Dartblog

At the Association of Alumni forum on campaign guidelines yesterday, the conversation ranged far afield, but one bit of dictum was most interesting. Outgoing Alumni Council President John Daukas said something to the effect that:

It is tough to ask the Trustees for more Alumni Trustee seats when they point out to us that only 28% of the alumni are voting. Geez. Almost half the alumni give money to the College every year.

Whether Mr. Daukas was aware when he spoke those words that his comparison is spurious, I do not know. But this is not the first time that he has mentioned pejoratively the percentage participation of alumni in Trustee races.

It is true that 28% of the College’s 65,000 then-living alums participated in the Stephen Smith trustee race. A total of 18,186 eligible voters cast ballots. And according to Carie Pelzel, V-P of Development, in the 2009 fiscal year (ending on June 30, 2009) the Dartmouth College Fund received contributions from 22,971 alumni, which the Development Office calculated as being 45.9% of alums.

A gold star for anyone math-minded enough to instantly see the inconsistency here. If you use the College’s updated figure for living alums — 69,000 — as your denominator, then these 22,971 contributors are only 33.29% of alumni. However, Development seems to use a different denominator: they base their calculation on the assumption that there are only 50,045 alumni out there (22,971 is 45.9% of 50,045).

It is possible that there are now only 50,045 alums of the undergraduate College (I think that there are more), but given that it is undergraduate alumni who are most attentive to the College’s affairs (each and every one of today’s sitting Trustees and AoA Executive Committee members was a Dartmouth undergrad) it is fairest to use this denominator, too, in calculating the alumni participation in trustee elections.

By this count, 36.34% of undergrad alums participated in Smith’s elections in 2007, a figure that is over double Harvard’s turnout in Board of Overseer elections. (Actually the Smith percentage should be even higher because the number of living undergrad alums has increased since May 2007 with the subsequent graduation of three undergraduate classes.) Curiously, this is about the level of particiation by eligible Americans in mid-term federal elections; does anyone want to abolish those ballots? By any measure, Dartmouth alumni’s participation in trustee balloting is quite extraordinary .

Whether you use 36.34% or 28% to describe participation in Stephen Smith’s 2007 election (not on the below chart), one thing that we can all agree upon is the fact that the advent of campaigning in elections with petition candidates has caused alumni trustee election turnouts to reverse a declining trend between 1992 and 2003:

In 2003, only about 20% of all alums voted in the Trustee beauty contest (there was no campaigning that year: alums dispiritedly chose between the candidates based on their pretty résumés and boilerplate statements). When T.J. Rodgers ran in 2004, turnout leapt, and it has continued to rise. Competition ain’t a bad thing.