As we enter the closing weeks of the 2007 Trustee campaign, the race has gotten a fair amount of attention from a variety of media outlets and from students at the College. Here are a few references that may be of interest to you as you decide who will get your vote for Trustee. As a reminder, the voting period ends on May 15th: paper ballots must be received, and online votes cast, no later than that date in order to be counted. Please make your voice heard before it’s too late.
Endorsements in major media outlets
William F. Buckley wrote a column in National Review endorsing me for Trustee. You can find his column entitled “The High Cost of Loving Dartmouth” here.
Professor Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame in the blogosphere world, did likewise in an op-ed that ran in The New York Post. You can find his piece entitled “David vs. Goliath U” here.
John Miller wrote a piece entitled “Fighting Steve” for National Review Online endorsing my candidacy. You can find it here.
The New Criterion ran an unsigned editorial – its lead editorial, no less – endorsing me for Trustee. The editorial also demonstrates how vital independently elected Trustees have been to recent progress at Dartmouth. You can find the editorial entitled “Eyes on Hanover” here.
The Weekly Standard ran an article on April 30th surveying this year’s Trustee race. You can find the article entitled “Gunfight at Alumni Corral: A new round in Dartmouth’s running battle” here.
Power Line, a major voice in the blogosphere and frequent commentator on all things Dartmouth, has endorsed me for Trustee and made numerous favorable postings about my candidacy. For two such postings, click here and here. By searching on the Power Line website (www.powerlineblog.com) for the word “Dartmouth,” you can find all sorts of interesting information and insightful commentary about the goings-on in Hanover — no surprise there, really, because a number of the contributors to the site have the legendary “granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains.”
An article on the website of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a noted free speech watchdog group, has praised me for my commitment to freedom of speech at Dartmouth. The article can be found here. FIRE has also cautioned Dartmouth that the concerns I’ve raised about free speech at Dartmouth remain valid despite the College’s current “green light” rating from FIRE. That cautionary note can be found here.
Published Interviews
The two major student newspapers on campus, The Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Review, have interviewed me about the issues facing the College, as has the College’s official publication, Dartmouth Life.
The Dartmouth ran an article profiling my candidacy when I first entered the race. You can find the article entitled “Smith Runs on Free Speech, COS [Committee on Standards] Reform” here.
The Dartmouth Review ran an interview with me, in question-and-answer format, in its latest issue. You can find the interview, which ran under the title “TDR Interviews Stephen Smith ‘88,” here.
Dartmouth Life ran an interview with me, in question-and-answer format, in its recent issue. You can find both the shortened version that ran in the print issue and the longer version here. To read my responses alongside those of my opponents, click here.
The Dartmouth surprised many College watchers by not delivering the expected endorsement of one of the three nominated candidates. “After private interviews with each trustee candidate and hours of deliberation,” the editorial staff reported in editorial dated March 30th, “we could not come to an endorsement.” This marks the first time in recent races that The Dartmouth hasn’t endorsed a nominated candidate for Trustee.
The editorial board commended me for “present[ing] the most concrete agenda.” It also said, more specifically, the following: “We were impressed that hiring faculty topped [Smith’s agenda] — promoting college-style teaching and reducing course enrollments is about getting the right people and enough of them. This plank was the strongest out of any candidate’s campaign.” You can find the editorial, which discusses the other candidates as well, by clicking here.
Student Endorsements
Given how central the student experience is to my candidacy, I’m delighted that a number of students — from all across the political spectrum – have endorsed my candidacy.
Joe Malchow ‘08, one of the most well-known students on campus, has endorsed my candidacy his widely read blog, ”Joe’s Dartblog” (www.dartblog.com). Having met Mr. Malchow and read his blog for some time, I can tell you that we’re very lucky to have students like him at the College – he’s a smart, courageous man of principle who works tirelessly to make student opinion heard and to make Dartmouth an even better place to go to school.
Mr. Malchow wrote the following in support of my candidacy:
“At Dartmouth, Law Professor Stephen Smith, the petition candidate, is in my opinion the candidate most likely to bring critical inquiry to bear on the College’s executives. As he says in his video statement, he wants to support the Dartmouth administration when it is right and stand up to it when it is wrong. Those are more than just words. Mr. Smith was the first in this campaign to adopt the issues of bureaucratic bloat, due process in student disciplinary hearings, and resource misallocation toward the graduate programs. And he’s the most substantive speaker on every one of them, actually pulling out numbers to demonstrate a pattern of wayward priorities.
. . .
In my opinion, then, Stephen Smith ‘88 is the standout candidate for Trustee—ready to agree with the administration when it is right, but possessed of a proven ability to disagree constructively when it is wrong. He has refused to attack his opponent, even though that opponent has called into question his very integrity. Mr. Smith’s blog shows that he is a sober and considered observer of Dartmouth College. Mr. Smith lives and works in academia, which I consider a benefit, and has served on a number of nonprofit boards, including the YMCA and the United Way. And his personal biography is singularly astonishing.
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But more than all that, don’t we really want a Trustee who, when he visits Hanover, actually goes down into the basement and plays a game or two? Don’t we want that sort of a Trustee advising President Wright at Board meetings? A Trustee who, when making decisions, sides with the actual student experience over the president’s executive summaries? In my view, Stephen Smith will be an advocate for students on the Board, and I encourage all readers to vote for him.”
You can find the Dartblog endorsement here.
Mr. Malchow was most recently joined in endorsing my candidacy by Adam Shpeen ‘07, chair of the Student Assembly’s task force for reform of the disciplinary process. Rebuking one of my opponents for criticizing my stance on disciplinary process reform, Mr. Shpeen wrote that “Smith has taken up the issue of COS [Committee on Standards] reform from the outset, endorsing the recommendations of our report and demanding that the board act to resolve the problem,” and commended as “truly noteworthy” my “boldness on an issue that has enormous effect on all students at Dartmouth.”
Mr. Shpeen’s op-ed can be found here.
Zak Moore ‘09 endorsed me because of the “diversity of vision” that I have brought to Dartmouth and would bring to the Board of Trustees. He explained:
“The bottom line is that Smith has been vocal, passionate, and proactive in articulating his vision to Dartmouth. He is addressing issues that matter to students from the liberty to speak freely to greater choice in course selection to ending academic injustice everywhere. Hundreds of alumni have signed on to support the petition candidacy of Smith because of his diversity of vision. Not only does he stand alone of all the candidates in even expressing a vision, Smith has shown that he represents a wide range of tangible goals that are essential to the well-being of Dartmouth.”
Mr. Moore’s op-ed can be found by clicking here.
Brandon Fenn ‘07 joined Mr. Moore in supporting my position on free speech at Dartmouth. Mr. Fenn wrote: “Instead of throwing out rhetoric about freedom of speech, Smith has made a simple recommendation: Dartmouth should just adopt the First Amendment. In my view, that puts him in touch with students. It is worth noting that Smith has been the only candidate to take the hard positions on free speech — and he stuck his neck out, doing it first, before he knew where the other candidates stand.”
Mr. Fenn also praised my stance on other issues:
“Taking a full view of the issues facing Dartmouth, and the positions Smith has taken on them, it is clear that he’s deeply in touch with student sentiment in Hanover. He is the first and only candidate to endorse reform of the Committee on Standards, where Dartmouth lags miles behind in the area of due process. He is, again, the first and only candidate to recognize Dartmouth’s bureaucracy problem, where the number of administrators keeps increasing almost exponentially every year — along with tuition. And while in Hanover for Winter Carnival, Smith spoke with several campus groups and made a strong case that the current administration has let Dartmouth’s focus on the undergraduate slip toward a more research-based institution.”
Mr. Fenn’s letter can be found here.
Although he believes free speech is no longer an issue at Dartmouth, Jacob Baron ‘10 has written several op-eds strongly praising my stand on streamlining the bloated bureaucracy and reforming the disciplinary process. Even as a first-year, Mr. Baron is well on his way to becoming one of the leading student commentators at the College.
Mr. Baron’s most recent piece, without mentioning me by name, endorses my position that the administration hasn’t done enough to bring down undergraduate class size to levels of which Dartmouth should be proud.
You can find his article, entitled, appropriately enough, ”Large Classes, Misplaced Priorities,” here.
Early in the campaign, Mr. Baron wrote the following in an article you can find by clicking here:
“What is immediately obvious with a visit to Smith’s website is that the man is a straight talker. Smith expresses his views on Dartmouth issues clearly and specifically to a degree that the other candidates, with the possible exception of Oberg, do not. . . . Along with the standard priorities of keeping Dartmouth a college and ensuring strong Greek and athletic programs, Smith speaks adamantly against the ‘bureaucratic bloat’ that he convincingly argues is evident. He even expresses support for Committee on Standards reform. To me, these last two issues in particular demonstrate that of the four candidates, Smith is most in touch with current student opinion.”
Mr. Baron followed up that op-ed with another towards the end of the campaign. After decrying the “politically motivated alarmism” that has led to the ”[d]emonization of petition candidates,” he had this to say about my platform:
“Administrative priorities are a big deal, and to many alumni, our current ones are all wrong. Smith advocates a very critical revamp of the College budget. Any candidate who does that is worth at least a second look. Every dollar spent on construction, sustainability, or administrators to pester students about water pong [which was banned this year in several dorms as a health measure to avoid excessive water consumption by students] is a dollar that could be spent on, say, reducing class sizes or making international admissions need-blind. . . . Setting budget priorities straight is Smith’s real platform, the part too often obscured by political fog. If Smith will move to revamp the budget to ‘keep Dartmouth a College’ and ‘invest in excellence, not bureaucracy,’ well, you can’t argue with that.”
This op-ed can be found here.
