The Fightin’ Alumni of Hanover

Wait – isn’t it the students who go to college?

By Alex DiBranco, Dartmouth College

Last year, two outsider candidates, conservatives Peter Robinson ’79 and Todd Zywicki ’88, were elected to Dartmouth College’s Board of Trustees in the so-called “Lone Pine Revolution.” As might be expected, the liberal newspaper the Dartmouth Free Press’ analysis that “this decision could not be more hurtful to the College” directly opposed the right-wing Dartmouth Review’s dubbing of the candidates’ victory as “heartening.”

As a Dartmouth student, Dartmouth Alumni Council scuffles have a personal importance for me. But the national attention focused on this issue indicates there is more at stake than Dartmouth students’ concerns. The New York Times suggests that Dartmouth is a model for the attempts of conservative alumni at other colleges trying to gain power over their former institutions. But the Times seems to be confused about the current issue — conservative dissidents were elected to Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees last year.

The issue of the attempted conservative takeover of academia — a reaction to what alums such as Robinson and Zywicki perceive as liberal bias in campus life — is significant but not the problem at hand in Hanover. What’s at stake now is simply the less-than-democratic processes by which some alumni attempt to exert influence over the university. Robinson and Zywicki’s electoral victory challenged Council business as usual, motivating longtime Council members — no matter what their political affiliations — to propose a new alumni constitution that is vehemently opposed by students on both the right and left. The Council’s new constitution protects the powers that be by making it difficult for petition candidates to run. Furthermore, by manipulating the election date and the delay before the newly elected president of the Board of Trustees takes office, the current officers have made a blatant power grab, giving themselves up to three additional years of control. The Executive Committee went so far as to consult an attorney in its effort to justify the legally dubious moving of the election date. Alumnus David Gale ’00 questions this: “Isn’t the fact that you felt you needed to seek legal counsel before making this move indication that it is, on its face, extremely questionable?”

In the constitution controversy, Dartmouth conservatives and liberals are on literally the same page. A collaboration between the editors-in-chief of both the Dartmouth Free Press and the Dartmouth Review — Andrew Seal and Daniel Linsalata — appeared within the pages of Dartmouth’s daily paper last month. Given that the Review and Free Press exist in a state of mutual loathing, when they stand “United Against the Constitution,” there must be something seriously amiss.

The Times articles cites Seal and Linsalata’s impassioned statement that the new constitution “is a slap in the face to open democracy and makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech which has been so strongly supported throughout the history of our nation.” For good measure, the story throws in a comparison to a mass murderer, quoting trustee Robinson: “This is as much a reform as when Joseph Stalin decided to hold elections in Eastern Europe. … Voting? Yes. Democracy? Not at all.”

What’s the point of all this overwrought rhetoric? There is something ridiculous about the national attention focused on a squabble between alums in power who want to stay that way and those on the outside who want to be part of the in-crowd. Seal and Linsalata’s declaration was not a political call to arms but simply a heartfelt appeal asking alumni not to vote for a reactionary constitution supported by change-averse alumni. The new Dartmouth alumni constitution would make the Board of Trustees unaccountable to the alumni, but what is most outrageous to me is that the Board has always been unaccountable to students.

Critical alumni are angry because they’re being treated without respect — treated, in other words, like students. Administrators work hard at ignoring the campus; if students want a say, they have to fight for it, as demonstrated in the recent successful efforts of the Darfur Action Group to convince the administration to divest from Sudan. Other students are agitating for administration action on the issues of sexual assault and gender-neutral housing, but so far, to no avail.

Students don’t have a vote in any administrative electoral process (no, Student Assembly does not count) — we have to fight for change. Dissatisfied alumni have the power to fight as well. They occasionally clutter campus publications with complaining letters, and some are active in the world of blogging, but students have discovered that those efforts alone will not inspire significant progress.

Students support dissatisfied alums because they worry that an undemocratic Council system, by keeping alternative voices out, will restrict progress on the issues they care about. It’s understandable that alumni have an emotional attachment to the place where they spent four years of their youth — we rely on those sentiments for funding — but in reality, they aren’t the ones affected by the actions of the Board of Trustees. Students are the ones hurt by issues such as rising tuition costs and program cuts. For instance, at Dartmouth, the Government department, one of the most popular, is under-staffed, with students on wait lists for courses term after term.

Alums often want to freeze their alma maters in time, all the better to facilitate remembrance of their youths. Students, on the other hand, more frequently embrace progress; frankly, not all traditions are good, especially when many alums remember Dartmouth as an all-male college. Dartmouth undergraduates have been discussing their desire to have younger alumni on the Council, people for whom memories of the undergraduate experience are still very fresh and who are thus are more likely to address real student concerns. So while we support alumni desires for fairer, more transparent elections, we also support students and young alumni having more control, so we are not subjected to the dictates of a power-hungry Board of Trustees whose time at Dartmouth has passed. Dartmouth should become a model for increased student control over education. Maybe the Council dissidents’ experience with feeling ignored will make them more sympathetic to students’ own struggle for self-government. Now there’s an ideal that has been strongly supported in our nation’s history.

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