Trustee Election: Dartmouth's Choices

by Robert Allgyer and Benjamin Oren

The Alumni of Dartmouth College will cast a collective vote within the next month for a new College Trustee, to replace Richard Page '54, who is retiring.

The Alumni Association has named three “official” candidates: Maxwell Anderson '77, Michael Chu '68 and Kevin Ross '77. One more—James Harris '91—collected enough signatures from College alumni to secure a spot on the ballot. Every living alum will be able to cast a vote for one candidate; the ballot went in the mail March 1, and is due back at the beginning of April.

This election is particularly important because only five of the thirteen Trustees are elected by popular alumni vote; the other eight are self-selecting.

The immediate context of the vote is the Board's pending consideration of the recommended Student Life Initiative. Several candidates have framed their campaigns in specific response to the Initiative, and insiders have noted that the election gives the alumni body a lucky chance to weigh in on the matter explicitly.

The vote, however symbolically important it may be, will not likely have a substantive impact on the deliberation process, since Page will hold his seat through June. By the time the new Trustee is seated, Board Chair William King '63 has repeatedly said, the Board will already have accepted or rejected the advisory panel's recommendations.

With isolated alumni movements challenging the Initiative in court, however (see opposing page), and student protests persisting, it is likely that the new Trustee will play a part in shaping the form of the Initiative's implementation, should the Trustees go ahead with the present plan.

The vote comes as Dartmouth is considering questions of its own institutional direction and collegiate theme. President James Wright has said that the College needs to restructure its institutional approach to deepen Dartmouth's stress on faculty research, in order to attract more top professors to the College. But Wright's critics say that such a move necessarily means a de-emphasis on teaching, and that Wright wants to abandon Dartmouth's traditional role as a teaching college in order to forge a meek imitation of Harvard, or Yale.

This month's alumni vote, then, has the potential for unique and lasting import.

The Dartmouth Review contacted the candidates for Trustee and solicited their opinions on these issues, important to the College's students and alumni and essential to the College's future. What follows is designed to inform the choices of Dartmouth's alumni, and to inform the intelligence of Dartmouth's student body.

Maxwell Anderson '77 is director of the Whitney Museum in New York. His biography cites as his undergraduate accomplishments his membership on the karate team and his editorial position with the Jack-O-Lantern.

Michael Chu '68 is the president of ACCION, Inc., a Boston-based non-profit whose goal is to use its officers' experience in high-stakes finance to secure loans from major banks to small and struggling business. While at Dartmouth, Chu played rugby and was a member of Foley House/Delta Upsilon, an undergraduate society.

James Harris '91 is a portfolio manager with Paribas, a French investment concern. He was secretary of Psi Upsilon while an undergraduate. He is the youngest alum to yet make it onto Dartmouthís ballot.

Kevin Ross '77 is a lawyer in Atlanta and adjunct professor of election law at Emory University's law school. He has been deeply involved in local politics there and chaired the City of Atlanta's Charter Review Commission. The only information Ross' official biography gives about his time at Dartmouth is that his major was economics.

To broadly characterize the four candidates, Anderson's and Chu's sentiments tend to closely mirror those of the Initiative, while Ross and Harris drift toward more independent stances.

“I'm impressed at the thoughtfulness of the document, and I support it as an effort to try to open up the campus and make college as attractive a choice for undergraduate choice as it can be,” Anderson said. “In a general sense, I support what is suggested.”

Anderson later sent an e-mail to a supporter, which was forwarded to The Dartmouth Review, and draws his position on the initiative into even sharper relief: “Unless Dartmouth breaks free of the reputation of a school rooted in dated social norms embedded in the fraternity system, it will always run the risk of seeming unwelcoming to many women, ethnically diverse students, or students from other parts of the world, and it will always be an unlikely choice for the loner with something to offer—the sophisticate who wrongly fancies himself too worldly for Hanover, or other essential participants in an intellectual climate that is demographically and experientially varied,” Anderson wrote. “I am behind the principles and goals articulated.”

Maxwell Anderson's professional record does not seem to promote such an inclusive vision; he made headlines when he radically rearranged the responsibilities of his curators upon assuming the stewardship of the Whitney. The move drove many of his staffers to resign.

Michael Chu's opinions on the fraternity system tend to closely parallel those of Anderson.

On the other side are Kevin Ross and James Harris.

Ross says that though he appreciates the sentiments behind the initiative, he thinks the issue is too complex to be solved simply by removing the Greek system—a move he opposes.

“First is that I believe that there is a lot in the report and in the overall initiative which is very worthy, I would call it aspirational in nature. I think the efforts to deal with alcohol abuse on campus is past due at Dartmouth as it probably is at many schools,” Ross said.

“I think the thinking about changing the residential system and improving the housing stock for students and exploring the clustering concept as a way of adding greater continuity to the college experience—that is all very thoughtful and worthwhile. Of course, a lot of people have read into the report or read into the whole initiative antagonism to the fraternity and sorority systems, and my thoughts on that are pretty direct. First of all, I don't favor, and as a Trustee would not support, the abolition of the fraternity or sorority system. I take at face value the administration and Trustee Board's statements that they do not intend to do this.

“The next point I go to from there is that if there's not any intention to do it directly, the report should not be structured or interpreted in a way that would cause that result indirectly. And I am a little concerned about certain things I see in the report that would suggest that maybe the standards that are part of the reform effort are going to be set so high that there isn't a reasonable prospect for existing fraternity's and sororities to meet those standards.

“There were some sentences in there to me that suggest prejudgment, which I don't think is a positive or constructive thing. I think the initiative overall should be about increasing choice, not eliminating choice and in that sense, again, I think there is clearly a lot of alumni and a lot of students who feel very closely to the fraternity and sorority system. I think that system can be improved; if we've got standards let's enforce those standards. But let's not eliminate choice.”

Harris, in his official statement, publicly feared that the Trustee Initiative would make Dartmouth host of some pernicious social engineering.

“Recently, Dartmouth has closely examined residential life,” Harris said. “As a Trustee, I will defend rights to free association, and promote responsible relationships among all members of Dartmouth's community. President Wright deserves our thanks for proposing official college alternatives to a vigorous, independent social life. However, we shouldn't narrow choices or forcibly socialize private life. Social engineers shouldn't remake Dartmouth College into a sterile modern museum with only the politically correct on display.”

Ross, significantly, tied his position on the Initiative into a larger vision for Dartmouth—a vision which leaves room for the College to stay a small, teaching-oriented institution.

“My vision is to continue in relative terms to be a smaller college where talented people come in, know each other, have a superior academic experience, build the lifelong relationships that can sustain you and move you forward in life, and be a place where people look at tough issues involving academic life and are bold enough to say let's try to address them, and the whole while maintaining our standing as one of the finest colleges in the land.”

The election took an interesting twist when Harris, the lone independent candidate, proposed several structural changes to the Alumni Council, the body charged with overseeing the process. Harris thinks the process is closed and caught in antiquated regulations, and is unhealthly antagonistic to independents like him.

Harris had five proposals:

1) Allow Internet voting to make the process more accessible to younger voters. 2) Create an Internet database of all living alumni to allow the particularly transient younger voters easier access to a ballot, and to allow the Alumni Council easier access to them. 3) Provide for student overview of the vote-counting process, to reinforce the impression of fairness. 4) Release the numerical vote totals, again to reinforce the impression of fairness. At the moment, the vote totals are unpublished. 5) Deposit official brochures, statements, etc., in the Dartmouth College Library.

Harris says that these five steps, taken together, would go a long way towards making the process seem more fair, and opening up the election to all alumni.

All of his proposals were rejected by the Alumni Council.