It no doubt speaks well of Dartmouth College that its graduates feel so passionately about the institution that a full-scale controversy has blown up over the way alumni members are elected to the board of trustees.

And the fact that The New York Times would see fit to devote 35 column inches and two pictures to the subject last week certainly suggests that it's important. Apparently, conservative bloggers and publications all over the country think so. The Times reports that the dust-up has drawn their intense interest because changes being proposed by the alumni association to its constitution would allegedly restrict the ability of insurgent candidates to be elected to the board of trustees - or something like that.

Anyway, as far as we can tell, conservative dissidents are disgusted by the direction in which Dartmouth is allegedly headed - to a place where hallowed traditions such as the social supremacy of fraternities, strong sports programs and the college's emphasis on undergraduate education are broken on the wheel of political correctness by liberal academics whose pernicious business it is to infringe on free speech.

Although the proposed electoral changes themselves are arcane, we are more than willing to acknowledge that people are all riled up about them. We can't help but wonder, though, whether this conservative angst isn't a bit myopic: While all this has been going on at Dartmouth, has anybody noticed that the Bush administration has assembled a vast centralized security state that systematically violates Americans' civil liberties, all the while asserting that executive power may not be checked by Congress, the courts or the press?

Now there's something that ought to truly outrage those of conservative persuasion. Grover Norquist, a conservative icon and normally a Bush supporter, is quoted to telling effect in a recent article by Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books: "If you interpret the Constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don't have a constitution: You have a king."

He added, "They're not trying to change the law; they're saying that they're above the law and in the case of the NSA (National Security Agency) wiretaps, they break it."

Indeed. Warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of other types of records on a large scale is only part of the story. Bush asserts the right to hold hundreds of "enemy combatants" indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without affording them recourse to court review; to disregard at his discretion legal prohibitions on torture of prisoners; to ignore laws passed by Congress or interpret them as he sees fit; and, contrary to the First Amendment as it has historically been interpreted, to prosecute the press for publishing government secrets.

And although we can understand conservatives' desire to stamp out the last vestige of American liberalism by taking control of the universities, we can't help thinking that their time might be better spent reining in the gross overreaching of rightwing Washington. After all, someday a Democrat might get elected president again. As Norquist notes: "These are all the powers you don't want Hillary Clinton to have."