Following in the footsteps of reform-minded Dartmouth alumni who have won insurgent campaigns for governing boards in Hanover, two Harvard alumni, Harvey A. Silverglate and Robert L. Freedman, are running their own campaign to bring "change" to Cambridge this year. At Minding the Campus, Silverglate describes his and Freedman's uphill battle:
I joined with Harvard College (Class of 1962) alumnus Robert L. Freedman of Philadelphia, and we - one political liberal and one political conservative - launched a joint run as petition candidates for Harvard's Board of Overseers. The Board is one of Harvard's governing bodies, second in power only to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a self-perpetuating body of six lifetime members plus the president of the University. (In an oddity of history, the Board of Overseers, although an older body than the President and Fellows, is less powerful.) Freedman and I secured the signatures of over 250 alumni on our respective nominating petitions and, according to the clear rules, we had to be, and were, placed on the Overseers ballots. Mailed in early April to Harvard's approximately 340,000 living alumni, the ballot contained a total of eight officially nominated (by the Administration-friendly Harvard Alumni Association) candidates, plus Freedman and me, for six places open on the 30-member Board. Unlike Dartmouth before its Board's machinations to change the rules, petition candidates have not fared well in Harvard's recent history. In fact, two decades have passed since a petition candidate last gained an Overseers seat. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu undertook a petition candidate's run in 1989 on a platform calling for Harvard to divest from securities of companies that did business with South Africa, then governed by an all-white apartheid government. He won a seat. Two years later, a recent Harvard Law School grad named Barack Obama secured a petition place on the ballot, also on a divestment platform. By then, however, the university had changed the election rules ever so slightly... but importantly. When the ballot appeared, all of the officially named Alumni Association-nominated candidates were listed at the top of the ballot, and Obama was listed at the very end, in the "petition candidate" category. Alumni in a hurry would not likely get to the end of the ballot before exercising their allowed number of votes. Obama lost. (Presumably, a decade and a half later, Obama had learned how to protect himself from ballot manipulation by entrenched authority! Harvard, it seems, offered useful lessons for later dealing with Chicago-style politics!) ... just as I completed the first draft of this blog entry, I received in the mail my May-June 2009 issue of Harvard Magazine, the university's self-proclaimed independent bi-monthly for alumni. I turned to the "John Harvard's Journal" feature that appears in every issue. There I found a "Cast Your Vote" admonition, followed by a note that "the official candidates' names appear in ballot order below, as determined by lot." And, indeed, all of the official Harvard Alumni Association nominees are listed. Then there is the afterthought: "In addition, two alumni have qualified to run as petition candidates," and Freedman and I are listed. Suffering the same treatment accorded Obama, we were not included in the lottery that determined the order in which the official candidates were listed; we followed at the end of the bus.
As Silverglate notes, ballots were mailed out in early April. They must be returned by high noon on May 29 to be counted in the election.