Publishing Not Perishing

Summer term was the setting for the birth pangs of what promises to be Dartmouth's seventh newspaper. (Maroon two Americans on a desert island, goes an old joke, and by morning one of them will have started a newspaper.) According to its coeditors Dhruv Khanna '83 and John Fanestil '83 and its publisher John Hall '83, the end of September was to see it on the street, jostling for place among all the others the venerable Dartmouth, its recent offspring, the Dartmouth Fortnightly,Campus, Black Praxis, Open Forum, and the Dartmouth Review.

This newcomer to the marketplace of free speech, the Harbinger, will be a fortnightly, an independent student effort consisting of 12 pages emphasizing "national and international politics and campus concerns at Dartmouth." In a formal statement of principle, the organizers decry contemporary trends in both and announce their intention to stimulate liberal thought at the College: "Dartmouth College has, for too long, been perceived as a bastion of conservatism. Popular sentiment on this campus and among our alumni belies such a perception. We intend to let the liberal voice of Dartmouth College be heard." The founders promise rational debate and careful reasoning and plan to rely on "the conversational, rather than the pedantic or scholarly*' for style.

Khanna described the new paper as a response to "severe problems of community and communication at Dartmouth," characterizing the College community as fragmented into groups talking past each other rather than to each other. Khannk was also critical of what he sees as thie faculty's unwillingness to take part in any of the current student publications. "We think one of our greatest assets is our remarkable faculty," he said, "and one of the functions of the Harbinger will be to prod the faculty out of their silence."

Khanna denied that the Harbinger was in any way a reaction to the DartmouthReview, but Hall and Fanestil cited the national publicity given to the contentiously conservative Review as an important element in the decision to launch a new publication. Fanestil conceded candidly that the Harbinger was in some sense sparked by the Review: "Sure, the paper might not be here if the Review hadn't been. But an integral part of the reaction to the Review is a reaction to what I see as the Review's great lack of careful thought and journalistic integrity. That's the most fundamental respect in which we are a reaction to it."

The Harbinger organizers have so far raised enough funds to put out two issues. Nobody was saying just what topics those first issues will address, but possible candidates were hinted at, among them Reagan's recent budget cuts, the MX missile debate, the role of athletics at Dartmouth, and diversity in the student body.