Dartmouth Moves The Goal Posts

WELL, YOU HAD to expect it. After three dissident candidates got themselves on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, the Dartmouth Alumni Association is moving the goal-posts. They want to bring in a new constitution that will not allow petition candidates to declare after the official nominees have been announced. How cool is that?

You can read all about it in The New York Times. Diana Jean Schemo tells all. The problem, according to John Daukas, a lawyer in charge of the task force that came up with the new constitution, is that

the current system put the official candidates at a disadvantage because they did not know whether they would face outside challengers at all or who they might be.

Oh dear. That would be a problem. Not that an alumni association that kept its ear to the ground would ever be blindsided by trustee candidates coming up out of left field.

Various bloggers and the folks at NRO are onto all this skullduggery. And even the two Dartmouth student newspapers are agreed.

Editors of the on-campus Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth Free Press, conservative and liberal publications that seldom agree, called the new constitution "a slap in the face to open democracy" that "makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech."

Still. It is far too early to bet against the incumbents.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

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C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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