By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 8, 2007

Conspiracy theories. Claims of a conservative cabal plotting a takeover. Charges of intimidation and threatening phone calls. These aren't behind-the-scenes shenanigans on the Hill, or K Street, or in a presidential campaign. It isn't the overheated plot in the latest Dan Brown novel.

Rather, it's the rhetoric of deep-pocketed Dartmouth College alumni wielding BlackBerrys and checkbooks, fighting an internecine battle over the control of the school.

In recent days, an anonymous group of dissident alums has been waging a full-scale offensive, taking out full-page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, posing hyperbolic questions: "Who Won't Get to Vote in New Hampshire? A: Dartmouth College Alumni," and "In this age of Sarbanes-Oxley and corporate transparency, can you imagine a CEO trying to wrest control of a multi-billion-dollar Board from his shareholders?"

The focus of their intensive lobbying: This weekend's retreat near the campus in Hanover, N.H., where the board's 18 trustees will determine the future of the board and the school's governance. Since 1891, when alumni agreed to bail the university out of its financial straits, half of the board of trustees have been elected by 60,000 or so alumni. (Dartmouth is unusual in this regard; only a handful of other institutions are run this way.)

But now, after a board committee conducted a study this summer exploring "governance reform," some fear that a vote could change the structure of the board and curb the influence of write-in campaigners. Or maybe not. The proposal itself has not been made public, or even seen by some of the trustees.

The dissidents -- including the anonymous voices behind SaveDartmouth.Org -- claim the meeting is in direct response to elections of the past three years, which brought in four trustees who have been critical of the current Dartmouth administration.

"Democracy hangs in the balance," says Dartmouth Trustee Stephen Smith, '88, an Anacostia native and University of Virginia law professor who clerked with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (This year, Smith won a seat on the board after waging a write-in campaign that cost $75,000.)

"It's embarrassing," says Wallace Ford, '70, a consulting firm COO, referring to the dissidents' ad campaign. "This is not a battleground of power; this is an institution of higher learning. I don't think students are learning anything positive in being witness to the rules of political warfare being applied in context on a college campus."

Over the years, Dartmouth frequently has found itself shoved front and center in the national spotlight, often to squirm-inducing effect. In the late '70s, the antics of Dartmouth fraternities garnered media attention. (In 1979, Esquire published an expos? of fraternity life, "Hanging by a Jockstrap to Tradition at Dartmouth.") During the late '80s, partisan feuding at the school sparked the interest of CBS's "60 Minutes."

(Full disclosure: This writer, class of '83, lived through that era, when conservative thinkers such as Dinesh D'Souza, '83, and Laura Ingraham, '85, got their start at the newly formed, independent paper the Dartmouth Review.)

Dartmouth's alums have always been a cantankerous lot, opinionated and verbose, passionately involved in the school's affairs long after they've grabbed their diplomas and bolted from the hills of New Hampshire. A Wall Street Journal editorial this week -- written by an alum -- described the school as "part college, part cult."

Back in 1819, graduate Daniel Webster, in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, famously declared before the Supreme Court: "It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." That love often inspires heated debate along both sides of the cultural and political divide: In its alumni magazine, people still bitterly debate the eradication of the Indian symbol as a mascot for its athletic teams -- a symbol that hasn't been in official use since the early '70s.

It's a place where even the lyrics of the alma mater, "Lest the old traditions fail," are loaded: Which traditions? That of academic excellence? Or the one that got Dartmouth's veiled image immortalized as frat-party central in "National Lampoon's Animal House"? That of single-sex education? (Dartmouth was the second to last of the Ivies to go co-ed, in '72.) Or that of inclusiveness? (Dartmouth, after all, was initially founded in 1769 as a school for Native American youth.)

To outsiders, the latest flap may seem particularly tedious. Last year, the administration presented a new alumni constitution, one that could change direct trustee elections. It was defeated with a 51 percent majority. This weekend, the trustees may decide to do an end run around that decision.

Board Chairman Ed Haldeman Jr. downplays the significance of the vote, but said he would not discuss specifics until the retreat concludes tomorrow at noon. "This isn't an end run around anything," he said yesterday. And he is trying to lower the volume, noting that "our elections for trustees have become more divisive and polarized."

"This has gotten really rancorous," Smith says. "A lot of alumni told us, 'We'd speak out and we'd join [the dissidents], but we fear reprisals.' Anything ranging from ostracization to intimidation to . . . they have kids. They fear retaliation in admissions office."

But Ford, who says he received death threats as president of the college's Afro-American Society in the late '60s, scoffs at Smith's claims. "Give me a break. . . . If they got a fish wrapped in newspaper, maybe I'd take them seriously."

If nothing else, the public feuding may make alumni even more passionate about their old school. "There are a number of people who are going to be sufficiently offended by this whole process that they're going to get a lot more involved," Ford says. "I sure am."