What I Learned From The Alumni Trustee Movement

Every now and then, calls appear for greater involvement of university alumni in governance and decisionmaking at their respective schools. I'm not entirely sure why alumni are especially qualified to do this, especially in light of the general decline in educational standards -- if the value of a four-year degree is decreasing, why should the university seek out the guidance of former students who are its own low-quality product?

After a lifetime, I'm able to ask that question now. I didn't ask that question 25 years or so ago, when I got involved in the alumni trustee movement at Dartmouth. I think the best argument I heard was in effect that membership on university boards is dominated by very wealthy donors who are representing largely plutocratic interests, and the selection process bypasses potential candidates who may represent other points of view.

In the case of Dartmouth, the unique history of its board offered a potential test case:

The system of alumni balloting to determine a nominee dates to the late nineteenth century. In 1876, Dartmouth's Board of Trustees resolved to fill some upcoming vacancies with alumni. Vacancies were rare at the time, however, and the number of alumni seated was small; most of the members of the Board were still elderly non-alumni clergymen who were seen as theologically and educationally conservative. In 1891, in what came to be known as "The 1891 Agreement", the Board of Trustees resolved to elect five trustees who had been nominated by the alumni of five years' standing. The nomination process would be handled by the Association of Alumni of Dartmouth College, of which every matriculated student becomes a member automatically upon graduation. Soon after the Board issued its 1891 resolution, five members resigned to open seats for the new nominees, and Dartmouth's first effective means of granting alumni influence on the composition of its Board was under way[.]

Not mentioned here is the circumstance that Dartmouth at the time was undergoing a financial crisis, and the board reached out to alumni for donations. The so-=called "alumni trustees" were estalished in return for the financial help, which was the essence of the "1891 Agreement". Throughout the 20th century, the nomination process for the alumni trustees was gradually modified, but until 1980, there was no effective dissagreement among trustees of any constituency.

Alumni trustees were nominated by a body called the Alumni Council, which appears always to have been an old boy network. In 1980, however, a San Diego urologist, Dr John Steel, successfully campaigned for nomination and election to the board as an alumni trustee via a previously unused petition process outside the old boy network. In yesterday's post, I referred to what I called called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid 2000s; the one initiated by Dr Steel was the first.

Steel certainly showed that this could be done, and the Second Rebellion could not have taken place without Steel's pathfinding example. I interviewed Steel for The Dartmouth Review about 2005. Steel was generally aligned with the Review's founders, and his campaign in 1980 was contemporary with the Review's founding. He appears to have been close to then-Dartmouth English professor, National Review senior editor, and founding Dartmouth Review faculty advisor Jeffrey Hart.

By Steel's own account, he was hardly an insurgent. He was a prosperous physician, so the much more wealthy charter trustees didn't see him as a threat, although he was fully aware that he flew commercial to board meetings, while the charter trustees had private jets. And Steel had personal qualities that made it easier for him to get along with everyone on the board. He saw there was a general consensus among members to do the best thing for the institution, and insofar as he exerted influence, it was as a member of the overall consensus.

It appears that after Steel, things settled down again, and there were no new petition candidates for alumni seats on the board until 2004, when Silicon Valley billionaire T J Rodgers ran for the alumni nomination as a petition candidate, only the second to do so after Steel. Rodgers was much more vocal, but I'm not sure if he had a definite program, and in any case, he was only one vote on the board, which operated by consensus.

But this provided an opening for two more petition candidates in 2005. That year, Todd Zywicki, an ambitious young law professor building his career, and Peter Robinson, a Jeffrey Hart protégé who'd become a Reagan White House speechwriter on Hart's influence, were nominated and elected. Robinson, a C-lister in the conservative movement ever since, claims to have written the line, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" for Reagan's 1987 address at the Brandenburg Gate -- and that's it. That was his one accomplisment.

Zywicki did neither himself nor the alumni trustee movement any favors. He characterized himself as an insurgent candidate, and his style was characterized as "open and oppositional". Mattters came to a head in 2007 when he addressed a conservative conference, making the point that he was a member of the Dartmouth board, and opened himself to allegations that he violated board policy:

On November 26, [2007], The Dartmouth published a column called In Violation of a Trustee’s Duty, by Bill Montgomery of the Dartmouth Class of 1952. The article called for Todd Zywicki’s punishment or forced resignation as a member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees because of remarks made by Zywicki while speaking at the 2007 Pope Center Conference.

According to Montgomery, Zywicki’s “most egregious statement” called former Dartmouth president James O. Freedman “a truly evil man.” As Zywicki explained in a powerful defense, this was not his own phrase but a quotation that he failed to attribute to Jeffrey Hart. Zywicki also apologized for its use as too excessive.

. . . Montgomery’s main argument for punitive actions against Zywicki suggests that Todd’s right to free speech ended when he became a Dartmouth trustee: “if he was only speaking for himself, he could speak as he pleased…when he became a member of the Dartmouth board, Zywicki accepted the obligation to follow board guidelines for conduct as clearly spelled out in the Statement on Governance and Trustee Responsibilities.”

While Zywicki wasn't removed from the board immediately, the trustees subsequently denied him a second term when his first term expired in 2009. A second controversy developed around another petition trustee, Stephen Smith, who was elected to the board in 2007. His term expired in 2011, and soon after its expiration,

Professor Stephen F. Smith, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Notre Dame Law School, stands accused of a serious crime.

According to the South Bend Tribune, Professor Smith faces one count of domestic battery, a class D felony. He’s accused of striking and kicking his wife at their home, in an incident that allegedly took place back in June.

Professor Smith doesn’t fit the profile of the typical defendant in a domestic violence case. How many DV defendants have clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court? How many have graduated from Dartmouth College, where Smith served as a trustee, and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he once taught?

It appears that, like they did with Zywicki, the board did not approve a second term for Smith, and he was off the board by the time the violence took place. But there can be little question that the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid-2000s simply didn't produce serious candidates, unlike the first one of 1980. The biggest problem was that grandstanding, ambitious board members like Zywicki and Smith simply didn't have personal styles or personal qualities that allowed them to work successfully with wealthy people who flew in private jets and made a point of staying out of the news.

I also suspect that none of the Second Rebellion candidates had much of an agenda beyond self-promotion. Again, this didn't play well with plutocrats who employed publicists to keep them out of the nees, not in it. A third factor was that Jeffrey Hart, the force behind both rebellions, and whose friends and protégés made up the candidate pools, was slipping into dementia in the 2000s -- by 2008, he endorsed Obama for president, and as a sometime contributor to The Dartmouth Review, I had the sense that the staff was covering for him.

At some point when the whole project had collapsed and both Zywicki and Smith were effectively in disgrace, somebody approached me to see if I'd run as a petition candidate. I couldn't decline fast enough.

When I first became interested in the project, I must not have remembered Ferdinand Lundberg, who if he'd been available would have told me that univeristy boards are the creatures of the very wealthy, who use them to control large blocks of stock via effective proxy ownership. A few ego-tripping alumni board members will be just a small irritant that can be slapped away. Best not to have bothered.