<p>Midwest Dad</p>
<p>While not a serious issue in the time frame for your son, the ongoing alumni battle has long term and far reaching implications for Dartmouth's future.</p>
<p>It has become a war over “Who’s Dartmouth IS it?” Does Dartmouth belong to the alumni and the future alumni (its students) or does it belong to the administration? </p>
<p>“Official Dartmouth” is committing hara kiri in its handling of the entire matter. Even if they win - they lose.</p>
<p>In many ways, Dartmouth IS its alumni. ...yet, somehow, the administration doesn’t get it – in fact, as hard as it is to believe, they don’t really seem to get Dartmouth – or if they do get it, they don’t like it. ...for it seems that over the past 20-25 years they have raised ****ing off alumni to an art form</p>
<p>Every year has brought a larger and larger and more and more expensive and extravagant full court press from the administration and the non elected trustees.</p>
<p>Mailings and emails are unending in support of the administration candidates. Class Officers call every single alumni reminding them to support the nominated slate and “approved” ballot measures. (Funny, I’ve never had the opportunity to vote on my class officers or reps – only on the trustees)</p>
<p>And every year, this onslaught is defeated by write in candidates by larger and larger margins. </p>
<p>… after 4 trustee election losses in a row, did “Official Dartmouth” see any light? Did they reach out to their alumni? Did they seek to address the issues driving the winning candidates? Not exactly. …</p>
<p>…they did respond to the results – with a massive effort to change the rules – which was also defeated handily when put to a vote (and after all the dollars and man hours spent in support of their proposals, they can in no way claim that the alumni were not well aware of or informed about the issues).</p>
<p>… so finally, unable to win any other way, “Official Dartmouth” has simply declared the rules changed – claiming that they never needed an election to do so any way. </p>
<p>The whole matter is now headed to court – where Dartmouth has a woeful record in litigation against its alumni and students.</p>
<p>There is no charitable way to spin this. Either they are lying now or they have been lying all along.</p>
<p>Common sense would seem to indicate that they are lying now and lack the authority they claim. No sane body would have gone through all the time and expense of last year’s alumni election if it were not necessary. </p>
<p>The alternative is that they have been lying all along, that last year’s election was a farce and an enormous waste of time, money, energy and good will. … and that Dartmouth’s history of alumni governance is a fiction, an illusion tolerated for so long as it conforms with and confirms the administration's positions. A fund raising ploy.</p>
<p>Part of the problem I believe is that Dartmouth has deviated from its history and gone to the outside to fill administration positions with people having no prior Dartmouth affiliation. As a result, in their quest to consolidate power, they are seeking to destroy a large part of what has made Dartmouth, Dartmouth. </p>
<p>The alumni, the absolute majority of the alumni have been fighting back – and so far, winning. </p>
<p>...but if “the powers that be” are able to give the finger to the alumni (that THEY have engaged against them over the past decade) by somehow permanently enacting by fiat that which they has been resoundingly and repeatedly defeated by vote (– and in so doing, tell their alumni emphatically that this is not YOUR Dartmouth, this is OUR Dartmouth - they seem either to not realize or not care what will happen to their income stream. </p>
<p>…and Dartmouth will be the poorer for it</p>
<p>Selected quotes from the original article
“Founded in Hanover, N.H., in 1769, Dartmouth has long been famous for the intensity of its alumni's loyalty. It is not unfair, or an exaggeration, to call it half college and half cult.
In part this devotion is because of what the school does well. "Dartmouth is the best undergraduate school in the world," says Mr. Rodgers, who graduated in 1970 as salutatorian, with degrees in chemistry and physics. There were "small classes taught by real professors, not graduate students," he says, "and I never realized how that was heaven on earth until I went on to my next school." (Mr. Rodgers earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1975.) </p>
<p>Partly, too, Dartmouth's alumni fidelity is a result of engaging graduates in the life of the college. It is one of a few schools in the U.S. that allow alumni to elect leaders directly. Eight of the 18 members of Dartmouth's governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote of some 66,500 graduates. (The other seats are reserved mostly for major donors, along with ex officio positions for the governor of New Hampshire and the college president.) This arrangement has been in place since 1891.
…
Although there were a lot of political issues churning about the campus, Mr. Rodgers decided "that I would pursue just one issue, and my one issue, the one substantive issue, is the quality of education at Dartmouth. . . I decided that if I started debating the political argument du jour it would reduce my effectiveness." </p>
<p>Selections from the Dartmouth Review</p>
<p>By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Sunday, August 5, 2007</p>
<p>“It may fairly be said that 1891 was a year that set Dartmouth apart from many of its peers. In that year, a contract—if not a formal written agreement—was made which resolved a long and contentious struggle over the Board of Trustee’s composition, a struggle which parallels today’s controversies. One hundred and sixteen years later, Dartmouth is still unique among colleges for democratically electing one half of its Board members (not including the two ex officio members: the President of the College and the Governor of New Hampshire). For those of you who have not been tuned in to the machinations of the Olde Guard, the 1891 Agreement—and its 116 year precedent—establishes in perpetuity that one half of Dartmouth’s Board will be democratically elected by alumni.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>For 116 years, such restructuring of the Board was not even considered. On the contrary, its current structure was solidified: each expansion made to the Board honored the parity of alumni and charter trustees; this includes the most recent 2003 expansion of the Board. Yet, in 2003 then-Chairman Neukom was not claiming that the 1891 accord was “nonsense,” as he did during the Alumni Council’s spring meeting (May 19-20, 2007). Now, only four years later, after the victory of four non-slated petition trustees, does he want to erase what was written into not only the meeting minutes of the 1891 gathering, but the history of Dartmouth College in general. To some, it is all about winning and control, not the betterment of Dartmouth College.
If this parity, this wishy-washy democratic element is all “nonsense,” then perhaps all that is left is to let the money talk. As some readers have already seen, the newly formed “1891 Society” plans to withhold financial contributions from the College should the 1891 accord be violated or altered in any way. Operating under the theme, “No Donation without Representation,” it is clear that a growing group of alumni are fed up with the shenanigans of the majority of Dartmouth’s administrators and trustees. The expanding chasm between alumni and the College—which seems to be ever-widening with the failure of the Alumni Constitution and the accession of four petition trustees to the last four vacant seats on the Board—is exactly the type of problem the 1891 accord hoped to remedy 116 years ago. As the meeting minutes of the 1891 gathering of the Association of Alumni state, parity on the Board will establish “a more sympathetic and close relation between the Corporation [Dartmouth College] and the Alumni.”
In the years leading up to 1891, the College was financially in shambles, which bled into its operational and academic capacity; the instant that alumni became directly involved with the College, with specific responsibilities and duties as Board members on one end, or as voting alumni on the other, Dartmouth was rejuvenated to become the elite and fiscally sound institution that it is today.”</p>