In 2004 a businessman from Silicon Valley made history: for the first time in 24 years, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers ran for election to the Dartmouth board against three candidates selected by the alumni council. Rodgers, a libertarian who opposes the Iraq War and supports gay marriage, shuns the liberal-conservative divide over university debates and explains he was motivated to run by "the degradation of freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly . . . at [Dartmouth] today."
Following Rodger's election, petitions of trustees Peter Robinson, Todd Zywicki, and Stephen Smith followed. Furthermore, the board recently rejected a new alumni constitution that would have changed election procedures, and the Dartmouth elite, not pleased with the outcome of the elections, have gone on the attack. Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Rodgers regarding his experience on the board:
[A]fter 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.
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.
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?"
Be sure to read the whole article. The Wall Street Journal editorial board had a companion piece entitled "The Illiberal College," in which they wrote: "Their [the alumni] presence has proven to be a tremendous offense to Dartmouth's inner circles. Like administrators at most universities, these academic elites expect only money -- not opinion and oversight -- from their alumni donors. A year ago, the administration worked with a small committee of alumni to alter the petition process to make it less likely that outsiders could win. They lost in a rout in an alumni referendum."
In 1951, Yale graduate William F. Buckley achieved notoriety with the publication of God and Man at Yale,
assaulting the undergraduate education as hostile to Christianity and
its support of collectivism and sought to rally Yale alumni to their supervisory role of university governance. Unfortunately, nothing has changed in the elite universities, and in fact
have grown worse. The examples of Ward Churchill and Lawrence Summers are two telling examples. As long-time readers of this blog know, Churchill was the tenured "ethnic studies" professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who was recently fired by the university for violations of academic ethics (another basis for his firing should have been an enthusiasm for violence, but academics stood idly by under the banner of academic freedom). The case of Harvard President Lawrence Summers points to the power of taboo in the Ivory Tower, when he offered informed speculation about gender-based differences in scientific professions. Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are just fine, it seems, but suggesting a taboo concept doesn't bode well.
Readers may wonder why we devote so much attention to university "politics," like this situation at Dartmouth or other events like Ward Churchill. Part of the answer is that all of us on this blog are involved in the university in some way, either by teaching or entering the higher levels of graduate education. The other part of the answer is that what happens in major universities today is important for the future of education in America. Dartmouth alumni have shaken up the complacent, left-wing administrations, and it's a trend that may continue across the country. Unlike for-profit corporations in America, universities don't share the same transparency and self-governance, which leaves the job to others to confront. Academics gripe about the problems of the separation of ownership and control in modern corporations and the power of managers rather than shareholders, yet they actively promote a governance model that puts power in a small elite while disenfranchising the university's stakeholders. If Dartmouth politics silence the alumni challenge, the entrenched illiberal governance will continue.
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