College trustees clash on key values

According to one faction, a shadowy cabal of conservatives is waging a war of misinformation to take over the board of trustees of Dartmouth College.

According to the other, devoted alumni are fighting an administration that has neglected undergraduate education in favor of research, let athletic teams languish, and cracked down unfairly on fraternities.

Voting begins this week for an alumni representative to the board, the latest battle in a fight that may prove influential around the country. Is Dartmouth the first domino in a national war on the allegedly liberal, politically correct Ivory Tower? Or is it an inspiration to alumni not to stay on the sidelines?

At the Hanover, N.H., school, alumni elect half of the trustees, an unusual setup, and the board appoints the rest. For most of Dartmouth's history, an alumni council nominated all candidates, and they tended to be palatable to the administration. But a clause little used until recent years allows a petition candidate to run if he or she gathers 500 signatures from fellow alumni.

In the last two elections, in 2004 and 2005, petition candidates who criticized Dartmouth's direction and boasted conservative or libertarian credentials won the three open seats.

"Too often in the past, colleges have said, 'Send us your money, and leave us alone,' " said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group that backs the petition efforts at Dartmouth. "We say, 'Sure, send your money, but also speak up.' "

Neal said Dartmouth is part of a significant trend, along with Colgate University and Hamilton College, where conservative alumni also competed for spots on school boards last year.

At Dartmouth, candidates are spending tens of thousands of dollars campaigning, unheard of in alumni elections at universities, according to Sheldon Steinbach, former general counsel of the American Council on Education.

The school, which has an 18-member board including its president and the New Hampshire governor, has historically been more sports- and fraternity-oriented and conservative than other Ivy League universities. Dartmouth is also known for providing its 4,100 undergraduates a more intimate education than larger research universities can offer.

Some alumni say Dartmouth's president, James Wright, is more concerned about boosting faculty research than maintaining a small-college experience. Several fraternities have been punished for infractions, and the football team has done poorly in recent years.

Other alumni say that the naysayers are just nostalgic for a less diverse Dartmouth that existed before women were admitted in 1972 and before the university started recruiting more artistic and intellectual students in the late 1980s.

Wright said critics are distorting reality, misleading fellow alumni, and threatening Dartmouth's efforts to recruit students, faculty, and donors during a $1.3 billion capital campaign.

"If Dartmouth is in a state of conflict all the time, are people as likely to make big and substantial gifts? I don't know," he said in an interview.

While Wright is not planning to step down anytime soon, the president of eight years said the fighting could dissuade his potential successors. "If there's a sense the institution is snarling at itself all the time and engaging in bitter disputes, it may make it harder," he said.

This year's petition candidate, Stephen F. Smith, is a law professor at the University of Virginia who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has three opponents sanctioned by the alumni council.

Sandy Alderson, chief executive of the San Diego Padres and one of the alumni council candidates, said Smith should acknowledge that he is backed by a powerful inner circle and should stop pretending to be an independent voice.

"This is a well-funded, disciplined political organization," Alderson said, adding that he knows because members of the circle interviewed him.

Alderson said he met with two of the sitting petition trustees: T.J. Rodgers, a California entrepreneur and self-described libertarian, and Peter Robinson, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter and fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Alderson also met with a third former trustee who served in the 1980s. The three decided they couldn't support him.

Smith said that nobody recruited him to run and that he speaks for himself. "I find it offensive that whenever you've got a black man in a position of authority, people ask who's the white man behind the throne," said Smith, who also makes the charge on his website.

But several influential alumni acknowledged that they are part of a small group that decides whom to support and to give a cherished mailing list of almost the entire alumni body that the petition candidates have cultivated over several years.

There's nothing nefarious about that, they said, since they are up against the alumni council's well-oiled machine.

"If we don't like the pool, we say: 'Let's go find a better person,' " said Rodgers, who said he interviewed Smith for three hours and signed his petition, but hasn't donated to his campaign.

Smith sent two letters to that mailing list, roughly 60,000 addresses, and a third to a smaller list. He said the first two mailings cost about $30,000 each, funded by alumni donations.

Alderson said he must spend big in order to keep up with Smith. He spent $15,000 on a website and about $33,000 on a campaign mailing to about 40,000 people. He said he wishes he had access to Smith's bigger list; his comes from another partisan alumni group.

Smith and the sitting petition trustees say they are motivated by their love of Dartmouth, not politics. "These are bread-and-butter issues," Smith said. "What is conservative about class size or athletics?"

At UVA, Smith said, he has taught Dartmouth grads who talk about big classes and "an effort to change Dartmouth from the only college in the Ivy League to just another faceless research university." He pointed to a campus newspaper editorial two years ago that said too many classes were bloated or had long waiting lists.

Dartmouth officials counter that the faculty-student ratio is 8 to 1, compared with 12 to 1 a decade ago.

Timothy Andreadis, president of the student government, said most classes are intimate.

"I'm inclined to believe [Smith] is coming from a certain faction of conservative alumni," said Andreadis, a senior. "And alums tend to be out of touch with the campus."

But the petition trustees say they are learning much more about what happens on campus because of the Internet. Online campus newspapers and blogs allow them to circumvent "the clumsy propaganda in alumni magazines," Robinson wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last fall.

To "the establishment" at every college and university, he declared: "The alumni are coming. But they won't sack your institutions, just reconnect them with American life."

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.