Dartblog

Everyone is entitled to their opinion — and I respect the opinions of all alumni. I will give you mine — as a Trustee of the college and someone who has invested hundreds of hours working for Dartmouth and seen the situation up close and personally over the past five years.

I agree that the fundamentals of Dartmouth are as strong as they have ever been: students still have a unique and special experience — both inside and outside the classroom, we have a great faculty committed to teaching, and the campus facilities are better than ever. Simply put Dartmouth provides the best undergraduate education in the world. The weakest part of Dartmouth right now is alumni relations.

Our alumni election process is broken and has politicized alumni relations at Dartmouth. It now takes ~$80-100k to “run” for Trustee — and over $800k is being spent on this AOA election.

The rules of the game have shifted to disingenuous use of catchy and often misleading sound bites (“board packing”, “democracy at Dartmouth”), rather than honest, balanced discussion of the real issues. The way to get elected is to claim to be an “outsider,” attack the college and accuse anyone who is involved with the college to be an “insider” who can’t be trusted. This may work to get elected in Washington, but is not appropriate for Dartmouth.

I have resisted using the term “right wing conspiracy” to date (to be clear, I am a lifelong republican) — but I will tell you that the people funding one side of this controversy have an underlying ideological agenda.

Virtually every major volunteer alumni organization of the college feels marginalized by this process. They support dropping the lawsuit. A growing number of alumni feel it is not worth getting involved at Dartmouth because it requires getting involved in ideological battles. The result is that only those who want to engage in political gamesmanship will run for Trustee and get involved at Dartmouth.

This threatens to harm the underlying strength of the college I do not believe these issues have impacted student life yet. My son is an ‘09 and I am reasonably connected to student life on campus. My guess is that the recent student letter was “facilitated” by a few politically motivated students. In November there was a “student-Trustee” event that was advertised as sponsored by several student organizations including Chi Gam, my former fraternity — when I asked how many Chi Gams were present, there were none. Instead, the gathering was coordinated by a small group of students with an agenda — who marketed it under false pretenses.

The college will spend ~$2m defending the alumni lawsuit — $2m that could be spent on students. These elections and legal proceedings are diverting resources away from students.

This controversy is beginning to impact faculty recruiting — as some top faculty recruits are worried that they will be held to political litmus tests. This will ultimately impact the quality of education that students receive.

This will have an impact on the selection of the next President of Dartmouth. This is the single most important decision for the college over the next 5-10 years. The most qualified candidates will stay away from a situation where one portion of the board is suing another.

The Dartmouth Board has and will continue to have the greatest representation of elected representative of any major college in the country. I remind you that all Trustees are alumni and put Dartmouth’s best interests first. I have observed and/or sat on many boards in my business career and I have never seen such out-of-line behavior by the recently elected board members and the groups supporting them — behavior that I believe is bad for the college. I also believe that the governance changes approved last year are better for the college going forward.

So my perspective is that this alumni squabbling will start impacting the fundamentals of our college if we let it. I believe this lawsuit should be dropped and I would encourage you to vote for the candidates that support this result.

John