The tanks of Tiananmen roll onto the Dartmouth Green by James Panero

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In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.

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Sep 10, 2007 03:24 PM

The tanks of Tiananmen roll onto the Dartmouth Green

by James Panero

William F. Buckley once noted, "If alumni are going to finance the College, they cannot be perceived as inactive agents who visit the area once a year for the annual stimulation of their philanthropic glands."

The notion that alumni should have any say in the governance of their alma mater is a significant development, and rare. Because it is still so rare, it also much be nurtured. Dartmouth College has broken ground in such reform, but now the school is again under threat from forces within. Over the weekend, the head of the school’s board of trustees, a man named Ed Haldeman, announced that in the interest of "good governance" the school would seek to undermine an 1891 agreement that gave rank-and-file alumni the right to elect half of the Dartmouth board by direct vote. The lead Note & Comment in our September issue outlined this worst-case possibility.

As goes New Hampshire, so goes the nation. It is therefore in everybody’s interest to follow these developments closely.

Over twenty-five years ago, a California surgeon named John Steel became the first petition candidate to be elected to the Dartmouth board. That was the start of Dartmouth’s reform movement. It took over twenty years before another petition candidate made it over the razor-wire fence. Since then, three more have done it in succession. This is revolutionary. We covered the election of the latest petition candidate, Steve Smith, here and here. These elections speak to the health of the school, by which I mean the health of her alumni. Thanks to them, discussions about the future of the college began to be ventilated in public.

Then a small group of the school’s richest donors, all of whom had until recently enjoyed the uncontested benefits of trusteeship, began to strike back against the base. They attempted to rewrite the school’s constitution to restrict rank-and-file involvement. With record participation, Dartmouth alumni soundly rejected this in an open vote. Having exhausted their democratic options, this group then began to consider undemocratic means. This bring us up to the present.

I am not surprised by the latest announcement. Alumni want accountability, accessibility, and openness in the school’s leadership. As Haldeman’s powermove demonstrates, the old guard want something else entirely.

This is a dark day for the school. What’s so unfortunate is that people like Ed Haldeman will risk destroying Dartmouth to save their consolidation of power. It is interesting to note that Alumni giving reached record levels of participation after the election of the four petition candidates and the defeat of the new constitution. I gave a donation to the school for the very first time. But Haldeman does not care about such statistics, nor does he care if he turns off thousands of loyal alums in the process. Haldeman has called the petition elections "politicized, costly, and divisive"--these are elections that alumni voted in. Are their votes divisive?

Such is the language of autocracy whenever it comes into contact with democratic idealism. Now Haldeman has rolled the tanks of Tiananmen onto the Dartmouth Green.

As the petition trustee T.J. Rodgers noted recently in The Wall Street Journal: "This is not a conservative-liberal conflict. This is a libertarian-totalitarian conflict." Look for more reaction over the next few days--including from Powerline, Roger L. Simon, Joe Malchow, the Wall Street Journal, The Dartmouth Review, and (in our October issue) the pages of The New Criterion.