Dartblog

Several days ago I highlighted the correspondence between Doug Anderson and an unnamed member of Dartmouth’s five-man Governance Committee, the group which reacted to the repeated election of independent Trustees by changing election rules and diluting those elected Trustees’ influence by adding a glut of eight new in-the-club Trustees—appointed rather than elected. The unnamed member of the Governance Committee wrote to Mr. Anderson:

No doubt the most controversial decision was the one we made to increase charter seats (appointed by the Board) without increasing alumni-elected seats. We did this because we need to ensure that the Board gets trustees who collectively have the skills and backgrounds to govern the institution as well as acceptable diversity and fund-raising capability. Adding appointed seats is the most efficient way to get this, since you can’t guarantee the outcome of elections.

What horror, yes? Elections the outcomes of which cannot be predicted. Of course, competent executives effusively endorse elections, because when their designates win balloting it is an implicit endorsement of the executive’s performance. Via email, Septimus Hodge replies to the Governance Committee member:

Here are some thoughts about this absurd statement:

1) The correspondent has, I think, reversed the real order of his concerns, but I will follow his order. What evidence is there that appointed trustees have “skills and backgrounds” to govern the institution that independently elected trustees do not have? (Trustees don’t “govern the institution” anyway; they are supposed to oversee the president and hold him accountable). Appointed trustees typically are selected because of donating and raising large amounts of money, and for being willing to go along with the administration, not because of particular skills or backgrounds. Few of them in my experience have any real knowledge of or commitment to the core principles of the university. In any case, they have not done much to assure intellectual diversity and open debate on campus, nor a coherent educational experience for the student. They defer to the administration and stay completely away from fundamental quality of education issues. They focus on fund raising, bricks and mortar, “student life,” and the like. Neither have they done a good job of controlling runaway costs and burgeoning bureaucracy.

On the other hand, the independently elected trustees are men who know the university well, several from the inside, and they would by no means defer to the administration on the core issues that should receive oversight but haven’t been getting it.

2) What reason is there to assume independently elected trustees would not have “acceptable diversity?” I presume Anderson’s correspondent is not talking about intellectual diversity, which the independently elected trustees clearly have, but instead about mere token skin-color diversity. Well, one of four of the independently elected trustees is black. This is a higher ratio of the correspondent’s “acceptable diversity” than has typically prevailed on the Board. In any case, a putative diversity achieved by appointing a trustee of perfectly homogeneous views, but who by accident of skin color is excused from the normal donation required for appointment, is an empty gesture, and as Shelby Steele has noted, is intended more to bolster the moral authority of the elite than to address the serious developmental needs of the minority group thus patronized.

3) The last point in the quoted paragraph is the real issue: the supposed need to ensure fund raising capability. But why should people who give large amounts of money be able to purchase seats on the Board? What does giving money have to do with assuring independence and accountability? It probably works the other way. Board members should be elected by alumni, based on their independence and on their real qualifications to oversee the president and the administration.

4) The correspondent complains that “you can’t guarantee the outcome of elections.” Evidently it doesn’t occur to him that elections are the essence of independence and accountability. I can see why insiders like the correspondent don’t think much of it, but I think that he has revealed more about the kind of unsuitable attitudes that trustees who don’t answer to anyone will come to hold than he realizes.