In today's D, Paul Heintz has an excellent defense of Instant Run-off Voting, citing his own experience as a loser of such a system as support for its reasonableness.
Julie Amstein Cillo, the Chair of the Alumni Council Trustee Nominating and Search Committee, writes in to explain the methodology of picking trustee candidates, refuting TJ Rodgers's implicit allegation that all trustee candidates that weren't petitioners were part of the [sinister] "establishment." Mr. Rodgers, you've been reading the Review too much.
Dartlog takes up the thread and lays into Cillo's explanation and ignores the substance of Heintz's argument entirely. They say, "But two-thirds of the Alumni Council's members are themselves part of the pro-College alumni establishment, being chosen by Dartmouth clubs, "official" minority organizations and by the Council itself. So representatives of the College need not be present to hold sway, as the Council is already solidly in the College's camp."
This knee-jerk hostility to anything that can be called "minority" is sickening. As if all the Asians at Goldman Sachs were part of the College "establishment." (I'm being stereotypical on purpose.)
I have just one question: If Review alumni were offered status as an "official" minority organization and a seat on the Council, would they turn it down because they would all of a sudden be a part of the establishment? O my gosh, would that make them a minority interest???
Conservatives oppose all minority set-asides.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes the alumni council's arrangement especially heinous is that it define which set-asides deserve special treatment. Asians and blacks and Indians and homosexuals are in; Hispanics and Irish and Catholics and Muslims and Iranians and Wiccans and the disabled are all left out. What makes the former group more deserving than the latter? Nothing except the politics of the moment. Far better not to have minority set-asides at all and treat everyone as the equals they are and not treat some as more equal than others.
I don't detect the same "knee-jerk hostility to anything that can be called 'minority'" that you do, but then again, I'm not actively looking for it.
ReplyDeleteI do think that the Reviewers do a poor job of defining their terms when they talk about certain alumni as "establishment" and others as "insurgents" or "outsiders."
What does it mean to be "pro-College," and why is that a bad thing? Does the Review prefer "anti-College" people? There's this basic underlying argument that the "establishment" wants to make Dartmouth in an overly liberal vision of what a college should be like, with all hiring dictated by affirmative action, divestment of the endowment from every company other than Whole Foods, make Dartmouth College into Dartmouth University/Harvard North, and keep everyone spouting the same diversity rhetoric and constantly apologizing to "exploited people," etc., and that the "insurgents" want to "restore the classical model" of education and cling to every tradition that Dartmouth's ever had for its own sake, etc.
But the trustee candidates and the college administrators aren't really discussed on these terms. They're talked about more as if they're members of a political party. They're all Dartmouth alums, and those most interested in the future of the institution tend to join (surprise) committees and such that support the institution. Does soliciting donations make one pro-College? Does agreeing to be an interviewer make one pro-College? Do you lose all credibility if you write a check to the college and don't attach a note to it saying "on condition that not one damn dime go to funding another Dean of Rainbow Ass-Clown Diversity"?
This is what I'd like to know, instead of this going assumption that "establishment" and "insurgent" types are easily identifiable.
I think some of their folks have a better understanding of this than others. Discussing college governance has some analogies to running a country or an organization, but not many.
anonymous #1: I was not aware of how unfair the minority representation is. but i think that is a very different question from whether minority interests should have a representative on the council. I honestly do not have an opinion, but i hate it when people just hear the word 'minority' and start blustering about reverse discrimination, inequality and all.
ReplyDeleteanonymous #2: i agree with everything you say and I've written about that before and intend to write about it again. the leftists on campus (especially the professors) are just as bad about painting a stark picture of the petitioners as the Review is.
But I hardly think one needs to actively look for knee-jerk hostility--about anything--to find it in the Review.