“Vox the Vote!” blazed the green-and-white sign from the Blunt Alumni Center the minute the new class of ‘10s stepped onto campus for orientation. Between the editorials in many major campus publications, the blitzes on the subject, and the buzz around campus, the battle over the new alumni constitution is impossible to ignore. For current undergraduate students, particularly new ‘10s, the questions to ask yourselves are: what is this new constitution all about, why is the new constitution being proposed, and why, as an undergraduate, should I care?

The third and most important question proves easiest to answer. The Dartmouth Alumni Constitution sets the rules for electing the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, just as the U.S. Constitution dictates the election process for House Representatives. Likewise, the Board of Trustees serves a role in relation to the Dartmouth community that is analogous to the U.S. Senate: it helps set college policy. The Board is responsible for matters that directly affect our experience, ranging from class availability to funding allocations. . Additionally, as undergraduates, we will all be alumni before long. We will want to have a substantial collective say in these issues for future generations of Dartmouth students. Alumni ability to voice their perspectives, however, lies at stake in the new constitution.

The problem with the new constitution concerns the process by which alumni can voice dissent or agreement with the direction of Dartmouth. The college administration already has the power to appoint half of the Board, and the proposed Constitution reduces the extent to which the election of the other half is truly democratic. It does so by manipulating the election rules in a number of ways - some of which require an advanced degree in game theory to comprehend fully. The most obviously manipulative measure concerns the nomination process. Currently, the elected half of the Board is determined by a vote among candidates put forth by the Nominating Committee of the Alumni Council. However - and this is crucial - if alumni are dissatisfied with these candidates, they have a recourse mechanism: they can nominate their own candidate to run via petition.

The new alumni constitution, however, undermines the petition candidate process. Under the new regulations, petition candidates must announce their intention to run forty-five days before the Nominating Committee presents their candidates. At that stage, however, petition candidates cannot know whether they are needed as an alternative to the Nominating Committee candidates, because they don't know who the Nominating Committee candidates will be. Moreover, if the administration knows in advance who the petition candidates are, it can select its slate of candidates not on merit but on the basis of which candidates will be best able to stave off the petitioners. In this way, the administration, which already handpicks half the Board, can "game" the process for electing the other half, thus reducing the limited amount of "democracy" available to the alumni.

So why is the administration asking the alumni to approve a constitution calculated to reduce their power to choose trustees? To answer this question, we must review the history of recent Dartmouth trustee elections. In the past two years, three petition candidates have won seats in the Board of Trustees--T.J. Rodgers, Peter Robinson, and Todd Zywicki. Each ran on an anti-administration platform that favored promoting free speech, an undergraduate focus, and support of athletics. It is important to note that the Task Force on Alumni Governance was commissioned to update the constitution in spring of 2004, just when the first insurgent candidate, Rodgers, was elected to the Board of Trustees.

The administration, it appears, is trying to manipulate the process of nominating and electing petition candidates because it feels threatened. The previous petition candidates differ from President Wright both ideologically and in their vision of Dartmouth. The strong recent support for petition candidates indicates a desire for new ideas and disapproval of much of what the administration is doing. But instead of engaging the views of the insurgents and the alumni who have elected them, the administration prefers to make it more difficult for alumni to elect those who hold these views.

Considering the importance of the Trustees to the college’s future, we must oppose this attempt to reduce alumni say. We should protest this de-democratization, just as we would if our right to elect our House Representatives was impeded by a U.S. Constitution re-write (just for the record: the U.S. Constitution actually has fewer words than the proposed Alumni Constitution). Dartmouth alumni are famously invested in the college and, having spent hours on the phone with some of them, I can attest that they love hearing students' perspective on issues like these. By signing protests—or even just sending a reply to the blitz survey on student opinion about the constitution—we can have a very real impact on the future of the college. This way, when we are alumni, we can be more than mere spectators to college policy-making.