Bored of Trustees

By Sam Buntz, Staff Columnist

Published on Thursday, February 18, 2010

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Since I first arrived at Dartmouth in the Fall of 2007, I have been vaguely aware that there is a conflict swirling around the … um, Board of Trustees or something? And there was some kind of lawsuit, and there have been controversial petition candidates, and every now and then, there is a new round of columns and letters to the editor I have to avoid reading. Recently, I gave in and read a couple of these letters to the Editor online. I realized “Wow, people really care about this stuff! Look at all the comments.” And then I asked myself, “Why don’t I?” This was a rhetorical question.

Of course I already knew why I couldn’t work up any deep seated feelings about the various Trustee issues that have crowded The D’s pages since long before I came here. As much as I love Dartmouth and am supremely grateful to it — truly thankful — I lack a sense of political proprietorship over the College. Phineas J. Tenniswhites ’67 might have one, but I don’t. I think its best to relate to the College not as a political body that needs the guidance of some particular ideology, but simply as a collective of people occupied with valuable work. The political campaigns of the Trustees are of extreme secondary importance to me, yet they elicits such passionate reactions.

In his essay “On Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau wrote, “Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient… [The government] does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished.” In my view, it is the character inherent in the students, teachers and staff at Dartmouth that has made my experience here great. They “are” Dartmouth. But the alumni who quibble endlessly about the political way in which the College should be run do not seem to “be” Dartmouth to me. They seem to think they are, of course, because they believe Dartmouth to be the torchbearer of some political spirit and not of the collective energy of its staff and students. I find this attitude alienating.

A farmer, a physician, a nurse, an artist or a rabbi — each one of these vocations is a thousand times more respectable in my eyes than that of a career politician. The difference is that the former are people who “do”— they grow, they heal, they create, they instruct. But the politician is not a person who “does” anything. He is a person constantly engaged in the task of massaging his own ego. The campaign never ends, promises and pledges are perennially made and broken. It is the efforts of those who are simply and lovingly devoted to their work that determines the fates of cities, states, and nations — even humble liberal arts institutions. I do not intend to imply that most of the trustees or aspiring trustees are “politicians” and not honest “doers,” as many have impressive resumes of “doing.” I am only referring to those circumstances in which some of them expressly show themselves to be acting in such a way.

But this point is still quite relevant to the Board of Trustees: politicians seem to spend an exponentially greater amount of time and energy in self-publicity, self-congratulation and endless rancor than in anything remotely related to the task, in this case of administering a college. If you don’t believe me, just scan the relevant back issues of this paper. Deciding whom to throw your support behind on the Board of Trustees is an emotional and arbitrary decision, irrelevant to getting real business done and insuring that the life of the College continues smoothly. In fact, I think this is a fundamentally apolitical task, anyway. And for the record, I think our current College President Jim Yong Kim is definitely numbered among “doers” and not among the politicians.

And so I urge you to ignore all the commotion that has ever surrounded the Board of Trustees. Actually, ignore the Board entirely. Those on the Board who do will do, and those who don’t won’t. Little that matters can be done politically. But what can be done is your own work. It is a shame that such frivolous bickering sometimes overshadows the wonderful work being done at Dartmouth. That is one reason the opinion of our peer institutions went sour, lowering our ranking in US News and World Report (“Dartmouth Drops in US News Rankings,” Aug. 17, 2007). This shows just how poisonous the Board of Trustees fighting has been — but it also shows how ridiculous those rankings are, because we know that the quality of the real work being done here is tremendous.