<p>^
said much more accurately and coherently than I could do :)</p>
<p>Wisconsinguy
Those were statements not facts :) I tried to qualify with "as far as I can tell" because I had seen nothing evidencing such though it seemed nonintuitive. Of course, perhaps one reason no one had suggested that the alumni of Tuck, Thayer and the Med School participate in the alumni Trustee elections is because they already do. Oops!<br>
I went to the Tuck and Thayer web sites and they appear to have separate alumni organizations. Nor have I ever seen any candidate with only graduate school affiliation. Nor could I find any reference to any graduate school alumni in the various debate materials I scanned online - nor a single graduate alumni affiliation listed on the membership of the "Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth". <a href="http://www.strongdartmouth.org/index.php?r=4%5B/url%5D">http://www.strongdartmouth.org/index.php?r=4</a><br>
Thus my attempt to qualify what was it turns out an incorrect notion on my part.
Still - if the professional schools were somehow being threatened, one would think their alumni would have been front and center in support of the administration. Anyone come across a breakdown of voting by affiliation?
In 5 years have you seen graduate program funding presented as an issue? The College has spent a small fortune in their mailings. If that's what this was all about, you'd have to think they would get it in there somewhere, no? </p>
<p>Corbett
Because in the context of the discussion, when Rodgers says Dartmouth, I do not believe he is referring to Tuck, Thayer or the Med School. But maybe I'm wrong again - check out paragraph 9 in the interview.<br>
I do not know how to say it any plainer - the Professional Schools are not part of the discussion. Not "my" discussion here, but Dartmouth's discussion there. Their funding is not an issue. This is a debate betwixt and between alumni of the college and about the college, not the College.</p>
<p>If you just don't want to accept that, then have at it. Knock yourself out. There are god knows how many web sites out there created and some still maintained by the interested parties with names like Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth, Alumni to Save Dartmouth, The 1891 Group, etc. etc. etc. More info and commentary can be found on the Dartmouth website, The Dartmouth website, and The Dartmouth Review website as well as at the Wall Street Journal and the Powerline Blog. Do a google search to gets dozens more.</p>
<p>bluebayou</p>
<p>The thing is, if you'd gone to Dartmouth, you would undertand. I believe I understand Mr. Rodgers and his context perfectly - but I do not know the man, have never spoken to the man, and would not presume to speak for him. Perhaps the interview in total will do a better job than I have.
His interviewer was a Dartmouth alum as well.
Here’s the whole interview:
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW</p>
<p>Mr. Rodgers Goes to Dartmouth
A cautionary tale about a businessman who ventured back into the Ivory Tower. </p>
<p>BY JOSEPH RAGO
Saturday, September 1, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT </p>
<p>SAN JOSE, Calif.--T.J. Rodgers does not seem pleased, his gelid stare intensifying at a recent project meeting. "You're not being aggressive enough on the transistors, so I'm going to help you," rumbles the chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley chip maker. This leads into a technical debate with one of his senior engineers: "Are you serious about using Indium instead of Boron?" </p>
<p>Mr. Rodgers founded Cypress in 1982, and now, a lifetime later in the hypercompetitive semiconductor business, it is an industry leader. Mr. Rodgers, for his part, has reached that phase where success purchases new opportunities. </p>
<p>Some men of his means and achievement buy a yacht, or turn to philanthropic work, or join other corporate boards. Mr. Rodgers went back to school: He became a trustee of his alma mater, Dartmouth College--and not a recumbent one. He has now served for three years; and though he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, "It's been a horrible experience. I'm a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That's not the way I'm treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby." </p>
<p>Now the college's establishment is working to ensure that the likes of T.J. Rodgers never again intrude where they're not welcome. What follows is a cautionary tale about what happens when the business world crosses over into the alternative academic one. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Until recently, though, Dartmouth's elections have been indifferent affairs, with the alumni choosing from a largely homogeneous slate handpicked by a committee closely aligned with the administration. In 2004, things got--interesting. Mr. Rodgers bypassed the official nomination channels and was named to the ballot by collecting alumni signatures; he needed 500 and ended up acquiring more than 15 times that. He was dissatisfied with the college's direction and resolved to either "do something or stop griping about it." He was elected by 54% of the voters. </p>
<p>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>That kind of pragmatism, however, didn't inhibit a highly political response from the aggrieved, including the college administration and some of the faculty. Mr. Rodgers notes that certain professors "seemed to specialize" in accusing him of being retrograde, racist, sexist, opposed to "diversity" and so forth. Or, in the academic shorthand, a conservative. </p>
<p>A curious label for a man who is in favor of gay marriage, against the Iraq war, and thinks Bill Clinton was a better president than George W. Bush. Mr. Rodgers's sensibility, rather, is libertarian, and ruggedly Western. He is also a famously aggressive, demanding CEO, with technical expertise, a strong entrepreneurial bent and an emphasis on empirics and analytics. His lodestars, he says, are "data and reason and logic." </p>
<p>At Dartmouth, he remarks, he has produced dozens of long, systematic papers on the issues. His first priority was to improve its "very poor record of freedom of speech." Soon enough, the college president, James Wright, overturned a speech code. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a watchdog group, elevated Dartmouth's rating from "red" to its highest, "green," one of only seven schools in the country with that status. "We made progress, and I was feeling pretty good," Mr. Rodgers says. </p>
<p>He intended to move on to quality of education next, but the political situation at Dartmouth degenerated. Mr. Rodgers's candidacy was followed by two further elections, in which petition candidates--Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Todd Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University--were also elected. Mr. Rodgers says that, like him, they're "independent people willing to challenge the status quo." </p>
<p>Perhaps sensing that a critical mass was building, Dartmouth's establishment then tried to skew the petition trustee process. The details are complex and tedious, but last autumn they cooked up a new alumni constitution that would have "reformed" the way trustees were elected. In practice, it would have stacked the odds, like those in a casino, in favor of the house. </p>
<p>The measure needed two-thirds of alumni approval to pass, and in an election with the highest turnout in Dartmouth's history, it was voted down by 51%. "It lost big time," Mr. Rodgers says. </p>
<p>Earlier this year another petition trustee, Stephen Smith of the University of Virginia Law School, was elected with 55% of the voters. Quite naturally, Dartmouth's insular leadership has loathed all of this. A former trustee, and a current chair of Dartmouth's $1.3 billion capital campaign, publicly charged that the petition process had initiated a "downward death spiral" in which a "radical minority cabal" was attempting to hijack the Board of Trustees. That was among the more charitable commentaries.
Curious, again, that Mr. Rodgers has been cast as the leader of some sinister conservative faction, since he is open about what his actual goals are. "They attack things that don't matter because they can't attack you for what you stand for--quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we're a response to the problem." </p>
<p>In Mr. Rodgers's judgment, the increasingly political denigration--the "rancor," he calls it--has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. "Before I ever went to my first board meeting," he says, "I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does--management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they're doing and what they need to get their jobs done." </p>
<p>He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments--economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular--were "suffering from a shortage of teaching." </p>
<p>"It's a simple problem," Mr. Rodgers says. "You hire more professors." His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. "I've had to scrounge to get data," he says, the administration not being forthcoming. "My best sources of data come from faculty members and students." </p>
<p>While he can't discuss internal figures, he says there's been "a modest improvement since 2004. It's about 10 professors net gain." That's "going in the right direction, but not nearly as fast as I would like." While the college has added 1.1% faculty per year over the last decade, at the same time its overall expenses have increased by 8.8%, "so the inevitable mathematical conclusion of those numbers is that the percentage of money we spend on faculty is going down, and it has gone down consistently for a long time." </p>
<p>"In general, I don't have a prescription," he says. "I'm not trying to micromanage the place. What I'm saying is take the huge amount of money that an institution like Dartmouth has and focus it on your core business, which is undergraduate education, and make it really, really good. If you want to pinch pennies, pinch pennies somewhere else and not on the core business. That's all I'm saying." </p>
<p>Trustee politics is the reason that this problem with "the core business," as he puts it, has not been addressed. "I don't think we pay enough attention to it and care enough about it. We have time to worry about other things and somehow the main business of the college, which is to educate, doesn't dominate our meetings. </p>
<p>"I obviously don't want to talk a lot about what happens in board meetings, but I keep pushing to spend time on it--and that makes me an annoyance. . . . The priority has been, if you look at it, changing the rules to get rid of the petition trustees who are willing to criticize the administration. </p>
<p>"Basically," he continues, "I find the meetings to be pro forma--this is an overstatement, but almost scripted. No, we don't roll up our sleeves and think real hard. I certainly don't feel like that what I have to offer to any organization is being used by the board of Dartmouth College." </p>
<p>Now, Mr. Rodgers says, the argument has come to its endgame. "This is not a conservative-liberal conflict. This is a libertarian-totalitarian conflict." </p>
<p>One of the main criticisms leveled at the petition trustee process is that it is polarizing, divisive and somehow detrimental to the college. Mr. Rodgers replies, "If 'divisive' means there are issues and we debate the issues and move forward according to a consensus, then divisive equals democracy, and democracy is good. The alternative, which I fear is what the administration and [Board of Trustees Chairman] Ed Haldeman are after right now, is a politburo--one-party rule." </p>
<p>And so, after losing four consecutive democratic contests, the Dartmouth administration has evidently decided to do away with democracy altogether. "Now I'm working on the existence question," Mr. Rodgers notes mordantly. </p>
<p>Though he cannot say for sure--"I'll be kept in the dark until a couple of days before the meeting on what they're planning on doing"--a five-member subcommittee, which conducts its business in secret and includes the chair and the president, has embarked on a "governance review" that will consolidate power. "It looks like they're just going to abandon, or make ineffectual, the ability of alumni to elect half the trustees at Dartmouth," Mr. Rodgers says.<br>
He believes that the model is the Harvard Corporation, where a small group "makes all the decisions. They elect themselves in secret. They elect themselves in secret for a life term. How's that for democracy?" </p>
<p>The rest of the Dartmouth trustees, Mr. Rodgers says, "will go to the board meetings to have a couple of banquets and meet a few students and feel good about ourselves and brag to our compatriots that we're indeed on the board of trustees of Dartmouth College." </p>
<p>This drastic action, he says, is unnecessary. "These are small problems that are fixable," Mr. Rodgers argues. "Instead of making them major political wars, we simply ought to go solve the problems and get on with it." </p>
<p>The alternative remedy, he continues, is poor corporate governance, for one. "This is committees working in secret, which is a very bad way to run any organization." Besides transparency, it may also present conflicts of interest, in which the college president would dominate those who ultimately evaluate his performance. </p>
<p>But he contrasts the situation especially with his experience at Cypress: "Silicon is a very tough master. It operates to the laws of physics, there are no politics, you can't vote or will or committee your way around it. . . . Therefore the culture of Silicon Valley, where winning and losing is being technologically successful or not, is an objective, nonpolitical culture. It's just different on the Dartmouth board." </p>
<p>Mr. Rodgers expects to be "severely criticized, unfairly and personally," for talking to The Journal. He may even be removed from his post entirely. "It's worth it," he says. "Doing what is right for the college that I love is more important than holding what is largely a ceremonial position." </p>
<p>Mr. Rago, a Dartmouth graduate, is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.</p>