Class Notes August 2006

Our Class is debating the controversy over whether Dartmouth should adopt a new Constitution to increase  voting in election of College trustees and make it less likely that a single petition candidate for Trustee positions can win because three candidates of the nominating committee  split the vote. There also are other changes.

 

Two members of the Class were on the nine-member  Alumni Goverance Task Force, which unanimously, despite ideological conflicts, proposed the change that will be subject to an all-alumni vote this fall. They are Jim Adler and Joe Mandel, and both are outspokenly in favor of the change, which would require that petition candidates come forward first, and then allow the nominating committee to name just one candidate to oppose each of them. In contrast to past elections, in which only persons present in Hanover were allowed to vote, and a three-fourths majority was required for passage, all 66,500 alumni would be allowed to vote on this change and a two-thirds margin is sufficient for passage.  Alumni trustee elections would be postponed to allow this vote to take place first.

 

Mandel, a vice chancellor at UCLA, told me the committee, despite having two members with conservative alumni views, was able to come up with the consensus position for the change, which he characterized as democratizing the process.

 

Adler declared, "The proposed Constitution represents a major achievement in constructive compromise, offering ALL alumni stronger voice in the alumni governance process, while encouraging more effective communication between alumni and the trustees election process. The vote is too important to ignore. Classmates are urged to learn the facts -- and then vote 'yes.'"

 

Gene Kohn, a former class president, associated himself with this position, calling it an easy decision to make.

 

But our classmate, Bob Brown, retired from Kodak and now living in Tallahassee, Fla., has a different position.

 

Brown, who calls himself a liberal Democrat, nonetheless said "for most of the last 20 years I have taken the side of the Dartmouth Review" on social and free speech issues at Dartmouth, and he feels  the change of trustee voting rules would be a mistake.

 

"I think my dissatisfaction with The College and with (the Bush Administration) has common links in the raw abuse of power with which they are entrusted, the prostitution of those principles which they claim to espouse, and lack of respect for individual rights and freedoms," he wrote me. "I am led to believe that the current brouhaha about the new Constitution is more of the same...The postponing of elections I see as a thinly-veiled ploy by the incumbents to remain in power for about nine months longer than their legitimate terms."

 

Brown said, however, he expects the new Constitution to pass "as will much of the current controversy." He quoted a Vietnam-era poem from The Who:

 

"I'll tip my hat to the new constituion

Take a bow for the new revolution.

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday.

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again."

 

--Ken Reich, 5522 Nagle Ave., Van Nuys, CA 91401; (818) 994-9231, kennethireich@yahoo.com.