Dartblog

Even though a thousand ill-wrought plans could be convincingly written to change them. For more on this, see Tim Dreisbach ‘70’s post: “A Philosophy for Board Compostion and Selection.”

It includes this bit:

Money and campaigning: One complaint about our current system is that money, or its lack, creates an uneven playing field. Alumni should be informed and make decisions based upon issues. This objection is eliminated if all candidates are afforded sufficient and equal opportunity to communicate their stances through Association or College-provided resources. This means more than Q&A’s in which the candidates respond without being able to raise issues they believe important, and campaign statements having severely restricted word lengths; they must be able to control what they wish to communicate. Give all candidates access to a common mailing that includes whatever materials they wish and support them equally in creating web pages. Further “speech” by candidates that does require financial support should not be restricted, as alumni should be trusted to sort issues from slick marketing PR.

Of course, alumni generally can tell the difference between genuine issues and P.R. But when the Dartmouth Administration shells out significant sums to D.C. political black-ops organizations like the Lombardo Group in quest of its desired ends in alumni elections, the alumni’s ability to make sound judgments is affected.