Academic Freedom For Trustees

Freedom of speech is much prized on the nation’s campuses, and often invoked by faculty. But is there freedom of speech for college trustees?

Apparently not – at least not at Dartmouth College, where a spirited talk by a trustee, Todd Zywicki, has led to calls for his resignation and to a condemnation by the college’s Alumni Council, a quasi-official group.

Zywicki gave his speech at a conference of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. As head of the center, I was pleased when my colleague George Leef invited Zywicki to be a member of a panel on “Trustees in the 21st Century.”

For most colleges, trustees are the closest thing the institution has to an owner. They are supposed to provide leadership and vision and make sure that the administrators (nominally, their agents) are pursuing the mission of the school. All too often, however, trustees are weak, timid, and manipulated by administrators.

I knew that Zywicki was not such a trustee. He became a candidate through an independent petition process instead of by appointment or by nomination by the Alumni Council. As such, he was supported by many Dartmouth alumni who want to halt a move toward a leftwing, politically correct campus that de-emphasizes the traditional undergraduate experience.

And I was delighted at Zywicki’s short speech. He outlined how he became a Dartmouth trustee, explained the drift toward the “social engineering of student life” that he and his fellow petition trustees are trying to stop, and then issued a true clarion call to those who are unhappy with the state of higher education today. Comparing mainstream academia to the oppressive, monolithic church of the Spanish Inquisition, Zywicki urged us to stand up and fight for reform.

But because he used strong language to criticize a former president of Dartmouth, because he described how the Dartmouth administration is trying to restrain dissent, and because he harshly criticized the state of academia today, powerful forces at Dartmouth are demanding his head. His comments have been taken out of context and the intellectual content of his remarks minimized.

Readers can look at the transcript of the speech and decide for themselves whether his statements were “inappropriate, and contrary to Dartmouth’s best interests,”as the Alumni Council stated.

As [Jay Schalin reveals] in his defense of Zywicki, his detractors pointedly ignore Zywicki’s praise of Dartmouth, since that would make him look evenhanded.

Zywicki’s analogy of campuses today to an oppressive, unchallenged authority is apt. All too often, academia enshrines left-wing politics, disparages tradition, edges out Shakespeare with sexuality theory, lets students shout down visiting conservative speakers, replaces freshman orientation with thought reform, and in numerous other ways narrows the speech and thought of students and faculty. Such campuses desperately need the catalyst of intellectual inquiry and the energy of new – and old — ideas.

Trustees are meant to be the conscience of schools, but at most schools, trustees are even less accountable than at Dartmouth. Trustees often have the same biases as the faculty. They either collude with the administration or let it do what it wants, as Candace de Russy, a fellow panelist with Zywicki at the Pope Center conference, pointed out. “It is by now painfully obvious that trustee culture is often rotten with relativism and indifference to civic duty,“ she said.

She cited numerous examples, such as the trustees’ “deafening silence” when Columbia University gave the podium to the president of Iran and the weak-kneed decision by UC-Davis regents to withdraw a speaking invitation to former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers. De Russy cited Dartmouth, too, noting that “the trustees manipulated the rules to eliminate petition trustees who dared to question the status quo. “

So, are trustees evolving into unnecessary remnants that have no current purpose? Are they destined to simply rubber-stamp administrators’ decisions? The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has been focusing on helping trustees understand and fulfill their fiduciary role, but it’s a long haul. “When trustees reflexively defer to faculties or administrators, they risk betraying their obligation to serve as thoughtful stewards of the academic enterprise,” says Phyllis Palmiero, director of ACTA’s Institute for Effective Governance.

Yet that is what happens throughout our nation’s schools and colleges. As soon as trustees start asking what students are learning, for example, they are told that they are micromanaging and interfering with faculty prerogatives. Typically, they back off.

Zywicki has been accused of violating his fiduciary duties at Dartmouth, but the exact opposite is true. It is he who fulfills the role properly by actively seeking to govern, rather than being just another milquetoast with season tickets to the football games.

Zywicki’s role as a petition trustee has offered a glimmer of hope for those who are trying to restore a diversity of ideas in academia. Or at least it did, until the entrenched powers who wish to monopolize the intellectual debate on the Dartmouth campus struck back with a vengeance.

The existence of petition candidates willing to challenge the status quo is largely a historical accident at Dartmouth. It may also turn out to be just a relic of the past, with no meaning today. As this drama plays out in Hanover and elsewhere in the country, we will soon find out if free speech is alive or dead at Dartmouth.

Jane Shaw is the executive director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. This article originally appeared in the Pope Center’s Clarion Call.