Dartblog

This morning’s editions of The Wall Street Journal point out the diminishing of Dartmouth at the hands of sensitive collegians who do not want their performance closely reviewed. “Your average banana republic is more transparent,” the Journal notes, without a hint of levity.

And they are precisely right. One need only consider the insulting and dishonest opening words of Chairman Ed Haldeman in this audio interview, when he was asked why the Board made such drastic changes. “I got my job in June and it seemed to be a reasonable activity to ask our Governance Committee to do sort of a clean slate appraisal of the governance structure at Dartmouth. I think it is a healthy thing for boards to do on a periodic basis,” he said.

The New Criterion’s James Panero also weighs in with “the tanks of Tienanmen roll onto the Dartmouth Green.” “This is a dark day for the school,” James writes.

What’s so unfortunate is that people like Ed Haldeman will risk destroying Dartmouth to save his consolidation of power. It is interesting to note that Alumni giving reached record levels of participation after the election of the four petition candidates and the defeat of the new constitution. I gave a donation to the school for the very first time. But Haldeman does not care about such statistics, nor does he care if he turns off thousands of loyal alums in the process. Haldeman has called the petition elections “politicized, costly, and divisive”—these are elections that alumni voted in. Are their votes divisive?

A good point. Right down to the consideration that bloggers who support Trustee candidates ought to be censored because they are engaging in ‘campaigning,’ this power grab will prove detrimental to Dartmouth for many reasons, not least the illiberal arrogance with which it was carried through.

On a lighter note, The New York Times maintained its tradition of rigorous fact checking by referring, in this article on the Dartmouth fracas, to a super-secret senior society at Dartmouth and quoting as official a gag website created by Dartmouth’s Jack-o-Lantern humor group.