Dartblog

The New York Sun makes note of a recent lecture by Judge José Cabranes on the subject of university trusteeships in the post-Enron era. Read the entire lecture here. Judge Cabranes makes a point that Dartblog has advocated for years: if the governance practices of the United States’ oldest and proudest private institutions of learning were to be transferred to a publicly listed for-profit company, the results would be catastrophic. Partly this is because the private sector is over regulated; mostly this is because colleges are run extremely poorly. Dartmouth of course is the most public example of this, as its Trustee elections have been national news for some years. But it is true everywhere.

Since Judge Cabranes’s wife is a Dartmouth alumna and a former trustee, and since his son is a senior at Dartmouth, Cabranes does not mention Dartmouth as a case study, a mossy one though it is. Still, his point that trustees need to become more activist supervisors is unmistakably relevant at Dartmouth. The Sun writes:

If trustees “ever actually turned down a candidate for an academic appointment (say, on the basis of articulable institutional concerns), the university likely would be thrown into turmoil,” the judge writes. He pointedly mentions a former provost of Columbia, Jonathan Cole, who is “apparently under the impression that harsh criticism of outspoken faculty members by outsiders constitutes a threat to academic freedom, even when there is no possible effect within the university.”

Judge Cabranes also offers a view into how universities deal with the Reserve Officers Training Corps. “The usual playbook is this: Trustees are informed by presidents that, for a variety of political or academic reasons, the faculty would find the return of ROTC intolerable and that any action to the contrary by trustees would make the president’s own position within the university untenable.”

Governing boards of universities, the judge writes, do not really govern. They “exercise very little authority other than their power to hire and fire presidents and their power to raise money and prudently manage the university’s endowment — in support of activities over which they have little or no influence.”