by Paul Alan Levy ‘72
The post from Friederike Keating, which suggests both that the alumni board is too large to be effective but also that the board needs to provide representation to more strains of alumni activism, leads me to provide the following reflection on paths not taken by the current proposed amendments to the alumni association’s constitution.
When the proposal to eliminate representatives from each of the chapters on the alumni board was first put forward in the fall of 2017, one of the rationales offered by the proponents of the change was that the alumni board was too large to operate effectively; elimination of chapter representation was said to represent a necessary form of streamlining. Of course, there was no necessary connection between the objective of cutting the size and eliminating chapter representation – why not, instead, cut down on the number of at-large members (fifteen of them, with five elected each year)?
Another alternative that was put forward was to keep roughly the same number of alumni board members but to achieve a degree of streamlining by expanding the Board’s Executive Committee – currently consisting of the secretary, vice–president, president, and immediate past president of the alumni board – by adding the chairs of each of the functioning committees – currently, the Committee for Young Alumni, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the Reed Career Alliance and the Chapters Committee. To make sure that this leadership represented a bottom-up democratic selection process instead of the current top-down process whereby the Alumni Board’s president chooses the committee chairs, the alternate proposals was for the committees to choose their own chairs.
One that sort of streamlined leadership structure was in place, it could have been possible to expand alumni participation in the alumni board by drawing in representatives from the affinity networks that have begun to form among alumni — among alumni of color, STEM femmes, legal professionals, journalists, Reedies in finance, Reedies for social change, and the like. That might have made the Board larger, although an alternative would have been to reduce the number of at-large board members.
To my own mind, the alumni board ought to be the gathering place where alums who are active in building and supporting the various activities of the alumni community can compare notes, and find ways to collaborate as well as to relate their activities to the college and the current students. Membership ought to be generated from the bottom up, rather than being selected by the current top-down process to which the representatives of the chapters are now the only exception. During the last years before Todd Hesse and Mike Teskey were pushed out of their alumni office positions, I had been hearing about such a possible expansion of the alumni board. Sadly, in the event the Board’s leadership decided to go in a different direction.
Indeed, the alternate amendment proposed, as well, that the nominating committee not limit itself to selecting a single candidate for each of the at-large and executive committee positions, One of the nicest developments at the alumni board over the past few years has been the increase in the number of alums who have wanted to be considered to be nominated for election to at-large positions. Reports from the nominating committee in recent years mentioned their having made selections from a pool of 45 or even 50 possible candidates. Why not, then, charge the nominating committee with putting forward at least two candidates for each at large position, and letting the alumni members choose among those candidates in an election? A similar principle might call for nominating multiple candidates for the executive committee positions.
Unfortunately, the proponents of the alumni constitution amendments decided to change in the direction of less democracy rather than more.
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