Letter to the Editor: Picking Sides
By Merle Adelman ’80
Published on Tuesday, February 9, 2010
To the Editor:
Did I hear a flip-flop drop?
Petition trustee hopeful Joe Asch ’79 claims he never supported the second round of litigation funded by the Hanover Institute against the College. Perhaps he has forgotten attending the December hearing in Grafton County Superior Court, sitting and commiserating with Frank Gado ’58, affiliate of the Hanover Institute and ardent litigant. Asch skipped the announcement of the Alumni Council’s trustee candidates in Hanover that morning in order to attend.
“[The lawsuit] is a shame in terms of the waste of resources to have a lawsuit, it’s a shame in terms of lost time, it’s a shame [because of the] conflict it engenders, but I have to say I understand why somebody would do that,” he told The Dartmouth after the second suit was dismissed (“Asch ’79 seeks trustee position,” Jan. 20).
Asch will say whatever it takes to get himself elected. When College President Jim Yong Kim was hired, Asch was first out of the gate to tear him down, telling the Valley News he “would have preferred a president who was a world-class scholar” and that he would not have hired Kim as a CEO because he had never run a company. Now he cannot wrap himself closely enough in our new president’s popularity. And after years of writing in favor of the benefits that “outsiders” bring to the board, he now declares that it needs “insiders”-- people like himself who can “investigate” what he calls “the dark Satanic mills of the Dartmouth bureaucracy.”
A conversion on the road to Dartmouth?
Merle Adelman ’80 Former Acting President, Association of Alumni
Ashce is the most self-serving alum out there. He simply has way too much time on his hands and 99% of the time is completely uninformed about what he’s talking about. He says he talks to students, but Mr. Asche speaking to the same 5 students who run the Review does not make you informed of students' needs.
By Anonymous on Feb 9 | 11:54 am
Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. I too, was a bit skeptical of Jim Kim at first, but after reading about him and hearing him speak, I changed my mind.
Circumstances change, and what might have been correct at one time can be incorrect at another.
By ‘12 on Feb 10 | 11:01 am
I agree with anonymous. I sincerely hope for the sake of the vast majority of the Dartmouth undergraduate community, whom Asche knows nothing about, that he does not make it onto the alumni board.
By jkl1 on Feb 10 | 12:12 pm