If you think Hillary Clinton has been slow to accept the results at the ballot box, meet the folks who run Dartmouth College.

Like Sen. Clinton, the powers that be at Dartmouth have been getting trounced at the voting booth by an opposition campaigning for change. Like Sen. Clinton, Dartmouth's establishment has responded with increasingly desperate attacks. And like Sen. Clinton, its hopes of victory now depend on increasing the power and influence of unelected officials.

In Mrs. Clinton's case, these are called superdelegates. In Dartmouth's case, they are the self-perpetuating members of the Board of Trustees. In little more than a week – on June 5 – elections will close for the leadership of Dartmouth's Association of Alumni. If the establishment slate wins, the board will eviscerate a progressive, 117-year-old arrangement that makes this college in Hanover, N.H. one of the few where alumni have a real say in the way the school is run.

That arrangement dates to 1891, when the trustees were divided into two equal groups, plus two ex-officio members. The first group was appointed by the school itself. The other half was chosen by alumni from within their ranks. In recent decades, because of the way alumni seat nominations and elections were run, these alumni trustees were pretty much insiders themselves, and the relationship with the board was a cozy one.

All that changed in 2004, when T.J. Rodgers – class of 1970 and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor – ran for one of the board's alumni seats. Mr. Rodgers had to mount a petition drive just to get his name on the ballot, and then won election by a comfortable margin. Like many of his fellow alums, Mr. Rodgers is a passionate believer in the liberal arts, and his platform stressed high academic standards, free speech and the primacy of the undergraduate mission at Dartmouth.