Dartblog

Dartmouth Trustees Opt to Eject Controversial Conservative By Susan J. Boutwell Valley News Staff Writer Hanover — Two years ago, before an appearance in North Carolina, Todd Zywicki joked that his tenure on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees might be cut short. Moments later, he delivered a speech that might well have sealed his fate.

Zywicki, a George Mason School of Law professor and 1988 Dartmouth graduate, was introduced on that occasion by a former University of North Carolina trustee who told the crowd assembled for a conference at John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy: “He was considered a dark horse in a hotly contested race to be elected an alumni trustee at Dartmouth College in 2005. His name was put on the ballot by petition, and I asked him how long his terms would be and he said normally it’s eight years. But, he said, in his case, it might be four.”

The audience laughed and then listened to Zywicki’s jeremiad against what he called the “new dogma” of environmentalism and feminism on the Dartmouth campus. It included a reference to former college president James O. Freedman as “a truly evil man … (whose) agenda was to turn Dartmouth into Harvard.” He associated “Freedmanism” with the promotion of multiculturalism, transforming Dartmouth from a college into a university, social engineering of student life that included abolition of the Greek system and a turning away from Dartmouth’s traditional educational values.

As it turned out, Zywicki’s joking reference to his tenure on the board of trustees was prescient. Earlier this month, he became the first trustee in modern times not elected to a second term by his colleagues on the board.

Zywicki’s dismissal from the board can be seen as just the latest chapter in the long and highly publicized conflict between college officials and conservative alumni who decry “political correctness” on campus and allege that the college’s traditional commitment to undergraduate education has been undermined. Zywicki, elected to the board in 2005, was one of four dissident trustees who won seats on the board as petition candidates, defeating candidates chosen by alumni groups seen as close to the administration.

In an open letter to the college community, posted on his own Web site as well as on a number of conservative Web sites, Zywicki calls the decision a stifling of free speech.

“A majority of Dartmouth’s trustees proved unwilling to stand up for the right of free speech in an academic forum when the words challenged their sensitivities,” he wrote. “The board’s larger message is clear — Trustees should shrink from leadership in the field of higher education when doing so would require addressing controversial issues. Dartmouth is ill-served by this parochial attitude.”

Zywicki, of Falls Church, Va., was traveling and unavailable for comment.

His criticisms have been rejected by the college, although Trustee Chairman Charles “Ed” Haldeman declined to discuss the reasons Zywicki did not win a second term at the board’s meeting on April 4 and 5. But Haldeman did say that two other trustees critical of the college were given second terms this month.

“There’s pretty good evidence that people can speak their mind and still get re-elected,” he said.

Also not commenting is Jim Yong Kim, Dartmouth’s incoming president, who will take over this summer for James Wright. Kim declined comment through a college spokesman.

Zywicki wrote that Kim, a Harvard-trained physician and global health pioneer, should seek more “openness in the governance of the College.”

“Throughout his career Dr. Kim has challenged entrenched financial and political interests. I urge him to devote the same energy to reforms in his new backyard,” wrote Zywicki.

Haldeman won’t say how he or his board voted at the April 4-5 meeting, except to say that Zywicki did not receive the majority needed for a second term.

“I know that each trustee that voted thought long and hard about what was in the best interests of the college,” he said. “I think the trustees in the room knew how I voted, because we talked about it. But I’m not talking.

“We don’t disclose any of our votes on any subject,” Haldeman said.

Indeed, one of the newly re-elected trustees said he was risking violating the “trustee oath” by speaking about the vote.

“Simply put, Todd’s ejection is an embarrassment for the board,” said T.J. Rodgers, a 1970 Dartmouth graduate from Woodside, Calif.

In an e-mail statement, Rodgers called the Zywicki decision a “witch-hunt trial” and “an affront to due process and even common decency.”

The decision, he wrote, is “no reason to abandon a man who was (a) good and decent Dartmouth Trustee.”

“One would think it would take more for this to happen for the first time in memory, but when you are a dissident, I guess it doesn’t,” said 2008 Dartmouth graduate Joe Malchow of San Jose, Calif., who helps write Dartblog, a right-of-center Web site about the college.

It might be unusual for Dartmouth to not to re-elect a trustee, but it happens in other places, said Rita Bornstein, president emerita of Rollins College and a speaker and author on issues of higher education governance and leadership.

She said trustees get voted off boards for a number of reasons, including because they don’t attend enough meetings or are disruptive.

The Zywicki decision is unfortunate for Dartmouth because it adds to the public’s awareness of “tremendous divisiveness there,” said Bornstein.

“It’s a terrible thing. It keeps Dartmouth’s name in the public ear and not in a good way. Something is always happening and it always seems to be negative and it besmirches the college’s reputation,” said Bornstein, president of Rollins, in Winter Park, Fla., for 14 years, through 2004.

Relations at Dartmouth have been prickly for years between the college administration and some alumni.

That’s not uncommon, Bornstein said.

“Alumni often think that they should be running their institutions and the fact remains that they are not professionals,” she said. “They have a mystic, mythical memory of the way things were and the way they think things should be.”

‘Truly Evil’
What most bothered many Dartmouth alumni and college officials was Zywicki’s reference in the 2007 Pope Center lecture to the late Freedman as “a truly evil man.”

Zywicki criticized the college, calling it a bastion of political correctness that began during Freedman’s tenure with a “de-emphasis on Dartmouth’s traditional values of educating well-rounded leaders in favor of creative loners.”

After the speech, Zywicki apologized to the Freedman family, but the damage had been done. Seven weeks later, Haldeman sent a letter to the college community saying the board had voted to reprimand Zywicki.

“The Board concluded that he had exercised poor judgment and had violated his responsibilities as a Trustee of Dartmouth College, which include acting in the best overall interests of Dartmouth and representing Dartmouth positively in words and deeds,” Haldeman’s letter said.

In his letter this month, Zywicki speculated that his 2007 remarks at the Pope lecture were behind the board’s decision not to re-elect him.

“My harsh judgments and language offended some, for which I apologized publicly,” he wrote.

The apology was ineffective, said William Montgomery of Hanover, Dartmouth class of 1952.

“He issued a very weak apology, one of those non-apology apologies,” Montgomery said. “If he’s unhappy about this turn of events, he has only himself to blame.”

That’s not how Zywicki sees it.

“I was denied re-election either because of the content of my speech or for some unnamed reason for which I received no notice or opportunity to respond,” he wrote.

His former board colleague, Rodgers, agreed.

“He was not informed of the accusations against him. He had no meaningful opportunity to respond. He was ejected by a secret vote — he was not allowed to know the vote count, or even the reasons behind his ejection,” Rodgers wrote.

‘Comprehensive and Transparent’
Haldeman sees the trustee election differently. The board chairman said that beginning a week or two before the April trustees meeting, each of the trustees up for re-election took part in a conference call with Haldeman and Trustee Christine Bucklin, chairwoman of the board’s Governance Committee. The call was to review a summary Bucklin put together of evaluations of the trustees up for re-election by each member of the board.

“It’s a very comprehensive and transparent process that we’ve used for a number of years,” Haldeman said.

Then, at the meeting, the name of each trustee up for re-election was brought before the full board for a vote. The trustee left the room and board members had an opportunity to talk about the trustee before the vote.

It’s not known what was said about Zywicki, nor is the vote known. Zywicki left the room for the vote and could have returned after the tally, but it’s not known whether he did.

“I prefer not to indicate what choice he made,” Haldeman said.

College officials haven’t “exhaustively researched” whether a trustee has ever been voted off the board, Dartmouth spokesman Roland Adams said this week.

However, “no one in the administration is currently aware of a previous Dartmouth parallel to this instance, certainly not in the modern history of the institution,” Adams wrote in an e-mail.

There is also no knowledge of a trustee ever receiving a formal censure, according to Adams.

This month’s historic trustee decision received little mention in a two-page college news release dated April 6. A paragraph in a list of board actions begins, “Approve the re-election of trustees who have completed their first terms” and ends saying that Zywicki was not re-elected.

Haldeman, chairman of Putnam Investment Management, and Rodgers, founder, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., were among the six trustees elected to serve second terms. Dartmouth trustees typically serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms, Adams said.

‘Inside Joke’
UNC trustee emerita Jean Kitchin had no idea she was foretelling the future with her introduction of Zywicki at the Pope lecture.

The moderator was surprised this week when a reporter told her that Zywicki had been voted off the Dartmouth board. She said she didn’t know him and had been handed an introduction script written by someone at the Pope Center.

She was told that what she read would have “meaning to this group,” Kitchen remembered.

And so the laughter that came after she read that Zywicki thought he might serve four — not eight — years on the Dartmouth board seemed like “some kind of inside joke I didn’t get.”

“I had never met him,” Kitchin said. “I had to ask someone how to pronounce his name.”

Susan J. Boutwell can be reached at sboutwell@vnews.com or at (603) 727-3248.