Dartmouth Alumni Reject Contentious New Constitution

The results of the vote on the Dartmouth alumni constitution are in.The constitution was rejected by Dartmouth alumni, who turned out in record numbers to vote on the measure, which would have changed, among other facets of alumni governance, the way the school’s trustees are elected.The proposed constitution required a two-thirds majority vote to go into effect but received only 49% of the 24,834 ballots cast; 38% of eligible voters weighed in on the matter. Although Dartmouth professed its neutrality, college president James Wright endorsed the constitutional change in his capacity as a trustee.The debate over the constitution brought campus politics out of Hanover and into the national spotlight, in large part because a trio of Dartmouth trustees — an entrepreneur, T.J. Rodgers, a former Reagan speechwriter, Peter Robinson, and a law professor, Todd Zywicki — argued that this election was not about constitutional technicalities but about who would have their voices heard at Dartmouth.Dartmouth is one of a handful of schools that allow alumni to elect trustees, and any Dartmouth alumnus able to solicit 500 signatures can be added to the ballot. Messrs. Rodgers, Robinson, and Zywicki are “petition candidates,” and they all ran on platforms critical of the Dartmouth administration.Mr. Zywicki described the new constitution as “an effort to protect the established order.”By requiring petition candidates to announce their candidacies before Dartmouth announced its own slate of candidates, Mr. Zywicki said the new constitution would have reversed the normal election procedures and defeated the purpose of using the petition candidates as a “safety valve” for the oversights of the committee responsible for nominating Dartmouth’s official candidates.Dartmouth’s student newspaper, the Dartmouth, parted ways with Messrs. Rodgers, Robinson, and Zywicki, when it endorsed the constitution in an editorial.“A vote in this election should not be a political vote against College President James Wright or Dartmouth ‘insiders’ to which it has been unfairly reduced by many of the document’s detractors,” the paper’s editors wrote. “Rather, it should be a vote in favor of a constitution that streamlines cumbersome organizations in a spirit of compromise and democratic representation.”An influential group of alumni, with leadership comprised of former Dartmouth trustees, devoted enormous resources toward an effort aimed at passing the constitution. They founded Dartmouth Alumni for Common Sense, a group devoted to securing the passage of the constitution, and hired a public relations group to aid them in their efforts. For the past month, they have tried to reach as many of Dartmouth’s 66,500 alumni as possible through mass e-mails, telephone pollsters, and pre-recorded phone calls.“We regret that the proposed reforms to the alumni constitution did not receive the votes necessary for approval,” the vice president of the Association of Alumni of Dartmouth College, Merle Adelman, said in a statement.

Dartmouth Alumni Reject Contentious New Constitution

Dartmouth Alumni Reject Contentious New Constitution

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