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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Smith Takes Election: Lone Pine Revolution Continues

Stephen Smith '88 has won a seat on the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College. The College's website reports that Smith took home 55% of the vote—Dartblog reminds us that that's a new high, topping T.J. Rodgers '70 54% from 2004. Voter participation was also historically high with 28 % of alumni taking the time to vote; 37% voted in the recent constitutional referendum, and 25% have taken part in the most recent trustee elections. I talked to Smith around a month about various issues, take a look at that article for an overview of what problems he believes the College is currently facing.

Smith is the fourth straight petition candidate elected in the last three trustee races. Alumni dissatisfaction with the direction the College is taking is palpable. Over at DartWire Ned Kenney '10 argued that if Smith won, it would only be because of Wright's entry into campus politics in the fall— because of Wright's intervention, so the argument goes, the issue of free speech was again in the spotlight. I agreed with him, making the same argument myself to several people, but with Smith winning so convincingly it appears that this would be the wrong conclusion to draw. It is more likely, it now seems, that dissatisfaction with the administration is broad in its scope, making this election all the more important as rumours of President Wright stepping down in a few years circulate Hanover.

Dartmouth's Board of Trustees is unique in that nearly half of its members are voted onto the Board by alumni. The Board currently consists of 18 trustees, 8 elected, 8 appointed, as well as two additional members, namely, the Governor of New Hampshire and the President of the College. In 2003, the Board voted to slowly expand to 22 from the current 18. As it stands after the current election, 4 of the 18 Trustees were petition candidates.

For more reading, here is William F. Buckley Jr.'s biographical sketch/endorsement of Smith.

Once the percentage of votes the other candidates received is made known, I will post them here.

Here are some numbers:

18,186 voters
32,941 votes cast (Dartmouth uses an approval voting system)
9,984 votes cast for Smith

UPDATE: I've been informed by Roland Adams, the administration's press secretary, that the percentage of votes received by the other candidates will not be made public. This is standard practice.

CORRECTION: In 2003 the Board of Trustees voted to expand from 16 trustees to 22. The current size of the board is 18 trustees (ex officio members included).

Posted by A.S. Erickson at 5:05 PM

Comments

How long, do you think, it will be before someone complains that Smith shouldn't have won because he only got 30.3% of the votes cast?

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 17, 2007 8:58 PM  

Anfin,
As you'll see in my most recent post over on DartWire, I certainly agree that there is enough alumni dissatisfaction to elect a petition candidate, even in years when there is not a fiasco such as the one we encountered last fall. I'm taking exception to Smith in particular, who by no means deserves to be a Trustee. He had nothing to do with the College for close to two decades and then all of a sudden, he's distraught by what's happening to Dear Ol' Dartmouth? It's funny to ignore the institution to which you say you owe all of your success. I know that you, as a Reviewer, could never agree with this in public (prove me wrong!) but Smith is an opportunist. I stand by my claim that he easily could have lost the election had there not been so many developments keeping the spotlight off of his indefensible hypocrisy.

Saying that Smith is undeserving of his post and being upset that he was elected do not go hand in hand. I think it's great he pulled it off. It's another step in the right direction, for sure.

Posted by Anonymous Ned — May 17, 2007 9:01 PM  

Anonymous: I'm not sure you understand approval voting. One person can vote for multiple candidates. So Smith's 55% probably means he wasn't the first choice of more than half of the electorate—but he was *acceptable* to more than half.

Posted by Blogger A. S. Erickson — May 17, 2007 9:26 PM  

Smith was "acceptable" to far more alumni than any other candidate. It is highly unlikely that more people had another candidate as their first choice, yet that candidate was found totally unacceptable by enough others to give Smith the edge.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 18, 2007 6:34 AM  

A. S.:

Oh, I understand it. But one of the standard attacks during the AGTF brouhaha was that the petition candidates had been elected with a mere 20-30% of the votes cast (ignoring the percentage of voters who voted for them). I'm wondering how soon someone's going to make the same illogical complaint about this election.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 18, 2007 9:10 AM  

Are you sure the board info is right?

I thought it expanded from 16 to 22 [not 18 to 22], and that Zywicki and Robinson represent the first two "new" seats.

And the board is not strictly unique in how it lets alumni nominate new trustees, since it is based on the system that was used at Williams and is probably still used there. But it is unique in the energy it puts into the process.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 18, 2007 9:15 AM  

The Board has 16 regular members and 2 ex officio members, one of whom, the Governor of New Hamphshire, never votes. This means the President of the College acts, in effect, as a tie-breaker. You could be right about the Board already having started its expansion, but I've never seen anything to make me think that it's already under way.

Posted by Blogger A. S. Erickson — May 18, 2007 9:32 AM  

The board had 16 [plus 2 ex officio] until it has started expanding, which is why it now has 18 [plus 2]. The two new seats recently created out of the blue are held by Zywicki and someone else [I don't remember]. The former obviously is the Alumni Trustee, the latter the Charter Trustee.

That makes presently 8 Alumni Trustees and 8 Charter Trustees, you might say, although the 2 Ex Officio are just as much required to exist by the charter, and both are permitted to vote [although the Governor understandably makes a practice of not coming to meetings].

You will note that the expansion reduces the relative power of the ex officio trustees from the original 1:6 in the charter to a future 1:11, and it increases the relative power of alumni nominees from 5:12 to 5:11 [both worse if you discount the governor].

Perhaps the trustees should avoid taking an alumni nominee in the future in order to return this imbalance to its historic proportions.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 18, 2007 10:28 AM  

Anonymous, was it really a standard attack during the constitution campaign that trustees were nominated by a minority of votes?

I doubt it was, because the proposed constitution also required approval voting.

Posted by Anonymous S.A. — May 18, 2007 10:48 AM  

A.S., thanks for the 16-18 correction. We'll give you a bye on the Brit spelling of "rumours."

Thanks too for restarting comments on Dartlog. This site seems to be the place for discussions that have been happening in Joe's inbox or on Little Green Blog or whatever until now.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous — May 18, 2007 1:52 PM  

I'm afraid you'll have to excuse the rumour/rumor mistake many more times in the future. It seems to me that Penguin and Oxford translations are more readily available than American ones—that coupled with The Economist, and I find my reading tastes most often lead to british spelling.

We're glad to get the blog up and running again, thanks for reading!

Posted by Blogger A. S. Erickson — May 18, 2007 3:20 PM  

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