ambika's spot

an interesting take on the dartmouth issue by a GM at MSFT. not sure where i stand yet -- need to let it percolate a bit. 

Quote

Dartmouth

There's a new furor in Hanover. This weekend, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees revised some of the governance rules, including how trustees are selected. The report is here. But it turns out that there is a fair amount of back-story behind this.

I first learned about this controversy a couple of weeks ago when I read this article in the Wall Street Journal.

But let's go way back further. I am, I must confess, a Dartmouth graduate -- class of 1988.  Anyone who has spent time among Dartmouth grads can tell you that 95% of them love the place and 5% despise it, with no middle ground. Certainly for my time there and at least 15 years afterward, I counted myself among the 5% -- though that position has softened in the past few years as I've made a few recent return visits and witnessed some significant positive changes in the quality of life there.

Dartmouth is an extreme place -- what can only be described as "freaking cold!" in the winter, and on top of that  more than two hours' drive from anything resembling civilization. Its alums are no less extreme. It wouldn't be a far stretch to describe it as OCD University, where between the infamous Dartmouth Review, the Dartmouth Outing Club with their fringe "Cabin and Trail", the frat parties, and of course the academic regime, the place breeds extremism in pretty much everything. While I hated the weather and the isolation, what really drove me nuts was the personal insanity bred (and perhaps even encouraged) by the College and the environment.

And it carries on after graduation. Dartmouth pummels its alums with mass mailings and requests to donate. As an institution it is very proud of its highly involved alumni and alumnae, and of the high donor rate, one of the highest for any academic institution in the US.

The problem with this, however, is it encourages the belief that alums should still have a say in how the college is run, long after they've graduated. Currently there are 18 trustees of the college:

• the Governor of New Hampshire
• the President of the University
• eight trustees appointed by the existing board of trustees
• eight trustees elected by the alumni

And the last one is the source of the controversy.

In recent times, the alumni elections have stopped becoming a simple, nice thing and have become very political. Dartmouth alums, particularly the conservative ones, are well known for publicly complaining about the direction of the college, and in recent years have taken to campaigning heavily to try to get the alumni-elected trustee positions.

But that aside, it's worth pointing out a couple of other things about the Dartmouth board of trustees that are highlighted in the governance committee's report. First, the board is small, compared to other elite institutions in the US (with the exception of Harvard). Being a trustee of a modern research university is not a thing your do on a weekend in your spare time; it's an enormous time commitment, and if you want really top-notch people to consider doing it, you'd better think hard about how much time you're asking them to put into this. To try to address this, the board voted to add eight new trustee positions, to help spread the load a bit more. It's really a double-edged sword, because as anyone who has sat in a meeting with dozens of people can tell you, the more people you have, the harder it is to have useful conversations that reach a good conclusion.

Second: a modern research university is a much more diverse operation than it was 50 years ago (20 years ago, for that matter). You need to think very hard about the kind of diverse expertise the board requires in order to do that well. And quite frankly, alumni elections are not the best way to do that. So the board decided that all eight of the new positions should be selected by the existing board of trustees, rather than elected by the alumni.

Together this looks like a plot to reduce the power and influence of alumni, and consolidate the power in the board of trustees. Especially if you are a rabid Dartmouth alum. And quite frankly, I can believe that in the past few years the board of trustees has become more divisive -- especially after the politicized alumni election process put some ringers in there. But looking objectively at this, these recommendations just make good, simple sense. The board needs more people with collectively broader expertise, and they need to have the ability to go get that expertise.

And to put some perspective on this for the Dartmouth alums: the board is not throwing away democracy, because this isn't a democracy. You're not citizens of the Republic of Dartmouth. No one is taking away any God-given right of yours. Dartmouth isn't a public institution, either; it's a privately held academic institution with billions of dollars of assets that needs to be run by people who know what they're doing. Your best argument that you ought to have a say in what happens there is that you donate money. But hey, you took the tax deduction for your donation, and by doing so you're acknowledging that it was a gift, not an investment. You don't "own" a part of Dartmouth, and you have no inherent voting power. You're certainly free to vote with your wallet if you don't like what goes on there (which is the approach I've taken) but beyond that, just shut up and deal with it. We're fortunate as alums that Dartmouth has any alumni-elected trustees at all, let alone the highest number of any elite academic institution in this country. Take that as a gift and get over yourself. If the trustees screw it up, the students and the alumni donations will stop coming. They're not stupid; they know that. So stop getting in the way, go back to your dreamy little dreams of all those wonderful beer-enhanced good times you had when you were an undergraduate at the College on the Hill, and let them run the damn school.

One last point: if you look at the list of current trustees, they're almost all alumni. Which makes it awfully difficult to argue that alumni have no representation or voice. (they're also almost all men -- problematic given that now a majority of the students in incoming classes are women)

Now excuse me while I go put on my flak jacket; I sense an imminent attack.