…electioneering has been almost absent and alumni bitterness and dissension entirely so.

--Leon Burr Richardson on Dartmouth's alumni's participation in trustee board elections

Today this assertion, made 75 years ago by the author of the History of Dartmouth College, couldn't be more jarring. Today electioneering abounds. With seemingly illimitable coffers, web-based organizations ranging from the tastelessly named SaveDartmouth.org to VoteDartmouth.org have pumped money into advertisement and activism.

Ads have appeared in the New York Times online and will soon appear in both the Wall Street Journal and the print edition of the New York Times. Their sources of cash and support safely hidden behind a firewall of anonymity, only one thing seems certain: disregarding the ethics of the shadowy forces (and not-so-secret Phrygians) lobbying for trustee sea-change at Dartmouth, they sure do have a lot of money.

One would think that this might entail responsibility. On March 10, 2007, Dartmouth Independent Editor Emeritus Michael B. Greene wrote "Mr. Smith Goes to Dartmouth." Though in that article, Greene relentlessly hurled argument after argument against then-candidate Stephen Smith's possible election to the Board of Trustees, the premise was simple. Smith was simply irresponsible when it came to Dartmouth. He didn't understand the issues; he didn't understand the students. And he got elected.

Across the country, mostly right wing pundits declared the success a Thermopylae. But one thing the blogs didn't take into account was the almost unprecedented undivided opinion of Dartmouth's students. They didn't want him. Nearly all Dartmouth's publications were unanimous on this issue (see for instance here, and here--the Review, which is in bed with the petition candidates, doesn't count); student leaders spanning the ideological spectrum exposed his short-comings. But he won.

This insult, combined with the $100,000 monetary excesses spent on trustee campaigning, led Dartmouth this July to "reassess" the Trustee Board's composition. Central to the ensuing debate, and trustee Todd Zywicki's outrage, was Dartmouth's claim that it could violate one of its time-old traditions and effectively nullify the 1891 agreement that apparently "requires" parity between those trustees selected by the board and those selected by alumni.

Zywicki's August 3 editorial in The Dartmouth, arguing that violating the agreement would effectively be a breach of contract, cut a clean narrative through the history of the 1891 agreement. But Zywicki's story seems too well-groomed, his law credentials too loudly pronounced, and the details too vague for his argument to be taken at face value.

The article accompanying this editorial was written by Kate Stith-Cabranes, one of Dartmouth's distinguished alumni, a professor at Yale Law School and a former Dartmouth trustee. Since this publication's founding, it has been our mission to supply the campus not only with entertainment, but also with well-researched facts and original argument. And this article does precisely that.

Our policy, however, has also been to maintain a stance of absolute neutrality, allowing our writers to express a full variety of opinion unhindered by unnecessary editorial apparatus. We recognize that publishing our first opinionated article from an alumna, no matter how distinguished, violates our neutrality. But for many students of Dartmouth, threatening changes in the Trustee Board's current composition de facto prevent a neutral position. A variety of unrealized solutions exist for Dartmouth's problems: hostile takeovers are not one of them.

It is our hope that in the future alumni will continue to be active with our magazine. Our pages are yours so long as your argument is original, factual, and--as always--thought-provoking.