by Ed Naile
Anyone enamored with the idea that student voters are a wonderful addition to New Hampshire politics needs a primer on one of the elite, ivory tower societies they come from.
They kinda-sorta look like crooks to me.
Now I am just a plain old arborist/logger/lumberjack educated guy with some modestly sharp reading comprehension skills but I’ll be damned if I want Dartmouth College sending the great over indulged, not quite mature horde to NH polling places, instead of where they are domiciled, if this is how the Dartmouth Trustees scam the college and NH.
Check out this site for an education on how to use an election to pack a board of trustees in NH:
Dartmouth alumni association violates own policies
Last year, two dark-horse independent alumni candidates won surprise spots on Dartmouth’s board of trustees. Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson ran on platforms that championed free speech, administrative accountability, and a return to a strong, liberal arts curriculum. Though their victory was hailed as a triumph of democratic process at Dartmouth, this year Dartmouth’s alumni association has gone to great lengths to ensure that similar triumphs won’t have the chance to occur again.
This spring, Dartmouth’s Alumni Governance Task Force revised its constitution in such a way as to ensure that candidates such as Zywicki and Robinson will have a much harder time even getting onto the ballot, let alone getting elected. Now Dartmouth’s Association of Alumni is digging itself into an even deeper hole: Its leaders have just announced an arbitrary and unconstitutional decision to postpone the annual elections for their own offices.
ACTA wrote to the alumni association about this problem last week. Today ACTA follows up with a hard-hitting press release:
DARTMOUTH INSIDERS CIRCLE THE WAGONS
Attempt to Block Reforms by Concerned Alumni
HANOVER, N.H. (June 5, 2006) — In defiance of the group’s own bylaws, the leaders of Dartmouth College’s Association of Alumni have arbitrarily “postponed” the annual elections for their own offices. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is calling upon the Association to reconsider this deeply troubling decision.
“The Hanover establishment has been searching for months to find ways to prevent more reformers from winning election to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees,” said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. “Postponing the election is the latest in their transparent effort to shut out constructive input from concerned alumni.”
In a June 1 letter to the president of the Association of Alumni, ACTA called on the Dartmouth group to hold the election as scheduled. This was in response to a May 24 letter from one of the leaders of the Association saying that the group’s scheduled October 15 annual meeting and election had been “postponed” until some indefinite time in “the first half of calendar year 2007.” The current alumni leaders were elected in October 2005, when they were required to establish when the next election would be held.
The minutes of that meeting show that the next election was set for October 15, 2006. There are no provisions whatsoever in the group’s constitution or bylaws for arbitrarily changing the date of the election.
The insiders’ decision to “postpone” their own date of accountability to voters is especially striking in light of current events at Dartmouth. A new and highly controversial constitution for alumni governance will be up for an all-alumni vote until October 30. As ACTA and many Dartmouth alumni have noted, some provisions in the new constitution would emasculate the current process for electing trustees by petition.
Three alumni–T.J. Rodgers in 2004 and Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson in 2005–have recently won election to the Board of Trustees as outsider candidates, all on platforms dedicated to reform, freedom of speech, and greater accountability on the part of the college administration. Their bids by petition drew the staunch opposition of the Dartmouth establishment.
“The powers that be at Dartmouth are trying to make sure that no one can follow in the footsteps of T.J. Rodgers, Todd Zywicki, and Peter Robinson,” Neal noted. “The new constitution requires an impossible task: making petition candidates get 250 signatures from other alumni, in 30 days, before the establishment has even said who its candidates are. This is unconscionable.”
However, as Neal concluded her letter to the Association of Alumni, “No matter what one thinks of the proposed new constitution, all reasonable people should agree that whatever constitution is in place ought to be honored.” ACTA has therefore requested that the Association honor its constitution and bylaws by reinstating the October 15 election immediately.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a national education nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. ACTA has a network of alumni and trustees around the country including those from Dartmouth. ACTA has issued numerous reports on higher education including How Many Ward Churchills?, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, The Hollow Core, and Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. For further information, contact ACTA at (202) 467-6787.
Pressure is what will force the Association of Alumni to act.
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Back in 2002, during the violation of the Dartmouth Bylaws by the lowlifes running the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, CNHT was monitoring the election in Hanover, the election where the Moderator, Mrs. Black, was encouraging non-residents to vote in the hot Shaheen – Sununu Senate race and keeping me and the three guys with me from observing the non-residents signing up at the registration table.
As a side note, in 2008 I was sent to Durham to assist poll watchers there whose rights were violated by the Durham Moderator who kept them 40 feet from registration tables. Attorney Chuck Douglass won an injunction that afternoon from Superior Court Judge Abramson stopping that illegal activity, admittedly, after most of the damage was done. NH is nothing if not consistent.
Here we are in 2011 and from that time the Dartmouth Trustees have used every dirty trick at their disposal to keep anyone from, asking questions about or not conforming with, their hive.
As I have written before, we “voted” in the 2004 Dartmouth BOT election (the last) with Chinese Restaurant ballots we made up – just as valid as a non-resident vote – for two gentlemen. One was Todd Zywicki the other Peter Robinson. They won but had their vote watered down by the original BOT.
And how much slack does Dartmouth want from NH?
1. The school gets extra representation in Concord through mostly non-resident student voters.
2. The local Moderator greases the registration wheels.
3. The NH Charitable Trust Division of AG’s office seems uninterested in the BOT violating the Dartmouth nonprofit bylaws for no other reason than to keep power and anyone not on the inside – out.
4. Our Legislature, in 2003, gave up six ex-officio seats on the BOT which used to include the Executive Council, Speaker of the House, and Governor, to now just the Governor. And he is about useless as we all know.
Seems like now more than ever the Dartmouth “Board of Do What We Like” needs adult supervision more than ever.
Or their Charter Revoked.
Where can I pick up a complaint form?