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Dartmouth review is of the utmost importance Jeffrey Hart
On Oct. 13, the undergraduate conservative newspaper The Dartmouth Review will celebrate its 20th anniversary in Manhattan. The banquet will be held at the Yale Club - a marvelous piece of architecture from the belle epoque era (known to Mark Twain as The Gilded Age) - because for the past 40 years, Dartmouth College alumni and faculty have been welcomed members. The ghosts of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway are felt presences in and around the bar. Some 300 ticket holders are expected to show up, and Bill Buckley and Dinesh D'Souza will be among the speakers. In case anyone needs to be reminded, D'Souza, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review, is the recent author of two very important books: "Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience," which is a study of the baneful effect of racial preferences in higher education, and "The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society," which persuasively argues that not racism, but the character of black culture itself, is the cause of most black woes in education and in the marketplace. That this undergraduate newspaper has sustained itself on a weekly basis for 20 years is, as Joe Lieberman would say, a miracle. So far as I know, this, historically, is a record among undergraduate independent newspapers. And it is especially remarkable considering the force arrayed against it. Dartmouth has no more liberal and radical faculty and administration than any other selective college or administration. Yet it certainly is liberal and radical. The Dartmouth Review was begun in 1980, inspired by the prospect of a Reagan administration in Washington and the victory in a Dartmouth trustee election by conservative Dr. John Steel. Officials at Dartmouth could not do much about the electing of Ronald Reagan, but they were outraged by the electing of Steel and proceeded to make such untoward events difficult, if not impossible, in the future. The editor of the official campus newspaper, The Daily Dartmouth, at the time was Gregory Fossedal. He supported both Reagan and Steel, and then he was bounced as editor. The resourceful fellow responded by helping to found and becoming the first editor of The Dartmouth Review. Talk about unintended consequences. Soon after graduation, Fossedal was with The Wall Street Journal, and after that he worked in the Reagan White House. Today he is an economic analyst in Washington. He had a perfect score on the Law School Test, but turned down acceptance to Harvard. Early on, The Dartmouth Review studied voter-registration rolls in Hanover and surrounding New Hampshire towns and discovered that of those registered Dartmouth faculty members, they were 92 percent Democrats. The economics department, of all things, had only one Republican. Religion had none. Government two. and English one. When then Dartmouth's liberal president John G. Kemeny retired, he was succeeded by David McLaughlin, an alumnus, college football player and businessman. When McLaughlin introduced himself at a general faculty meeting, a professor raised his hand and said bluntly, "You don't belong here." Translation: You are not an academic. You have no Ph.D. And we think you might be not only a Republican but a conservative. McLaughlin was out long before the end of his expected term, to be succeeded by James Freedman, a fanatical liberal. Under these conditions, it is nor surprising that the past 20 years of The Dartmouth Review has been turbulent, and it was covered by national TV news shows. But the Review's motto - a Latin phrase translated as "Don't tread on me" - should have been a warning. Early on, during the McLaughlin presidency, protesters against apartheid erected a cluster of ugly wooden shanties on the green in the middle of campus. Most students groaned. The faculty regarded them as sacred. After weeks and months, the dean of the college ordered them removed. McLaughlin returned from out of town and canceled that order. There were demonstrations and hubbub. One dark night, a dozen Review students joined others in knocking them down with hammers and crowbars. They received long suspensions but threatened suit and were reinstated after negotiations involving former New Hampshire Gov. Walter Peterson. I thought that if the erecting of the shanties was an expression of opinion, so was their destruction. Next, The Review exposed the impossible classroom performance by a black professor. It did so by printing verbatim a tape recording made by a college freshman of what purported to be a lecture. Amid the usual hubbub, the Review editor and three other top editors were suspended for extensive time periods tantamount to expulsion. They sued, and the judge ordered them reinstated because of the gross prejudice of their disciplinary hearings. The suit cost the students $300,000 to win, Dartmouth $300,000 to lose. The faculty grumbled that The Review was like Der Stunner, a Nazi newspaper. That is, it had supported Reagan and attacked liberal and leftist icons. And so it has gone over the years. At one point, Freedman staged a huge rally of students and others in the middle of campus. This is now generally referred to as "The Hate Rally." He accused The Review of racism. The editor in chief of The Review that year was black, an "A" student and went on to The Wall Street Journal. He accused the Review of anti-Semitism. Half a dozen of its editors in chief have been Jewish, and often much of its staff. A list of the important careers being enjoyed by leading Review students would be too long for many columns. They regard the official Dartmouth newspaper as a silly resume stuffer.
Jeffrey Hart
is a syndicated columnist for King Features Syndicate. |
