Dartmouth Dilutes Democracy

I have been watching from afar as my alma mater Dartmouth College, which seems to have produced more than its share of high-powered middle-aged bloggers, has been roiled in a battle over openness since “outsiders” (intelligent alumni) were freely elected to their Board of Trustees. The other shoe dropped today when an announcement was made that the Trustees would be enlarged with eight new members who would be appointed, not elected, obviously vitiating the power of the elected members.

In other words, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees becomes something like the Assembly of Experts in Iran, electing the college president much in the way the “Experts” elect the Supreme Leader.

What a horrid lesson in democracy to Dartmouth students. The people who put this system in action consider themselves “progressives” but are in reality reactionaries. And sadly they are representative of American academia in general. As goes the Ivy League, so go the rest of the sheep.

The precocious Dartmouth undergrad Joe Malchow, who has already worked for the Wall Street Journal, has the full story.

UPDATE: The Powerline Dartmouth brigade logs in. From Scott Johnson: Dartmouth’s board has now acted to quell the disturbance of alumni in Dartmouth’s governance. In doing so, the board has achieved by diktat what it could not achieve by consent. It has made the opening represented by the election of Rodgers, Robinson, and Zywicki Dartmouth’s Prague Spring.