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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Outside Agitators

In an article in today’s paper, the New York Times notes that at Dartmouth

dissidents are trying to get a foothold on the governing board through alumni elections. The unfolding controversy is being watched closely by other universities.

"The old way of doing business, where people get their degree, lead their lives and the only source of information about their institution is the alumni magazine, that's just gone," said Peter Robinson, Dartmouth class of '79, a speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan and a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, who was one of the insurgents who won election to the board last year.

Conservative alumni at Colgate University and Hamilton College in upstate New York have also tried to reach the board as petition candidates, so far unsuccessfully.

At Hamilton, the dissent flared after a campus club issued a speaking invitation to Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who has called victims of the Sept. 11 attacks "little Eichmanns," and after the college invited Susan Rosenberg to teach a seminar on memoir writing. As a leftist in the early 1980's, Ms. Rosenberg was linked to the armed robbery of a bank in which two police officers and a security guard were killed.

At Colgate, the opposition reached critical mass over the college's efforts to curb Greek life by taking over ownership of fraternity houses.

"What we're seeing at Dartmouth, Colgate and Hamilton are alumni who are profoundly troubled by the direction of those institutions," said Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council for Trustees and Alumni, a group whose founders in 1995 included Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. "It's time for those looking in from the outside to provide some input."


The article goes on to note that it’s simplistic to see this as a right/left issue. Similar attempts to infiltrate universities and colleges from the outside have in the past come from the left; and a number of recent infiltrators haven’t been political so much as institutional -- they’ve wanted higher salaries for professors, or have worried about the relative importance of undergraduate and graduate education at a particular school.

UD sees this trend, in any case, as an unmitigated good. Universities and colleges should welcome these events. They should be happy that alumni care enough to put themselves forward. And as self-reflective institutions, they should embrace the intellectual provocations the outsiders offer.