Dartblog

In a wide-ranging article, The Dartmouth Review reports on charges of malfeasance against Ed Haldeman, Dartmouth’s Chairman of the Board, architect of the Board-packing plan to reduce the influence of stakeholder elections, and CEO of Putnam Investments. The Review concludes:

Today, more than a few students and alumni of Dartmouth College expect Haldeman to uphold his commitment to genuine ethical reform. Like Putnam’s shareholders, Dartmouth’s alumni and students are being let down by the very man meant to protect their interests. And like Putnam’s shareholders, the alumni of the College are taking the issue to court.

It is worth thinking about just how closely the Board-packing plan tracks with the last decade’s corporate iniquity. Dartmouth, since 1891, has been overseen by its tens of thousands of living alumni. These are people with financial and personal stakes in the success of the College. Moreover they are each of them Dartmouth graduates, and so can be relied upon for some modicum of perspicacity. Even now, at this moment, since the Board-packing plan has been forestalled, Dartmouth’s executives, like Jim Wright, Barry Scherr, and Carol Folt, are responsible to a large body of informed stakeholders. Why? Well, simply because those stakeholders have the contractual right to elect half of the Board of Trustees.

The Board-packing plan, Mr. Haldeman’s Board-packing plan, proposes this: take the body of 70,000 presently holding oversight power, and transfer that power to a body of five self-appointed people. These five are the Board’s “Governance Committee,” a shadowy coterie which chooses the unelected portion of the Board. The Board-packing plan would double the number of seats these five people could fill, while not allowing for any additional elections.

Rather radically insidious for a vaunted institution of higher learning. But, before the present era of good governance, standard practice among the less honest businessmen of the world.