The Trustee Elections

Dartmouth has a new charter trustee and, finally, two new alumni trustees. Robert P. Henderson '53, chairman of Itek Corporation, was named in mid-May as the choice of the Board of Trustees for charter trustee. Robert E. Field '43 and Ronald B. Schram '64, decisive winners in nomination contests, became alumni trustees in June.

The selection of charter trustees rests solely with the board, and the naming of Henderson was no exception to what traditionally has been a process done quietly in the inner sanctum of the trustees. For Field and Schram, however, the path to alumni trusteeship was sometimes noisy, sometimes controversial, and anything but routine.

After the Alumni Council nominated them for trustee last December, Field and Schram were challenged by T. Coleman Andrews III '76 and Malcolm V. Beard Jr. '67, whose petition nominations were engineered by alumni and students dissatisfied with the current College administration. Most of the same people backed last year's successful petition candidacy of Dr. John F. Steel '54, and two more chances to build leverage on the board did not escape their notice. With the Indian symbol as their rallying point, the Beard-Andrews forces consisting principally of a group called the Committee of Concerned Dartmouth Alumni and students on the staff of the DartmouthReview indicted the "liberal values" of the Kemeny administration and the "rubber-stamp" Board of Trustees.

In March, a mass mailing to alumni by the Dartmouth Review set off an angry crossfire of broadly distributed letters supporting and sometimes denouncing the competing candidates. It was, as some said, an unseemly fracas. Election guidelines prepared last summer, in the wake of the Steel election, were supposed to prevent campaigning for alumni trustee nominations. They didn't. Finally, in a letter accompanying the ballots sent to all alumni in April, John K. Benson '31, president of the Association of Alumni, which oversees the trustee balloting process, accused the Dartmouth Review of published misstatements and a "clear violation" of the guidelines in its support of Beard and Andrews.

Benson's allegations fueled the controversy and culminated in a formal complaint by Beard and Andrews that the election had been unfairly tipped against them. On May 16, Beard, representatives of the Committee of Concerned Dartmouth Alumni and the Dartmouth Review, and their lawyer met with the Executive Committee of the Association of Alumni in a five-hour hearing in Concord, New Hampshire. The lawyer excused the campaigning on behalf of all the candidates as part of "the rough-and-tumble of politics" and argued that Benson's linking of Beard and Andrews with what the lawyer called "student unrest" meaning the Dartmouth Review seriously prejudiced their candidacies.

The testimony of other witnesses did not necessarily support this interpretation. On May 20, the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association issued a ten-page document ruling' against the complaint of Beard and Andrews. "While we doubt that anyone will ever be able to define the relationship between the Review and the C.D.A. [Concerned Dartmouth Alumni]," the committee said, "we are persuaded that the Review's involvement was extensive, pervasive and direct." According to the ruling, the Review "went far beyond the normal bounds of journalistic reporting and editorializing on like contests." It obtained petitions, filled them in, distributed them, had them returned to its own mailing address, and then filed them. It devoted a substantial amount of its own funds to promote these candidacies. It has made' at least three mailings ... on their behalf."

"Just as the candidates [Beard and Andrews] stood to gain from these activities on their behalf by the Review, so, too, must they lose by their excesses," the Alumni Association committee said.

A few hours after the ruling was made public, the counting of the ballots began under the watchful gaze of observers from both sides. Late that afternoon, the results were announced: Field, partner of Price Waterhouse in New York, became the nominee of the alumni by defeating Andrews 11,228 votes to 5,267; Schram, partner in the Boston law firm of Ropes and Gray, likewise defeated Beard, 10,785 votes to 5,549.

About 40 per cent of the alumni cast ballots this time, compared with 31 per cent in last year's Steel-Rasenberger contest.

"We deplore the misunderstandings that seem to be endemic to this process. We regret the divisions that may have been created because of these misunderstandings. We also believe that the moment to stop these misunderstandings is now. It is time the Dartmouth community stopped shouting at each other and started listening to each other again." Executive Committee of the Alumni Association, after its hearing on the contest for alumni trustee