As you may recall from past DP posts, a few months ago Stephen Smith won election to Dartmouth College’s Board of Trustees over the opposition of the school’s administration. He was the fourth “outsider” to win a seat, and the New Criterion recently reported that this sent Dartmouth’s rulers back to the drawing board:

Congratulations to Mr. Smith were still echoing when, on May 19, Charles Haldeman, Dartmouth’s new Chairman of the Board, announced that “the Governance Committee of the Board this summer will review the composition of the Board and the process of trustee selection.” James Wright, Dartmouth’s president, is a member of this board-within-the-board, and so is in the enviable position of reviewing himself and his own policies—not what most of us mean by “oversight.”

Three alumni trustees—but not, you will be shocked to learn, any of the four independent trustees—are also members of this select committee. Meanwhile, the college has also withheld customary funds and mailing lists from elected officers of Dartmouth’s Association of Alumni who wished to publicize the controversy.

The New Criterion suspected the Governance Committee was about to demonstrate the accuracy of the magazine’s description of university leadership:

As we noted in this space last April, college faculties and administrations represent “an entrenched, sclerotic, and self-perpetuating hegemony.”

Now, OpinionJournal reports that the Governance Committee may be planning to defeat the will of the Alumni and the spirit of Dartmouth’s own charter:

The scheme the board’s governance committee is most likely to adopt this week has been dubbed “The Harvard Plan” because it would preserve the faint form of democracy while arrogating most power to an unelected internal committee. At Harvard, this is called the “Corporation”; a larger elected body, the Overseers, has little power.

Former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis recently recounted the disposition of the Corporation during the Larry Summers debacle: “[It] was a leadership vacuum. . . . If Harvard were a public corporation . . . the shareholders would have been up in arms about the failure of the directors to care responsibly for the institution.” It is not surprising that the “best practice” Dartmouth seeks to emulate is precisely the practice that enabled Harvard’s expulsion of Mr. Summers.

Besides possessing prestige, institutional power and national political clout, the university system’s “self-perpetuating hegemony” presides over an enormous treasure trove:

The endowments of the 25 wealthiest institutions of higher learning total $178 billion, and a college education is one of the largest investments a person will ever make (in tuition and donations as an alumnus). It isn’t a surprise that alumni stakeholders have begun to show interest and exert influence. The only surprise is the lengths to which academic elites will go in order to keep out the light of day.

Those lengths may include harassment and abuse. Last week OpinionJournal interviewed T.J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley chipmaker Cypress Semiconductor and one of the four “dissident” trustees:

(Rogers’) first priority was to improve its “very poor record of freedom of speech.” Soon enough, the college president, James Wright, overturned a speech code. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a watchdog group, elevated Dartmouth’s rating from “red” to its highest, “green,” one of only seven schools in the country with that status. “We made progress, and I was feeling pretty good,” Mr. Rodgers says.

But his good feelings didn’t last:

(T)hough he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, “It’s been a horrible experience. I’m a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That’s not the way I’m treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby.”

Rogers believes his standing has been damaged:

“They attack things that don’t matter because they can’t attack you for what you stand for–quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we’re a response to the problem.”

In Mr. Rodgers’s judgment, the increasingly political denigration–the “rancor,” he calls it–has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general.

We’ll soon know what procedural path the college’s Governance Committee has chosen. Perhaps the Larry Summers debacle at Harvard emboldened other administrations to keep control of their own fiefdoms by any means necessary. They may have noticed that, once the negative publicity died down, life at Harvard’s educational juggernaut returned to what passes for normal there.

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