Trustees, Dartmouth, and the AP

The Duke case has provided a good example of how Boards of Trustees, by taking an excessively passive approach to their oversight role, can cause significant harm to an institution.

But Duke is hardly alone. The Dartmouth administration also made a name for itself by supporting a combination of political correctness and hostility to athletics that would make Orin Starn proud. Unlike Duke, Dartmouth allows alumni to elect some of its trustees, and in the past three years, four insurgent candidates have been elected. All four have called for:

• an increased emphasis on athletics;
• abolishing speech codes;
• returning the college to a platform of research and teaching excellence.

One of the trustees, Todd Zywicki, lamented that "Dartmouth has drifted from its core mission in recent years,” often by diverting funds to "programs of questionable educational value.” He also celebrated the intricate link between teaching and research.

In short, the insurgent Dartmouth trustees could be called the anti-Group of 88.

As the insurgents have prevailed, Dartmouth has kept changing the rules to make it harder for candidates not approved by the administration to prevail; yet last week, the latest insurgent, University of Virginia law professor Stephen Smith, won.

Here is how an astonishingly slanted AP article covered Smith’s triumph:

• It suggested that while Dartmouth had in recent years tried to “make the campus more welcoming to women, minorities and scholars,” Smith “appreciated the old Dartmouth,” characterized by “rowdy fraternities—such as the one that inspired the movie ‘Animal House.’” Yet nothing in Smith's platform suggests that such a description is accurate.
  

• It contended that Smith opposed “codes regulating hate speech,” even though, as any glance through the annals of FIRE would reveal, these codes have a chilling effect on all speech.
  

• It implied that Smith, who is African-American and attended Dartmouth, opposed the “cultural shifts at campuses that were previously all-male and nearly all-white.”

• It reported that defenders of the administration “said Smith was not forthcoming about his conservative background, including a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” (In fact, Smith’s website says, “After law school, I worked for two federal judges. The first was Judge David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The second was Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court of the United States.”)

• It claimed that Smith’s opponents embraced “mainstream” ideas.

The article then closed with a quote not from the victorious candidate but from Dartmouth president James Wright, who remarked, “For those people who don't like goals that include diversity, that don't include faculty doing scholarship, I'm sorry, but I think those are the best traditions of Dartmouth.”

The AP coverage of the lacrosse case, coordinated by Aaron Beard, has been among the best. And in general, the AP’s stories are characterized by a no-nonsense, facts-only approach. The CNN website doesn’t identify the author of the AP piece on Dartmouth, but that such a biased story would come from the AP is disturbing.