The One-Minute Survey

Thursday, August 02, 2007

This discussion topic is initiated by Scott Meacham '95:

**********************************************************

The Association recently sent out a survey, reproduced below. What are your comments on its contents and the potential results?

----

LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD!

Dartmouth College Association of Alumni One-Minute Survey

Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with the following:

"I believe that the Board of Trustees should maintain the current balance of 50% charter trustees and 50% directly-elected alumni trustees (excluding the two ex officio positions)."

AGREE DISAGREE

"I believe that any concerns with the process of electing alumni trustees should be referred to the leaders of the Association of Alumni, as those representatives are duly-elected by all alumni to represent alumni interests, especially alumni participation in the trustee selection process."

AGREE DISAGREE

Please affix a stamp and drop this into the mail as soon as possible!

----------------------------------------

Posted at the request of Scott Meacham '95

7 Comments:

Tim, thanks for posting this discussion topic.

The survey really does look like it was designed more to mold alumni opinion than to sample it. Phrasing the survey as a jab at the Trustees and the Alumni Council seems wasteful, since the results will be just as biased as the questions and will be unable to tell us anything useful. It also seems inappropriate and premature, since the Association should be having a hard time endorsing particular partisan positions unless it first gets an accurate handle on the alumni views it is supposed to be representing (which seems to be the original motivation for creating a survey in the first place).

I am curious as to whether the survey was approved by a majority of the Executive, and, if so, who voted for it.

Thank you, Executives, for all of your activity and for taking the time to communicate with the membership through this blog.

By scott m. '95, at 8/02/2007 1:00 PM
Scott:

"a jab at the Trustees"-- where?

"a jab at the Alumni Council"-- who brought up the Council?

What is partisan about speaking out in defense of alumni participation in the trustee selection process?

In fact the survey did not even do that... it asked alumni if that is something they themselves believe in.

Of course a majority of the Executive Committee approved of the letter... it would not have gone out as an official letter otherwise. Who voted in this majority... the 7 names were all listed on the explanatory sheet included with the letter. They are also available in the approved minutes of our committee meetings, available to anyone who requests them (contact the staff at Blunt Hall.) So why your questions here?

We are not just trying to communicate "with" the membership, but trying to support alumni in communicating directly with each other without filters... hence our posting of your two topics.

Do people fear the questions because they fear the answers? Do they fear the communication because they fear the spread of alternate thinking?

By Tim Dreisbach '71, at 8/02/2007 9:20 PM
Tim asks "What is partisan about speaking out in defense of alumni participation in the trustee selection process?"

Nothing, if that's all it were – but claiming that there are any "directly-elected alumni trustees" is not merely "speaking out," it is taking a partisan position. It would be stating a blatant falsehood if it were not prefaced by the qualifier "I believe...".

(Note: the question of whether trustees are "elected" at all has of course been debated. It is indisputable, however, that no trustees are "directly-elected" by alumni. Even the partisans and wishful thinkers who want there to be a right to elect trustees do not go so far as to claim that the elections are direct, rather than through the "nomination" process spelled out in the Association's constitution. This isn't the place to discuss the foolishness of the idea that there are "directly-elected" trustees; it's enough to say that this survey question and the accompanying letter – noting elections "directly by the alumni" – at least exhibit gross bias.)

You have to admit that the results of the survey will not live up to their ostensible purpose, which I take to be the collection of an accurate survey of alumni sentiment. This thing is so biased I shouldn't even have to explain it, but I will (and I'm getting some of this from a discussion at Dartlog):

If you answer "agree" to question one, are you agreeing that you believe that there is a direct election of alumni trustees, or that, even if you know that claim to be false, you still think there should be 50% alumni trustees? Why in the world would the Association include two or more contentions (what amount to multiple queries) in a single survey question?

The second one appears to be aimed squarely at the Alumni Council, especially through its superfluous (and misleading) statement that the Association Executive is "duly-elected by all alumni to represent alumni interests."

That statement implies that the Council, the only other semi-official alumni group of this type, is not duly elected, or is not meant to represent alumni interests, or is neither. In fact, the original and main job of the Council – which is duly elected, by the way – is precisely to represent alumni interests to the Trustees. You might disagree with how well it does its job, but "The purposes of the Alumni Council shall be: 1. To serve as a representative organization of Dartmouth alumni acting in the best interest of Dartmouth College;" etc. This is a job that your predecessors explicitly gave to the Council – if you want it back or have some other beef with the Council, you need to take it to them, not to try to drum up support among voters to whom you've given only partial and misleading information in the guise of a survey.

The quotation marks, the "I believe" phrasing, the underlining, the boldface print, the "LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD!" and "KEEP DARTMOUTH STRONG" language – you don't think this is biased? This is the kind of survey the Hanover Institute should send out – something intended to take a position, collect support for that position, and then be used as ammunition in future battles, I presume. If the Association does want to take a partisan position, doesn't it need to take an accurate survey first to find out the beliefs of alumni? This is no way to meet that goal. The sample is so polluted by the poor and biased questioning that we will have no way of knowing whether the alumni who agree with these two statements merely reflect the biases of the Executives or truly express the will of the alumni.

"Of course a majority of the Executive Committee approved of the letter... it would not have gone out as an official letter otherwise."

Thank you. We cannot have assumed that it was approved, since it was written in a way that made it look like the work of one person.

"Who voted in this majority... the 7 names were all listed on the explanatory sheet included with the letter."

Thanks! Ha ha. I have begun to assume that the Executive Committee only has seven members, since everything seems to come from the same people.

By scott m. '95, at 8/03/2007 12:53 PM
Tim-- I have to agree with Scott on this one. I would really like to return the survey, but it didn't have choices that accurately represent my views. It made the assumption that the election process is fair and representative of alumni sentiment, and so it came across as incredibly biased and intending to be used for propaganda rather than as a method to accurately understand alumni sentiment.

I absolutely believe that the 50% split of alumni/non-alumni Trustees is important to the College and to her future. I can't imagine that there are a lot of alumni would would disagree with that. I do not, however, think that that division should come at the sacrifice of having qualified, experienced and capable people managing the Board.

I understand that the current system for electing Trustees creates a significant disadvantage for nominated candidates. Since I know that the nominated candidates are selected and vetted by a committee of alumni elected by all factions of Dartmouth alumni (classes, clubs, interest groups), and those that have been proposed in recent years appear to be SIGNIFICANTLY more qualified than those proposed by petition, I tend to be discomforted by the fact that the petition candidates continue to utilize the biased system to put themselves on the Board. It is even more disturbing to me that seemingly less qualified candidates are being elected when you account for the fact the petition candidates are being advocated and heavily funded by a small group of alumni whose strength has come from making derogatory (often misleading or blatantly untrue) comments about my College.

In an ideal world, we would not have a group of unelected, unrepresentative alumni manipulating a system that was intended as a failsafe in order to put their unvetted candidates on the Board. But here we are in a world where an unknown group of people with unknown standards are, by way of misleading information and lots of money, putting people on my College's Board of Trustees who by basic experience and credential are not as qualified to serve as those who went through a selection and vetting process by openly elected alumni. I might not even care about the political leanings of the petition candidates so much if they had even the appearance of the level of qualification (ability to motivate donors, experience managing organizations of Dartmouth's magnitude, long-standing dedication and gifts of time and money to Dartmouth, etc.).

So ultimately, although I strongly support having a 50% alumni split on the Board, I also very much support an inquiry and possible changes to how that 50% gets onto the Board.

I am incredibly proud of our Board in its willingness to take a very courageous stand and focus on what is RIGHT and BEST for the College, not just on the popularity of that evaluation. If the choice is for the Board to do nothing and allow less qualified people to be routinely elected because of a system they have no control over or to take this stand and try to protect the College, I think it is not only their right but their duty to ensure that the best possible people are deciding Dartmouth's future.

So at the end, I think that Scott is right on the money, and I am saddened that a group of our Association of Alumni leadership are using their positions of trust to promote what appears to be a propoganda-collecting survey rather than truly reaching out to alums to get their unfiltered opinions.

By Anonymous, at 8/07/2007 2:23 PM
Anon above said:
"I absolutely believe that the 50% split of alumni/non-alumni Trustees is important to the College and to her future. I can't imagine that there are a lot of alumni would would disagree with that. I do not, however, think that that division should come at the sacrifice of having qualified, experienced and capable people managing the Board."

That means he should agree with the first survey question. He is correct that most alumni also agree, though there are some who argue strongly for reducing alumni involvement. Our survey may better quantify that.

Agreeing or not has nothing to do with the legitimate concern that we have well-qualified people on the Board. The survey did not enter into the debate as to whether or not the current system is resulting in unqualified candidates. Again there are people on both sides of that issue. All that the second question asked was, if people do want changes to the selection process, should those be made with the participation of our elected Association leaders, versus the potential for unilateral changes made by the Board alone.

By Tim Dreisbach '71, at 8/07/2007 4:03 PM
FRESH AIR: Just as biological inbreeding leads to the deterioration of a species, so too does intellectual incest cause degeneration of the critical faculties (both meanings)! The Petition Process for Alumni Trustee Elections opens a window for letting a litle fresh air into the otherwise closed chambers of the Hanover Cabal. Any attempt to nudge shut that window will result in a firestorm that can only hurt Dartmouth!
Paul N. Wenger, Jr. '51
wenger001@sbcglobal.net

By Anonymous, at 8/15/2007 3:25 PM
FRESH AIR: The Petition Process for election of Alumni Trustees opens a window for letting a breath of fresh air into the otherwise closed chambers of the Hanover Cabal. Since the recently elected Petition Trustee received an ABSOLUTE MAJORITY of the almost 20,000 votes cast - and since the Gerrymandered "Constition" was also rejected by an absolute majority of votes cast, it is clear that any attempt to nudge shut that window will result in a firestorm that can only hurt Dartmouth!
Paul N. Wenger, Jr. '51
wenger001@sbcglobal.net

By paulwenger, at 8/15/2007 3:42 PM

Thursday, August 02, 2007

The One-Minute Survey

7 Comments:

About

Contributors

Previous posts

Archives