Amid homecoming festivities and foliage, alumni of Dartmouth College will travel to rural Hanover, N.H., this weekend to settle a bitter power struggle with major implications for the Ivy League school.

On the agenda is the election of the executive committee of Dartmouth’s Association of Alumni. It’s an annual election to choose the leadership of the alumni’s representative body, and typically the stakes are very low. This time around, say college observers, the composition of Dartmouth’s board of trustees and the academic direction of the school may hinge on the outcome of Sunday’s election. Alumni can only vote by appearing in person.

The election comes against the backdrop of a concerted effort among conservative-leaning alumni to influence academic policy by winning seats on the 18-member board of trustees, the highest governing body of the college. At Dartmouth, unlike most other schools, alumni have the power to elect half of the members of the board.

In the past two years, three alumni have circumvented the traditional process for electing trustees by winning seats on the board as petition candidates.They defeated candidates who were nominated by the official alumni governing body, which some say is tied closely to the administration led by President James Wright.

The three so-called insurgent trustees, T.J. Rodgers, Peter Robinson, and Todd Zywicki, campaigned on a platform unusually critical of the administration. They told alumni they would reverse what they saw as an attempt on the part of the administration to dilute undergraduate education by transforming Dartmouth into a research university, one that would not measure up to Harvard and Yale. They also accused the administration of censoring speech and told alumni they would push to abolish speech codes if elected.

It was a message that evidently resonated with voters. In the spring, Mr. Zywicki, a 39-year-old law professor at George Mason University School of Law and a contributor to the popular Volokh Conspiracy blog, and Mr. Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributor to the National Review’s house blog, stunned the Dartmouth community by toppling a lineup of CEOs and vice presidents of major corporations. One of the vanquished candidates is Gregg Engles, the chairman and CEO of the Dean Foods Company, a publicly traded dairy company with $10 billion in annual revenues. Mr. Zywicki and Mr. Robinson were both encouraged to run by Mr. Rodgers, a brash, wealthy, and self-described libertarian Silicon Valley CEO who won the year before.

“There is no reasonable person who could say that our resumes or our life experiences were in any way more impressive than those of the candidates against whom we were running,” said Mr. Robinson, 48, who drafted President Reagan’s famous Berlin speech that exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Mr. Robinson said: “The only reason why members of the alumni body would have voted for us was because they had read our positions and agreed with them.”

The results of this weekend’s alum ni election may determine whether the “Lone Pine” revolution, as some have dubbed the surprise victories, has a future.

The election comes weeks after a special alumni task force completed a draft of a new constitution that supporters of Mr. Rodgers, Mr. Zywicki, and Mr. Robinson say puts petition candidates at a serious disadvantage.

The proposed constitution, which combines the alumni association and the small but powerful alumni council into one entity, changes the trustee electoral process in two important ways: Petition candidates would have to notify the alumni association 45 days before the association nominates its own candidates. And under the proposed system, alumni would vote using a partial preference system that allows voters to rank their first and second choices. Alumni currently use an approval voting system in which they check off any number of candidates on their ballot.

Critics of the proposed constitution say petition candidates are disadvan taged by having to give notice of their candidacies weeks in advance because it allows the alumni association to tailor its picks to best compete with those already in the race. Critics also speculate that Mr. Zywicki and Mr. Robinson would have lost under the proposed preference system by splitting firstplace votes.

“They are making changes that do de facto make it more difficult to be a successful petition candidate, and they haven’t explained why these changes are needed,” said Dartmouth undergraduate, Joseph Malchow, 20, a conservative campus blogger.

The chairman of the task force, Josiah Stevenson, wrote an op-ed piece for Dartmouth’s student newspaper this month denying that he and the other framers are a “pawn of the college administration,” and said the changes in the constitution simplify the voting process. The push to amend the constitution predated the victories of the socalled insurgent candidates, he wrote.

The executive committee election pits two slates of candidates against each other, one of which has gotten on the ballot by petition and is aligned with the petition trustees. A victory for the petition slate would make it unlikely that the constitution would come up for a vote before the alumni association, and it would increase the chances that trustees nominated by the association would have the backing of Mr. Rodgers, Mr. Zywicki, and Mr. Robinson.

Merle Adelman, who is running for first vice president on the nominated slate that is opposing the petition candidates, said she and her running mates “don’t have opinions about the administration.This is the slate that follows the established process.” She said the executive committee does not have the power to defeat the proposed constitutional changes.

Dartmouth’s vice president for public affairs,William Walker, said that the college administration’s view is that the task force that proposed the revised constitution “has engaged in a thoughtful, deliberate and inclusive process to gather a wide range of ideas on alumni governance.”