Current Chairman of the Board of Trustees Bill Neukom '64 gave a
presentation at a May 19th meeting of the Alumni Council. At the meeting he expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of money that entered the last trustee election. When asked if he would ensure that the number of elected trustees would remain the same as the number of charter trustees, he replied:
In terms of honoring that [keeping the proportion the same], any Board of the College would be aware of it and the history since then, but it is of even more importance that the Board look at current circumstances and do what it thinks is in the best interest of the College.
Also voicing discontent with the recent election was Rick Routhier ‘73 Tu’76, the chairman of the the Alumni Council's nominating committee. He was specifically worried if, in the future, the Council would be able to find capable alumni willing to run:
The current rules allow for campaigning, which means whoever runs will have to have money to campaign, and that is not an attractive opportunity for many people who would interested in and capable of serving on the Board of Trustees.
Or they could, of course, find someone who supports their positions to pay for their campaign. This new development makes the recent Association of Alumni election all the more important. One can hope that a petition heavy Executive Committee (of the AoA) will oppose any curtailment of rights that alumni now possess.
22 comments:
This is interesting. I wonder if anyone in the anti-establishment camp has given much thought to either of these 2 questions:
1. Whether open campaigning is always a good thing
2. Whether more alumni participation in college governance is always a good thing.
On the first point, of course Neukom will be rightly criticized for his remarks. He wants more restrictions on campaigning so that he can have more control over the information that goes to the voters and so that administration lapdogs can get elected. This is similar to the new constitution proposed a while back --- if at first you don't succeed, change the rules. Accountability can be tough sometimes.
Setting aside his personal motivations, though, it is disconcerting to see money enter trustee races the way it has lately. With a 28% participation level in the last election, the adage that "money wins elections" is particularly apt, and trustee candidates should be elected on their qualifications, not on their campaign resources. It's not an adequate answer to say that people should simply fight money with money.
On the second point, it's hard to see what sort of a stake alumni have in the future of the college beyond an emotional investment and an interest in the credential value of their degrees. The trustees don't "govern" the alumni in any real sense, and it's not obvious that the average alum knows much about how to run a college. It may be that accountability to a larger group is necessary to prevent the trustees from looting the college and running it into the ground, but that's not obvious either.
I doubt that Neukom or Routhier have honorable motives, but their points shouldn't be lightly dismissed.
Well, (1), open campaigning is, I would think, almost always preferable to the alternative, which as far as I can see is simply apathy or in-groupery. The amounts involved in campaigning for the Dartmouth board are presumably minimal, but certainly within reach of any of the officially nominated campaigners for the Board. Alderson in particular appears to have put a fair amount of his own substantial resources into his campaign, but I see no inaccuracy in Smith's characterization of all three of the official nominees as "millionaires". In addition, the official nominees had the advantage of a College-financed mailing from President Wright.
(2) Whether alumni participation in college governance is always a good thing is certainly an untried proposition. Dartmouth is among about 25 institutions that have provision for petition nominations to certain Board seats (or equivalent arrangements). The alumni of Hamilton College, interestingly enough, had a Board election with a petition candidate soon after the controversial invitation to Ward Churchill to speak there, which prompted the whole "little Eichmanns" furore and resulted in Churchill's eventual dismissal from Colorado University. The petition candidate lost that election.
The real effect of alumni activists on a college Board is yet to be examined, it seems to me. There have certainly been opinions expressed that the Duke Board could have taken a different role in the whole lacrosse team incident there, though it's difficult to see what such a role might have been. In hindsight, the Duke faculty and administration exercised flawed judgment in many areas, and Duke is in the first stages of settling what will likely be numerous lawsuits resulting from that flawed judgment. It's possible that if the Duke bad actors had had a greater consciousness that they might be held accountable for flawed judgment, there might have been different results, but we can't say without better examples.
The Dartmouth experience so far seems unique. What's wrong with that? It seems to me that the typical member of any institutional Board is a wealthy donor who is being rewarded for those donations. This sets up preconditions for in-groupery and decisions based on (dare we say it?) class interest -- no different from the flawed decisions that emanate from Ford, Pew, MacArthur, etc., and often stemming from the same very privileged families or their representatives.
A complaint that money might drive selection to an institution's Board seems disingenuous in this context, to say the least. By the same token, the independent trustees currently on the Board are probably on the whole better educated and more informed on academic issues than the charter trustees, who are presumably selected the way any trustees are normally chosen: they've bought their way in.
Mr. Bruce, thanks for your response. Why is it disingenuous to complain about people buying trustee elections, though? I don't think making donations to the College and spending a lot of money on a campaign are equivalent.
One shows an unselfish interest in the College without any necessary expectation of a reward, while the other is just spending money to buy yourself more power. John Berry '44 gave Dartmouth $25M for a library. Regardless of whether he gets a voice in College governance (he doesn't, afaik), the students still get to use his library.
Smith and Alderson spent tens of thousands on their campaigns, but that doesn't benefit anyone except for Kinko's, the Postal Service and Smith (because he won).
If the trustee election can be bought for $60,000, then I think Neukom is right to be concerned.
Anonymous wrote that "I doubt that Neukom or Routhier have honorable motives".
Why? Were you there when they spoke? Why be so quick to attribute dishonor to these two?
It might interest you to know that the vaunted 1891 resolution that established the current system of alumni trustee nominations was put forth over the objections of those who worried that the nomination process would devolve into crass and petty electioneering unbecoming of a would-be trustee. By the 1920s, the high tone of the nominations then going on was used as a justification for the process, which was, after all, not an election of a civic representative but a nomination for the appointment of a corporate trustee. How far we have sunk...
in response to "Dishonor?":
Because, on the heels of the fourth consecutive election of a petition candidate, Neukom's and Routhier's comments sound more like the complaints of a sore loser than those of someone concerned for the dignity of the process.
Neukom was a supporter of the new constitution that failed a while back.
Your comment about the 1891 agreement is hardly interesting. The most natural objections to injecting voting into any governing process are often that with democracy will come tawdry campaigning and a need to respect the wishes of people who may be ill-equipped to make important decisions. I'd be really surprised if there were other objections or if the 1891 agreement met with unanimous support.
As I said, I don't think alumni voting rights or campaigning are necessarily good things. The timing of Neukom's complaints, though, and his past actions, however, make it look like he's just reacting to feeling the heat from voters.
Anonymous, while wealthy families and their scions get warm and fuzzy feelings by serving on institutional boards, this is by no means all they get. Amonog other things, they can receive preferential treatment for their offspring in the admissions process (how much is an Ivy degree worth?), as well as business and investment related advantages. A Board, after all, can influence investments and other institutional decisions that can do things like affect the value of neighboring real estate.
Don't minimize the satisfaction the very wealthy get from playing God with the lives of the non-wealthy. The Dartmouth Board, for instance, appears to have derived some satisfaction in the 1990s from social engineering at the College in areas like the Student Life Initiative.
An interesting development in the past generation, in fact, has been the tendency of the very wealthy to advocate policies that were formerly associated with the far Left (again, simply look at the programmatic involvements of the prominent foundations). This is probably because the wealthiest are immune from the consequences of their programmatic recommendations -- their tax liabilities aren't proportional; their lawyers can get them out of legal problems; their lifestyles can insulate them from any propinquity-related issues. That such folks can influence our universities -- and have been doing so -- makes me nervous.
Berry gave x million; I Googled Neukom, and he is part of the Microsoft fortune and recently gave $22 million to Dartmouth, a tad more than 60K. Do you think there might be some relationship, uh, with his current position on the Dartmouth Board? Do you think that as the Chair of a white-shoe law firm, as the President of the ABA, and as a wealthy rentier, his views might be just a tad elitist?
The left has forgotten its routes. Pick up a copy of Lundberg's The Rich and the Super Rich via Amazon used books.
Buying the election??? Smith used his money to send out two lengthy letters to alums filled with factual arguments about the College, and he had a web site that made the same points. Smith advanced IDEAS in these letters and, lo and behold, just shy of 10,000 Ivy-League-educated voters chose to vote for him.
If Sandy Alderson had spent three times as much money as Smith putting out his own message that all is well at Dartmouth and Jim Wright is a great President, do you think that Alderson would have won the election?
Or to put it another way, when we are alums, will we be as easily swayed by money as some people think the alumni were in this election?
Whoops, "roots", not "routes".
This post has enough material for several discussions. One not yet raised is the possibility of changing (maintaining?) the proportion of alumni trustees.
In 1769, the board had 12 trustees, of whom 2 were ex officio (the governor, traditionally not a voter; and the college president). The 10 "charter trustees" were all appointed by the board through its own internal election process as the charter specifies. Although anyone would have been free to nominate trustees, no formal nomination process existed and the trustees lacked any policy of electing nominees.
Around 1876, the trustees instituted a policy of refraining from electing a trustee for several months until the alumni had a chance to put forth a nominee. Trustees elected under this system and the successive schemes are known as "alumni trustees." The system was applied only as vacancies came open and created few alumni trustees.
In 1891, the trustees altered their policy by resolving to elect nominees to the next five vacancies and asking five members to resign within a year. The nominees would come from alumni of five years' standing, a policy the trustees seem to have dropped. The Alumni Association informally agreed that each of its nominees, despite being elected by the board for life like all of the non-ex officio trustees, would promise to resign after five years. The proportion of alumni trustees to voting members was more than 45%, and to the proportion of alumni among the total board-appointed membership was 50%.
Around 1913, the board changed its policy and began soliciting the nomination from the Alumni Council rather than the Association of Alumni.
In 1961, the board added four seats for a total of 16. Notably, the trustees appear to have designated two of these seats as alumni trustees, maintaining the proportion of alumni to charter trustees (although the 1891 resolution had offered only the set number of five). Thus the alumni proportion of the board's voting members rose to more than 46%. If the 1891 resolution was an agreement between the alumni and the trustees, then the trustees gave the alumni a free gift in 1961.
In 1990, the board changed its policy to refrain from soliciting a nominee in cases where it decided to reelect alumni trustees who had resigned after their promised five years. (The Alumni Association inserted a housekeeping provision in its constitution to reflect this change. It was somewhat controversial, although it has saved the association the embarrassment of nominating someone to an occupied seat.)
In 2003, the trustees resolved to expand the board by adding six more seats. The press release stated (possibly unwisely and certainly prematurely) that half would be alumni trustees, which would raise the proportion of voting members to more than 47% but maintain the proportion of alumni to all appointed trustees at 50%. Two of those seats have been added already. It is really the President's Office that is being short-changed, it seems: while the board has expanded, his power has declined by almost half.
As a non-lawyer, I nevertheless think we have a legal issue called estoppel. It looks like we have a long record of the Board of Trustees acting on the principle that half (exactly 50 percent) of all non ex-officio members will be nominated by the alumni. It also appears that, while this has never been formally codified, both the Board and the alumni have made statements mutually reflecting this understanding, and the alumni in particular have relied on it. Every written statement, including the 2003 press release, strengthens the case for this. If someone put that out "prematurely", he or she, let's face it, should have been fired.
Mr. Neukom, a lawyer, is clearly aware of these issues. That he would make statements telegraphing some Board intention to reconsider these apparent agreements shows, as far as I can see, that the man is a fool, at least in areas outside his expertise.
I suspect that the law prof independent trustees are chuckling here. My wife, an attorney for a non-profit, went through a somewhat similar constitutional change relating to their board. It required, and would almost certainly require in the case of Dartmouth (it seems to me) a change in the bylaws, likely including the bylaws of the Association of Alumni.
Good luck.
"I'd be really surprised if there were other objections or if the 1891 agreement met with unanimous support."
Wha? There were other objections to the 1891 resolution, especially to its legality with regard to the charter, and at the same time (indeed, for that reason) it did not meet with unanimous support.
The objection to electioneering in a democracy has an analogue in the objection to "tawdry campaigning" in the nomination process, only without any of the reasons (democracy, the constitution, legal rights) that we put up with campaigning in government.
With a chip on his shoulder the size of the Titanic, John wrote "Don't minimize the satisfaction the very wealthy get from playing God with the lives of the non-wealthy." We're sorry for your impoverished upbringing.
Estoppel can't freeze a situation forever or prevent a corporation from making a legitimate change in policy. Yes, if the trustees offered to seat an alumni nominee but then declined to do so, you might be able to estop them to deny that they made the offer. But if the trustees today came out with an official policy of seating no alumni nominees, or just some of them, then alumni would have a hard time pretending they did not know the policy when their later nominee was turned down at the next election.
The change "required, and would almost certainly require in the case of Dartmouth (it seems to me) a change in the bylaws, likely including the bylaws of the Association of Alumni."
Changes in board policy would not require any changes in the bylaws of the alumni association. The board doesn't give a fig what the association does or thinks it can do, except to the extent the board would prefer alumni harmony. The association would be wise to conform its bylaws to whatever the trustees' policy is, if only to avoid nominating someone for an occupied seat, as it did in 1990.
Well, Anonymous, we'll see how this plays out, but even Neukom seems to be dithering over the Board's possible position. An assertion by the Board that we will (say) return to nominating only five members from the alums would almost certainly generate a lawsuit, possible from the Association, possibly from some entity like the Hanover Institute.
I wouldn't try to predict that outcome, though you're welcome to do so.
Anonymous 12:18: While the power of the elected trustees has gone up percentage-wise, as a matter of voting, looking at it this way is useless. President Wright still holds the tie-breaker—and he would if there were 200 trustees instead of 16 (plus himself). The proportion that really matters is the one between charter trustees and elected trustees.
Anonymous 11:27: Claiming that the election was bought for $60,000 seems a bit disingenuous, especially considering the alumni-wide mailings Wright sent out. Was it unreasonable for Smith to publicize his positions and respond to Wright's attacks? To assume Smith bought the election is to assume Dartmouth graduates are stupid and unable to make an informed decision.
What I find most interesting about the recent trustee elections is the apparent shift away from the Board's traditional purpose. Yes they ultimately have the final say on everything Dartmouth, but traditionally (at least I assume) a board of trustees' primary purpose was to help raise funds for the college. Thus, charter trustees are often extremely wealthy—the idea being, that they can convince their wealthy friends to donate as well. In the last few years the idea of a passive Board has been turned on its head as alumni watched the Board support Wright with endeavors like the SLI. How all this will end no one knows, but it will be exciting to watch.
As a side note, it's helpful when commenters use names; otherwise, it becomes difficult to disentangle one anonymous from another. I don't care if you use your real name or some made up personal signature, but please do consider putting something down other than anonymous.
Cheers.
(I posted at 10:36, 11:27, and 11:42, and I'll pick a better pseudonym later)
I think this discussion has largely run its course, and I have very little to add. A few responses to the other commenters, though:
* estoppel usually applies to prevent someone from changing a legal position. The Trustees are only estopped if, since 1891, they've treated the agreement as binding and giving a right to the alumni. If instead, the understanding has been that the presence of elected trustees was a matter of grace, then that grace can be rescinded as easily as it was extended. I don't know much about the facts of this, so I have no idea how this shakes out.
* Political science types probably understand this better than I do, but my point about money winning elections was just that not everyone votes based on a rational evaluation of the ideas of the candidates, and elections are often as much about getting people to vote at all as it is about making a persuasive case for your platform. With only 28% of eligible alumni voting, that leaves lots of untapped potential voters who might be shaken from their apathy by a candidate with enough money to communicate effectively with them. So, to 11:56AM, yes, I think Alderson would have won if he'd tripled his spending. To Anfin and the others, I take back my suggestion that the election was "bought." I meant nothing more by it than what I've said in this comment, and didn't mean to provoke.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses.
Keggy, I would imagine that Neukom is dithering about the Board's position precisely because the Board seems to be in a typical estoppel position. Wikipedia gives an example: I owe a debt to someone. The person tells me informally that the debt has been forgiven. I say OK, great, and buy a car with the money, and the creditor knows this. The creditor then says, oh, I changed my mind, you still owe the money.
It's hard for me to think that the College acting for over 100 years to put Association-nominated members on the Board in a 50% ratio, twice adjusting this to conform to the expanded Board membership, and referring to this situation in writing, does not put the Board in a situation of estoppel, especially as the Association has revised its bylaws to conform to the expanded membership.
The Association has relied on its ability to nominate mambers to the Board in conformance with the recognized procedures.
If the Board were to revoke this understanding, I think it would meet the standard of "unconscionable". That's just from the legal side, of course. A dispute like that could be a major crisis for the College, equivalent to the early cases.
Neukom, in even broaching a course of action that would lead to such an outcome, is a fool. I think, frankly, that he hates the idea of having someone with a net worth not in the multiple millions sitting in the same room.
Far more money was spent supporting the College's side of things in the constitution vote than in the recent trustee race - and the turnout in that vote was much higher: 38% of alums rather than 28% in the recent race. Yet, amazingly enough, 52% of voters voted "no" in the constitution race, a figure strikingly close to the 55% of votes cast for Smith.
Reasoning simplisticly, all that extra spending caused a large increase in turnout (38% rather than 28%), but only a tiny change in sentiment (52% rather than 55%).
Of course, you could also argue that over the past year, another 3% of alums came to see evidence of the fumbling, unprofessional nature of the Wright administration....
Some unfortunately telling lines from the Alumni Council May meetings:
http://alumni.dartmouth.edu/news/?p=3&id=0586
The defeat of the trustee candidates put forth by the Nominating Committee elicited energetic discussion during chair Rick Routhier’s report on the trustee election process as well as at other times during the council weekend.
“Given the rules [which mandate the nomination of three trustee candidates by the council for one vacant alumni trustee seat on the board] and now the demands of money and time spent in open campaigning, we believe we will not be able to get the best candidates to run for positions on the board of trustees," Routhier said.
Councilors weighed in with a variety of suggestions, and many expressed frustration at not being able to get alumni who've supported petition candidates in recent elections to come to the table. Councilor Sarah Hoit '88 asked Routhier what he thought a solution would be.
"We worked on it for four years. It was the alumni constitution," he said.
“The trustee election process is a problem, and an urgent one,” Routhier said. " I would ask the trustees to take a careful look at the process of how they choose their board."
Fielding numerous questions about the election process in their panel discussion, trustees Jose Fernandez ’77, Al Mulley Jr., MD, ’70, and chair Bill Neukom ’64 referred to the work of a governance committee on the board of trustees that has for the last year been studying what sort of board best serves Dartmouth’s interests in the 21st century, and how that board should be elected. The trustees said they anticipated a report from the committee at their June meeting.
As far as I can see, though, that report will be confidential under the trustees' ground rules, so we won't know what it says. Among my concerns is that we have (just based on those who are reported as speaking above) a doctor, a lawyer, and whatever else (a dentist?) asserting their opinions on Board policymaking.
This is no different from the condo board or the youth soccer board, with the eager doctors, lawyers, and dentists who don't get a chance to make policy decisions in their normal work, but relish the chance to screw things up for the condo or the soccer league.
Except that college trustees are also typically major donors, which as far as I can surmise adds an additional dimension: these guys are rich. Looking at the slate of Association candidates for the last election, I believe all were members of "senior" societies (it used to be "secret" societies) like Dragon or C&G. Membership in these is a class marker. I don't believe any of the petition candidates has been a member of a "senior" society.
I strongly suspect that the traditional major donor Board member regards membership as a kind of next step above "senior" society. As C.S.Lewis has pointed out, there is always an in-group within any other in-group. What probably has Neukom and the others exercised is that it's possible to bypass the polite and tasteful ways in which Board members have heretofore been selected, and here come the riffraff.
But I don't see how wealth particularly qualifies people for policymaking (or at least policy monitoring) positions. On one hand I'd like to be a fly on the wall in those committee meetings where they figure out what to do about the nominating process, but on the other, I'd probably get disgusted pretty quickly with how dumb the remarks were. Even if I were just a fly.
Mr. Bruce, I think you're steering away from intelligent discourse and into baseless personal attacks. You seem to have a deep-seated resentment of Mr. Neukom simply because he's rich.
I agree that doctors and lawyers are often full of themselves and overenthusiastic about policy making, but I don't think that the analogy to the condo board or the soccer league makes much sense. Neukom was Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft for a while and had plenty of opportunities to make policy decisions. The vast majority of the Trustees have MBAs, and most have backgrounds that seem like good preparation for being a trustee.
Todd Zywicki doesn't have an MBA, but he was "Director of Office Policy" at the FTC.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~trustees/biographies/zywicki.html
Most of these people have considerable policymaking experience and don't strike me as the overzealous, incompetent soccer parents. You've said twice in this thread that you suspect that Neukom doesn't like people who aren't rich, but you haven't suggested any basis for believing that other than to say that he happens to be rich and that he seems unhappy with the recent success of the trustee candidates.
I'd suggest that you wait a few hours between watching The Skulls and posting on this thread. Your other comments were pretty thoughtful, but this is just silly.
Keggy, it seems to me that there's a fair amount of sociological opinion that says the very wealthy do, in fact, have what might be described as a mutual class interest.
Unlike the non-wealthy, they have a vested interest in family associations, for instance, since this is how wealth is transferred. I haven't spoken with any of my cousins in decades, but the relationship among cousins in wealthy families is much closer, since they share a concern with the management of major financial resources.
The positions of very wealthy individuals in corporate hierarchies is also likely to represent strategic alliances, much like feudal marriages, more than the qualifications of the individuals. Fords, DuPonts, etc., have tended to serve as executives in the companies they control as a means of watching the eggs in the basket, but not really reflective of where they would rise had they not had substantial working control of the enterprise in the first place via the family block of stock.
We simply don't know how the charter members of the Board were selected, any more than we really know how members of Dragon or C&G were selected (and of course, we don't even know exactly who's a member in some of these cases, as they are "secret" societies). But I think we can rely on the assumption that they're from wealthy backgrounds, and that various recognized mechanisms, including the interests of heirs to large fortunes, govern their selection, far more than merit-based achievement.
T.J.Rodgers is wealthy (though nowhere near in Neukom's league) but self-made. I suspect this drives the resentment of other Board members, every bit as much as the fact that Robinson, Zywicki, and Smith are all the first in their families to attend college.
For that matter, Keggy, I'm puzzled that your own remarks seem thoughtful when not on the subject of wealth vs merit-based advancement of the self-made. I note that you seem to have lost your equanimity above and accused me of not coming from a privileged background. The horror! Any suggestion that there is in fact class interest among the very wealthy, that such class interest manifests itself in places like the boards of prestigious non-profits, and that the motives of board members may be attributable to their highly privileged backgrounds seems to cause a loss of temper on your part.
But these assertions are based on well-documented mainstream opinion.
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