Dartblog

The Association of Alumni Executive Committee has announced the creation of an Election Reform Study Committee to re-jigger the campaign guidelines for Alumni Trustee elections. The committee will be holding an open forum in Hanover on Saturday, September 12th at 11 AM in 105 Dartmouth Hall.

You have to know that the fix is in when you see the first question in the Committee’s survey regarding past Alumni Trustee elections:

Issue 1: Should the outcome of alumni trustee and/or AoA EC elections be influenced by the amount of money spent campaigning?

A flip answer would be: Yes! After all, why should campaigning for an Alumni Trustee seat be any different from the campaigning for a Charter Trustee slot. As Trustee Brad Evans told the Dartmouth Advanced Leadership Summit at the Hanover Inn on August 7, 2007, Trustee seats are too valuable to be wasted on people who don’t donate large sums of money. (What he did not say is that in addition to getting a Board seat for $10M or so, big donors also get acceptances for their kids and often a hefty chunk of the College’s endowment for their hedge funds - but we’ll leave those stories for another day).

A more accurate answer would be another question: Why is this issue coming up? The only response to that one is that the powers that be in the Administration and on the Alumni Council still cannot accept that they lost the past four Alumni Trustee elections on the merits. As Stephen Smith detailed in the D, his spending on his campaign totaled $74,825k:

Supposedly the American electorate can be bamboozled by high-production-value ads, but do the Administration/Alumni Council muckymucks think that the 9,984 alumni who voted for Smith were tricked into doing so because he sent them two closely argued letters detailing the weaknesses of the Wright Administration and the failure of the Board to properly oversee the College? In a four-candidate race, Smith got the votes of an absolute majority (55%) of the alumni who voted. And besides, Sandy Alderson, the putative runner-up to Smith (for some reason the College never announces the full results of Trustee elections), said that he spent approximately the same amount on an elaborate web site, ads, and, if memory serves, a mailing, too.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but exactly how stupid do the folks in the Administration and on the Alumni Council think that the alumni are?

Tomorrow: Some ideas on how to create a level playing field and allow full discussion of the issues by the candidates in Alumni Trustee elections.