As a professional writer, I do my best to respect commercial boundaries put up by publishers, but in this rare instance I think a subscription-only editorial from the Wall Street Journal merits breaking my rule and publishing here in its entirety. It criticizes reactionary behavior by my alma mater Dartmouth College that is emblematic of a cancer spread across the American academy. Pretending to be “progressive,” these institutions are turning into the most rigid insular communities threatening freedom of expression and even thought. The folks at Powerline (also Dartmouth alums) have previously published this editorial but I am doing so here because of the open comments. Please have your say.
Dissidents at Dartmouth
September 1, 2006; Page A14
The left-leaning faction that dominates American higher education doesn’t take kindly to strangers — particularly those who challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxies. Just ask Harvard’s Larry Summers.
Or consider the escalating governance controversy at Dartmouth College. A few reformers have achieved a bit of influence, and now the New Hampshire school’s insular establishment is doing everything it can to run them out of Hanover.
Since 1891, Dartmouth has been among the handful of colleges and universities that allows alumni to elect leaders directly. At present, eight of the 18 members of the governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote of some 66,500 graduates, from a slate nominated by a small, mostly unelected committee. (The remaining seats, reserved for major donors, are filled by appointment.)
In practice, the Trustees have been largely ornamental overseers, rubber-stamping the management decisions of the “progressive” college administration and faculty. The passivity of the Trustees owes, in part, to the fact that many official alumni representatives operate as a de facto wing of the establishment, pushing candidates who won’t make trouble.
In 2004 and 2005, however, Dartmouth alumni were finally offered genuine choices. Over three successive Trustee contests, independent candidates bypassed the official channels and got onto the ballot by collecting alumni signatures. Each of the petition candidates — T.J. Rodgers, a Silicon Valley CEO; Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter and current Hoover Institution fellow; and Todd Zywicki, a law professor — ran on explicit platforms emphasizing academic standards, free speech and Dartmouth’s acute leadership crisis. All three were unexpectedly elected by wide margins despite intense institutional opposition. Not only did the trend give expression to the general alumni discontent over how Dartmouth is being run (a rare thing in academia), but a critical mass was also building for more muscular stewardship, and, with it, fundamental change.
Dartmouth’s inner circles, quite naturally, loathe all of this. And so the Alumni Council — the representative body of sorts for the whole — decided there was nothing to be done but change the rules. At issue is a new proposed constitution, cooked up in 2004 and constantly altered in response to events, that would “reform” the incorporation of the Trustees.
Most of the details are too tedious to go into here, but the new document is plainly designed to prevent outsiders from gaining still more Trusteeships. Most significant is a provision that would require prospective candidates to submit petitions before the official nominating committee selects its candidates. Not only would this vitiate the entire rationale for petition candidacies — a last resort to express dissatisfaction with the status quo — but it would allow the nominating committee to shape its slate against external challengers and split votes. These rules, like those in a casino, would game the odds in any given election in favor of the house.
The constitution is promoted as a measure to increase fairness and transparency, but in reality it would do neither. While the Alumni Council — already a bureaucratic labyrinth — is to be reorganized, it would actually become less representative, with more unelected positions with more power to pick Trustees than under the present arrangement. The revisions would also increase set-aside seats for groups defined by race or sexual orientation.
As if to redouble the throbbing of the tell-tale heart, the alumni executives recently “postponed” the elections for their own offices, in violation of their own bylaws, until after the constitution is given an up-or-down vote by the full alumni body. If it passes, the maneuver would entrench the leadership as currently comprised until at least 2009. Alumni would be left without democratically elected executives, let alone a say in Trustee nominations.
And so a pattern emerges at Dartmouth, one interminably replicated on other campuses: The academic establishment wants to consolidate its authority and exclude those who might deviate from the party line. But in a democracy, the results are not supposed to be foreordained. The new constitution will be put up for ratification by the alumni on September 15. Despite Dartmouth’s troubles in recent years, we trust its graduates are bright enough to see this power play for what it is.
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10 Comments
1. Terrye:This kind of reminds me of the fabled all White all Protestandt Country Clubs where only the right sort of people were acceptable.
I myself would not get a second mortgage to send my kid of to some university where he can learn to hate his country, his society, his culture, me etc.
Snobs.
Sep 2, 2006 - 2:44 am 2. ricpic:I don’t get it. What’s the hubbub all about? After all, aren’t Dartmouth’s administrators charter members of the elect, the chosen? And as such how can they do wrong? Accountability? By definition it doesn’t apply.
Sep 2, 2006 - 7:39 am 3. timmah!:“This kind of reminds me of the fabled all White all Protestandt Country Clubs where only the right sort of people were acceptable.”
Fabled?
Sep 2, 2006 - 8:27 am 4. shel:“Fabled?”
I sorta thought she meant it in the sense of “notorious”
My son is very smart, high scores etc., and was often told by well-meaning people that he could go to college anywhere he wanted–meaning, of course, that even the wonderful Ivy Leagues would let him in. Being an iconoclastic libertarian by nature, he instead chose to attend a medium-sized branch of a state university where he meets all sorts of people, where elitism is laughable, and where practicalities and individualism trump any sort of orthodoxy or stereotypes. He assures me he doesn’t get any of that kind of crap in his classes (and would speak out if he did.)
I sincerely hope the last sentence of the above editorial is true–that that’s going to be the prevailing attitude in another decade or two, and the crumbling old academic idiots at these “country clubs” are going to be either a joke or gone. In a healthy world you go to college to learn how to think critically and arrive at your own conclusions, not to be told what to think by people who have spent their entire adult lives cloistered within the dreaming spires.
Sep 2, 2006 - 8:56 am 5. Ron:Ever wonder where all the old Marxist have fled? Most have found very cushy jobs on the campuses of the colleges and Universities in the United States. It used to be thought that that with the fall of the Berlin Wall that communism was finished, not true. They have just changed their names to administrator and continued the war utilizing Political Correctness [mind think like in Orwell's 1984] and the plecebo of Diversity. Instead of direct confrontation like before they now just take your children and mold them the way they want while you aren’t watching, you just to get to pay the tutition and their exorbitant salaries. They figure in just several generations while being paid very well, they can take the United States down. They have a plan and they fight when it is being disrupted, Political Correctness and the rest of it is very dangerous to the Political well being of the United States and has to be fought just like the cold war was fought. We have a 5th column in this country and its on the Campuses.
Sep 2, 2006 - 9:02 am 6. everyman:Does this college administration up in Hanover sound like one with a “voice crying in the wilderness”?
Do we suppose that these elites – who for so long have had their perverse way with my alma mater – actually think that they speak with such a voice?
Do we suppose that, indeed, they actually think . . .
At all?
Sep 2, 2006 - 11:29 am 7. Barry Dauphin:And it’s important for folks to remember instances like this when the academic chorus shouts about how the country should be run. They would have the country run the way Dartmouth is (and Harvard).
Sep 2, 2006 - 5:04 pm 8. Jeffersonian:WASP country club, like hell. This is more akin to how Iranian elections are run.
Sep 2, 2006 - 8:01 pm 9. timmah!:“I sorta thought she meant it in the sense of “notorious”
”
Ah, I get it. My first thought was fabled as in “Isreali missles that drill evenly spaced holes on the way in, and tap them in your choice of metric or standard thread upon detonation”.
My confusion aside, Terrye’s point is spot-on.
Sep 3, 2006 - 6:13 am 10. Mike_Nargizian:Without trying to be cute but this is exactly what the Mullahs did in the past 5-7 years. They consolidated their already strong arm hold by crushing the growing oppositions’ voices in govt. They narrowed even further who could and could not run for Parliament there not to mention closing down tens if not hundreds of newspapers as well.
Now if this was taking place at Harvard how appropos or ironic it would be with the Grand Mullah Khatami speaking there on 9-11.
Then you could write a dripping article chock full of “inteligeniaisms in the vein of a Chomsky or Fisk “intelligently” comparing Harvard’s (Dartmouth’s) Board of Trustees to Iran “election processes”.
Unlike the other “brilliant” pieces don’t think Wash Post/NY/LA Times would publish it though.
Mike
Sep 6, 2006 - 5:15 pm