Dartblog

For those of you who didn’t see this over at The Dartmouth Review, below is a debate about the 1891 Agreement in the form of letters to the Valley News, Hanover’s local paper.

VALLEY NEWS - 6/12/2007

Letter to the Editor By Joseph Asch
Dartmouth’s Democratic Agreement

Alone among alumni at institutions of higher learning, Dartmouth graduates elect almost half the members of the College’s governing Board of Trustees. The alumni’s preeminent role, which dates back to 1891, goes a long way toward explaining Dartmouth’s enduring focus on its undergraduate students, in contrast to other schools where the quest for prestige has elevated research far above undergraduate education.

However democracy does not always bring about the results sought by the College’s leaders. The current administration’s policies have pushed to make Dartmouth, in President Jim Wright’s acceptance-speech phrase, “a research university in all but name.”

In response, the alumni have used their votes to disagree. Three trustees, nominated by popular petition rather than via the usual pliant nominating committee, were elected to the Board in 2004 and 2005, and a fourth petitioner won a place three weeks ago. Stephen Smith ‘88, the College’s first elected black trustee, won his seat with a greater number of votes and the support of a higher percentage of voters than any previous petition candidate.

In 2006, a group closely allied to the administration proffered a new alumni constitution. This document sought, among other changes, to put obstacles in the path of Trustee candidates nominated by petition. However, despite massive campaigning in support of the document, the alumni refused to be told what to do. The proposed constitution failed to gain even a simple majority of alumni votes, let alone the two-thirds super-majority required for ratification.

With Smith’s victory, it was only a matter of time before another attempt was made to stop the election of petition trustees. As a recent story in the Valley News noted, it seems that the Board of Trustees will soon try to impose changes by fiat to Dartmouth’s method of governance. Any such effort would be a serious error.

In fact, any modification at all to the uniquely democratic 1891 agreement would be harmful to the College and to the basis for its historic strength. Today Dartmouth’s famously loyal alumni can voice their opinions at the ballot box. If that option is abridged or taken from them altogether, then they would be left with only one way to express their discontent: at the cashbox.
Joseph Asch ‘79 Hanover, NH
……….

DARTMOUTH MENTION – ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

VALLEY NEWS - 6/23/2007
Alumni Not Truly Represented
Letter to the Editor By Stan Colla ‘66
ALUMNI NOT TRULY REPRESENTED

To the Editor:

The problem with Joseph Asch’s vision of democracy in Dartmouth’s trustee nomination process (Forum, June 12) is that it might not truly reflect the will of Dartmouth’s alumni. The nomination process stipulated under the current constitution of the Dartmouth Alumni Association provides a distinct advantage to a single petition candidate running against the three mandated Alumni Council candidates.

In this year’s trustee election, Stephen Smith received 9,984 votes while the remaining 22,957 votes were divided up among the three Alumni Council candidates. Not to take anything away from Smith’s victory, but you can do the math.

If you were supportive of the Alumni Council’s slate of nominees, you then had to figure out how you would choose among the three Alumni Council candidates. If you were not, you had only one choice.

Joe Asch knows this structural anomaly exists, and so do each of the petition trustees to be nominated within the past three years. None of them wants to change this part of the constitution because it would eliminate their advantage and, possibly, lead to the nomination of one of the Alumni Council candidates. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear Joe Asch claim that, under the current arrangement, Mickey Mouse, if nominated by petition, could be elected to Dartmouth’s board of trustees. He might, for once, be right.

The proposed constitution that failed last fall under a relentless attack led by, among others, the then three petition-nominated trustees would have led to head-to-head races between candidates when a petitioner qualified for nomination. That would have gone a long way to ensuring that the will of the majority was known. As it stands now, a plurality of the votes, not a majority, can win the election.

For the record, I agree with Joe Asch and others that the wisdom of Dartmouth’s alumni needs to be better heard, acknowledged and used by the college. Because of their lifelong identification with their alma mater, the alumni have the privilege and the responsibility to offer their constructive feedback. However, this attempt to alter the board of trustees profile at Dartmouth through a flawed nomination process has got to stop. If the board of trustees decides to take matters into its own hands because the alumni will not, that is their privilege and responsibility.

STANLEY COLLA
Dartmouth Class of 1966
Hanover
……….

Vote-Counting at Dartmouth

In a letter June 23, Dartmouth’s former vice president of alumni relations Stan Colla described how Stephen Smith, Class of 1988, won the college’s recent trustee election with 9,984 votes out of an overall total of 32,941 votes cast, and then he opined that Smith’s victory “might not truly reflect the will” of the alumni. He tartly suggested “you can do the math.”

Well, let’s take Colla up on his modest proposal. But before we do so, we need to note a fact that Colla curiously omits from his letter: 18,186 individual alumni voted in the election, and many of them voted for more than one candidate. Under the approval method, alumni could vote for
each and every candidate that they thought qualified to be a good trustee; each alumnus could cast up to four individual ballots. In this way, the 18,186 voters cast 32,941 votes.

Of the 18,186 voting alumni, the 9,984 who voted for Smith
comprised 54.9 percent of all voters. A convincing majority by any calculation, no? Mr. Colla asserts that the three candidates nominated by the college’s Alumni Council split their support between them. Possibly true, but irrelevant in this election: even if all of the voters who did not vote for Smith concentrated their votes on a single candidate, that candidate would have received the approval of only 45.1% of all voters. Smith’s victory was unmistakable.

Colla is confused - or he seeks to confuse us - about the
distinction between votes and voters. As an illustration, how would Colla describe the results in the following hypothetical situation: Imagine that all of the 18,186 voters in the recent election had voted for Smith, and
that many had voted for other candidates, too. Would Colla then say that only a little more than half the “votes” (18,186 out of 32,941) had been cast for Dartmouth’s first African-American alumni trustee? Or would he give Smith credit for a 100 percent victory?

As a graduate of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business, Colla owes us a better effort in analyzing the statistics from the recent election, especially given that I corrected him for the same obvious error in an op-ed in The Dartmouth on September 29, 2005.

And, returning to the larger picture, the members of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees owe it to alumni to respect the College’s 116-year-old system of governance, even though the choice of Stephen Smith by a decisive majority of alumni voters is not the one that they favor.

Joseph Asch
Dartmouth Class of 1979
Hanover