Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

We’ve been quiet for a while and with good reason. We will have an important public announcement on Constitution Day. It will represent an important evolution in the form and substance of educational product and academic freedom, one resulting from the limitations, if not the failures, of the current model. It will be a wonderful experiment with a national scale.

……….

Meanwhile we witness the remarkable pronouncement of the Dartmouth administration:

 “We do not believe that having more elections is in the best interests of the College,” they wrote, because of “divisiveness.” In other words, the independent trustees were willing to dissent from the insular uniformity of modern higher education, so they had to be neutered before they might actually make a difference.

[WSJ Dartmouth Diminished September 11, 2007; Page A18]

Unfortunately, we’ve seen a variation of the same game before:

Candidates for Alumni Trustee “may not include any contact information or references to specific hard copy or online resource material…” in their statements of candidacy.

Hamilton College Alumni Association, 2005 Alumni Trustee Election Procedures, June 17, 2005

Ask for a draft of the amendments to Hamilton’s bylaws that the Alumni Association approved at last spring’s meeting, and you’ll be told its not in the best interests of the college for regular alumni to see what was affirmatively adopted…kind of like the final report on the Kirkland Project. It’s just none of the alumni’s business.