Campaigning
April, said the poet, is the cruelest month, and this April has been crueler than most in this town and at this College. Along with last snows and first tentative green-up came an unprecedented blossoming of vituperation as choosing two alumni trustee nominees climaxed in salvo after salvo of invective.
Early in this college year, the trusteenomination procedure followed along the well-worn path: In September, the Alumni Council announced two forthcoming vacancies among the seven alumni trustees, to occur when the terms of David P. Smith '35 and David T. McLaughlin '54 expire in June, and solicited in the usual way suggestions for their successors. At their December meeting, the council nominated Robert E. Field '43 and Ronald B. Schram '64 to fill the positions.
But accompanying the announcement of the council nominees in the December issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE was the first general publication of a set of guidelines designed to govern any balloting that might become necessary in choosing alumni trustee candidates and thereby to avoid the contention that occurred last year when petition candidate John F. Steel '54 defeated council candidate Raymond J. Rasenberger '49. The guidelines were drawn up by officers of the Association of Alumni, the organization to which all alumni automatically belong and with which lies the responsibility for overseeing any contested nomination. The guidelines established a timetable for nominations of either council or petition candidates, set down regulations standardizing the preparation of biographical material and position statements to be sent with ballots to the alumni, and provided for a threemember balloting committee, to be appointed from among the officers and excutive committee of the association, and for election procedures. Preceding the specific rules was a preamble stating that "organized or funded attempts to solicit support for a particular candidate are contrary to the purposes and spirit of the nominating process, are not in the best interests of Dartmouth College, and should not occur." Candidates were asked to signify in writing their willingness to abide by the guidelines and to use their best efforts to discourage any proscribed campaigning in their behalf.
From that point on, the scenario underwent abrupt change. S. Avery Raube '30, one of the organizers of the group known as the Committee of Concerned Dartmouth Alumni formed last year to promote Steel's successful candidacy, indicated doubt in January that his committee would mount petition drives for candidates to oppose Field and Schram. Meanwhile, however, student founders of the Dartmouth Review, an independent weekly newspaper violently opposed to John Kemeny's presidency and the general direction of the College in recent years, circulated petitions to nominate Malcolm V. Beard Jr. '67 and T. Coleman Andrews III '76 to run against Schram and Field, respectively.
The petitions, with well over the required 250 alumni signatures, were delivered to the office of the secretary of the College before the March 1 deadline, thereby insuring a contested election. The rules then called for ballots to be mailed by March 20, with the final date for their return to be May 1 and the tabulation to take place by May 10. Spokesmen for the disenchanted alumni group protested the ban on organized campaigns, but all four candidates agreed to comply with the guidelines. The timetable, however, was to be set back by some two weeks by the controversy over the guidelines.
The Dartmouth Review, considered the sponsor of the opposition candidates, was warned by the balloting committee that any mass mailings in Beard's and Andrews's behalf would be deemed a violation of the proscription against organized or funded campaigns. The Alumni Council, in response to a similar warning, refrained from a general mailing in support of their nominees.
The Review persisted, however, sending out in the latter part of March a mass mailing to some 35,000 alumni, the address list evidently purloined from the copyrighted 1976 Alumni Directory. It led off with a lengthy "Dear Dartmouth Alumnus" letter characterized by such categorical asides as a declaration that "no sane person believes the Indian symbol to have been denigrating" and descriptions of the black student newspaper as "black-revolutionary" and the feminist paper as "feminist-lesbian." It included long statements by Beard and Andrews as to what they perceive to be the evils of the current Dartmouth. Sprinkled throughout were glowing endorsements of Beard's and Andrews' candidacies by both alumni and non-Dartmouth persons, including Raube and his committee and Emil Mosbacher '43, the latter of whom repudiated it forthwith.
In view of what he regarded as a gross violation of the guidelines, Edward M. Scheu Jr. '46, secretary protem of the Association of Alumni and of its balloting committee, urged that the election be called off or delayed. When the committee decided to proceed, he resigned. About two weeks later, around April 10, as president of the Casque and Gauntlet Alumni Association, Scheu wrote to all members of that organization, outlining his version of the controversy. It was one of a flurry of mailings about that time, at the expense of the writers to groups of selected alumni, all ruled neither funded nor organized by the balloting committee. William L. Randall '52, president of the Alumni Council, wrote to former and current councilors, not mentioning council candidates by name but deploring the opposition's tactics and sounding a battle cry for participation. Vice president emeritus Orton H. Hicks '21 wrote a lot of his friends to urge support of Schram and Fields; Robert V. Bartles '64, an Alumni Councilor and classmate of Schram's did likewise. Willard M. Bollenbach Jr. '49, a St. Paul, Minnesota, businessman, plumped for the other side. Francis W. Evans '37, a retired insurance executive from North Carolina, called forth, in effect, "a plague on both your houses." The Review, he wrote association president John K. Benson '31, is "a crude, rude, and vile yellow rag whose termination would be a boon to mankind," but its "fire and life blood" is maintained by such activities as "the carefully orchestrated mailing" in support of council candidates of which "your organization would have indeed to be deaf and blind . . . to even casually suggest you knew nothing. ..."
While all of this was going on en famille, a rash of newspaper columns on the Dartmouth trustee election erupted across the country by sheerest coincidence, of course all written by syndicated columnists of a conservative persuasion, all included, curiously enough, on the Review's masthead as advisers or special benefactors. As if by the long, long arm of coincidence, English professor Jeffrey Hart' 51, William A. Rusher, and Patrick Buchanan all called into question Shirley MacLaine's credentials for a 1973 honorary degree, all associating her with Chairman Mao. William F. Buckley Jr. took a more original tack on the brouhaha, but he was glittering in his praise of Hart's profundity, popularity, and availability to students seeking "academic or political advice or encouragement." Buchanan dubbed Hart merely "the Lech Walesa" of Dartmouth's conservative rebellion.
The last we heard, toward the end of April, distrust had reached such a level that the first batch of ballots to be returned some 8,000 accumulated over a period of time at the post office was transferred directly to a Dartmouth National Bank vault by Cary P. Clark '62, College counsel, and Laurence G. Leavitt '25, vice president of the Association of Alumni, escorted by a crew from Buildings and Grounds. Shortly after the deadline for votes to be received, the accumulated ballots will be transported to a specified location, the signatures will be verified, the envelopes will be opened, and the votes will be counted in the view of the association president or his designated representative, with observers for each candidate keeping skeptical eyes on the proceedings.
By the time most alumni read this, the results of the contested election will be known. And a good many reputations and a good measure of decency will have been its victim.
Amid all the sound and fury, the studentsmost of them anyway—appear to be doingwhat students do best: learning, playing,daydreaming in the Carpenter art library.
