Three alumni in recent years have bucked the administration and won election on the premise that a college trustee should devote serious attention to what is going on, on campus. One is industrialist T.J. Rodgers; the second, Todd Zywicki, a professor at George Mason University School of Law; the third, Peter Robinson, a lively fellow of the Hoover Institution. They contended for seats as trustees and won with a majority of the alumni vote. They hope to welcome now as a fourth trustee the learned and eloquent Professor Smith, who, like them, is bent on preserving those traditions at Dartmouth that made it, over the years, so singular an institution of learning, so beloved of its alumni.
It is difficult to understand the hostility so many colleges have toward alumni who are vigorous and devoted. I am myself a veteran of the painful experience of running against the establishment. In 1968, I was nominated as a dissident candidate (you need 500 votes to secure a spot on the voting registry). Official Yale all but collapsed with fear and loathing. They induced the most popular living alumnus to take time off from running the Department of Defense in order to run against me. True, 32 years later I received an honorary degree from Yale, as a prize for losing.
Social observers have to acknowledge that there is a role for independent-minded alumni trustees. In the case of Stephen Smith, someone who with every disadvantage known in the land (poverty, single parent, black skin) has triumphed, in an enormously competitive environment, against East Coast snobbery and insularity. This is a moment when one wishes one were an alumnus of Dartmouth, so that one could vote for Steve Smith.