled things promptly. COSO was very receptive to working with the College Republicans in the future.” In a world where right-leaning media condemns colleges around the country for favoring liberal students, Dartmouth College has done its due diligence in supporting DCR through this difficult time in its history. The Review remains hopeful that positive changes are on the horizon for the College Republicans as they enter this new chapter.