nyone with the foresight and intelligence God gave tree bark should have been able to see this one coming: Peter Robinson ’79 and Todd Zywicki ’88 were elected to the Board of Trustees by alumni voters last week. This marks the second and third times in two years that alumni voters have shunned the candidates nominated by the Alumni Council in order to select two individuals running as independent petition candidates. Robinson, Zywicki, and their supporters hail this event as a mandate from College alumni for the conservative pursuit of a better Dartmouth and representative of severe alumni discontent with the Alumni Council’s clandestine process of nominating candidates, wherein the council chooses its nominees without an application process and prohibits its candidates from communicating with voters. But whatever the claims of this being a directive from alumni voters, sadly, this decision could not be more hurtful to the College.

With Robinson and Zywicki’s win, Dartmouth lost at least one better-qualified candidate. Ric Lewis ’84, one of four candidates nominated by the Alumni Council and interviewed by the Free Press, proved himself to be a dedicated advocate for underprivileged children in philanthropic work, a talented financial executive, and a man with a positive and much-needed vision for making Dartmouth a better place. His top priorities included substantially increasing faculty pay, diversifying and increasing the endowment, promoting better relations with alumni, and improving the relationship between the administration and the Greek system. Now granted that some of these planning points sound like obvious endeavors for a Trustee candidate, the sad fact is that no one currently on the Board or within the administration is doing enough to provide dynamic and vocal leadership on these issues—Zywicki and Robinson have at best paid lip-service to them. Both mentioned the need to reduce class size in public comments following their election, but have spent far more time blasting the College for posing an unidentified threat to free speech than providing realistic solutions to academic issues. Having devoted as much time and energy to insurgency against the administration as these candidates have, one must question their commitment to the real needs of the College.

Now, instead of having positive and passionate leaders to guide the College towards these improvements, the Board of Trustees has the opposite: two candidates who, using the politics of division, will focus attention on the wrong issues. Robinson and Zywicki come from the same school of thought as T.J. Rodgers ’70, current Trustee and poster-child for Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance, a largely radical and right wing group intent on damning the current administration’s agenda as a crusade to destroy free speech and the Greek system. For years, they have been pitting alums and Greeks against the administration, and portraying the former two as the underdogs.

Is there an epidemic of free speech suppression I’m not aware of? Is President Wright running around tearing down posters and snatching up copies of The Review? Absolutely not and this administration has done everything it can to support free speech in a responsible fashion. Indeed, the College has adopted what the Supreme Court stated in the landmark case of Schenck v. United States: free speech is guaranteed up until the point it is used to harm others. At an educational institution like Dartmouth, as at most other places of higher learning, you can say whatever you wish up to a point. It is as reprehensible and dangerous to call for physical attacks on the GLBTQ community as it is to post anti-Semitic quotes from Mein Kampf calling for violence against Jews as part of your organizational mantra; a college like Dartmouth cannot permit such behavior. What’s so dangerous about that?

As for worries about the Greek system, let these fretful alums rest assured that the fraternities and sororities are not in jeopardy. Yes, the faculty has voted to disband the system on more than one occasion, but has that ever come to fruition? Absolutely not. The student body, the majority of which is Greek-affiliated, seems determined to preserve its Greek-rich culture and simply will not stand for any further incursions into the operations of the societies. And loyal alums should know that the administration would never tread too far on Greek territory, lest Dartmouth lose much-needed alumni financial support. Why continue with this frantic behavior? Fraternities and sororities safe from immediate peril don’t need any more defending.

As Robinson and Zywicki voice the concerns of fellow alumni out of touch with Dartmouth reality, more important and pertinent issues will be ignored. We will continue to lose quality faculty members to peer institutions because of low pay. Class sizes will continue to grow, and the campus community will continue to become polarized.

And therein lies a much more dangerous fact: Robinson and Zywicki will serve to hinder the spirit of community and collaboration that Dartmouth so desperately needs. In representing a paranoid and radical element of the alumni, they will propagate the idea that the best way to accomplish change at the College is to treat the administration as an enemy to be fought rather than a colleague to cooperate with. If Greeks, alumni, minority communities, and the administration are all engaged in a melée over policy, nothing positive will be accomplished. The only way to address the very relevant and tangible issues facing this college is to do so cooperatively by improving communication between communities and forging better relationships to find solutions where everyone has input. Make no mistake: Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance and those who stand in support of them are not interested in ensuring that everyone’s opinion is represented in institutional decision-making; they are interested in ensuring that their opinion is.

So now what? What should be done in the face of these terrible prospects? The Alumni Council first needs to take a look at itself and its practices in selecting nominees and realize that alums are dissatisfied with it. The Council needs to begin using equal-opportunity application processes for nomination and allow its candidates to communicate with alumni voters. In the Council’s attempt to create an easy election process, it has lost transparency and ultimately the best interests of the College; this election serves to unequivocally prove that point.

Beyond hoping that the Alumni Council creates a better process for selecting trustee candidates, we can do little more than pray: pray that Robinson and Zywicki do not further hijack the College policy agenda and that the alumni have the fortitude, intelligence, and vision to elect better candidates next time. We cannot afford more radical and caustic opinions that erode the sense of community and well-being at Dartmouth.