Since 1769, all but the two ex officio seats have been filled by majority-vote election by the board itself. That is what the charter, as upheld by Webster, requires. Since 1891, the candidates for half of those elected seats, an intentionally-sized minority of the board, have been nominated by alumni and elected by the board, as required. Thus the board has always controlled all the seats, by design. That is how most nonprofit corporations work.

You have confused the board, the administration, and the alumni bureaucracy. The alumni are the ones who proposed a new constitution for their own groups; it would have tangentially affected the way they nominated trustees, and it was supported by the board, but it was not an example of the administration trying to “change the rules.” An alumni interest group hired a PR firm to support the constitution. The administration, which has its own permanent publicity office, did not do so, and your statement that it did is false.

If you think a nomination process open only to Dartmouth alumni that produces candidates who are elected by a self-selecting private corporate board of 18 counts as “democracy,” then good luck to you. Most people would say that this corporation, like every other one in this country, must abide by its articles of incorporation, and that such articles typically embody frankly undemocratic methods of conserving private property rights. Can you name a corporation whose board decisions do not appear to outsiders as “executive fiat”?

Your note that the board’s vote at its traditional September meeting was “between semesters” shows you to be a conspiratorial thinker. Students are not members of the board, so it is not clear what you meant by this.

The Governance Committee is not a “board-within-the-board.” It does not even meet regularly, it is only constituted every few years to review board operations. Its report was adopted by a democratic majority of the entire body, and there was no “diktat.” Something tells me you are unfamiliar with Robert’s Rules of Order and have no idea how private corporations make decisions.

The board’s decision does nothing to circumscribe the power of the “independent” trustees. Each of the four still has all the powers of any trustee. The board’s decision was the reform itself, and the conservative “independent” trustees you favor have formally supported a lawsuit seeking a court order to maintain the status quo. Thus it seems you have the two sides backward again.

The Putnam case will have no effect on academic governance. When not pinning the majority-vote decision on Haldeman, the Review or its readers generally pin it exclusively on (a) President Wright or (b) former Chairman William Neukom. It is not clear how any of these three could have swayed the majority of the board to support the Committee’s proposal except by logical persuasion. Esfahani-Smith’s attempt to link Haldeman’s reforms at Putnam to the board’s reforms at Dartmouth founders on many points, one of which is the simple fact that Haldeman is the CIO at Putnam, not the chairman of its board. He is required to take action singlehandedly.

Incidentallly, Webster brought tears to his own eyes, not those of Marshall. The whole peroration from which you quote is based on a slightly dubious publication made decades after the fact, not on any notes of Webster’s. But you seem to have as little respect for the facts as you do for common sense, so I won’t let that stand in the way of the good laugh I get from reading your column.