A Straight Talk

IT'S time, I think, that we had a straight talk about the DartmouthReview. Why? Only because it continues to disseminate misleading information about the College. I live here, I know. But let me speak more specifically.

From its very first issue, published one year ago, the Review unleashed a vocal and abusive attack on the College. This antagonistic attitude was not at all surprising given the generally negative views of the College held by the paper's financial supporters. And that's fair enough; adversarial relationships can be productive in terms of solving deeply disputed problems, and few, I think, would exempt Dartmouth from either criticism or the obligation to explain its policies to any such critics.

The Review, however, by its actions, has expressed an indifference to a mature exchange of viewpoints. Rather, it has encouraged a non-constructive relationship with the College and in the process has seemed to take a perverse pleasure in vilifying President Kemeny and maligning Dartmouth as a whole. It seems to me that the Review's continued editorializing in the journalistic sense of the word on subjects of great importance to the good governance of the College has long since passed the point of sprightly irreverence or even non-constructive criticism. To speak plainly, its misrepresentations seem deliberately designed to provide evidence of some trumped-up administration duplicity, duplicity so horrendous that an enraged Dartmouth will rise up and vote into office those alumni who share the Review's political and educational views.

Let me cite just one example of how this bastard child of fact and fantasy is produced. In an article concerning the election of John Steel '54 to the Board of Trustees, the Review writer insinuated that Michael McGean '49, the secretary of the College, had considered discounting votes in favor of Steel's candidacy and, moreover, that President Kemeny and his executive assistant, Alexander Fanelli '42, had possibly conspired to prevent Steel's seating on the board. The proof? Hearsay, speculation, the undocumented accusations of Steel supporters. The purpose? To undermine the integrity of these men. The method? The worst sort of yellow journalism.

The Review has done much the same thing with its reporting of such subjects as the trustee election guidelines, the College Committee on Standing and Conduct, year-round operation, the value of today's Dartmouth education, and on and on.

Unfortunately, its editors have not been satisfied with mangling their readers' understanding of important issues; they have made a practice of insulting, libeling, and threatening anyone with the temerity to raise questions about their methods or disagree with their opinions. For example, when the ALUMNI MAGAZINE began to prepare a routine story about the founding of the Review, one of the Review's editors threatened to publish unspecified "details" of our writer's personal life and to complain to influential alumni were she not taken off the story. Her crime, he claimed, was a conflict of interest. His was blackmail. You can read her original, unaltered story in our September 1980 issue and judge for yourself.

More examples: They have labeled a pro-abortion speaker at a Tucker Foundation debate as "allegedly syphilitic" and have recently been accused of stealing confidential journals and files from the Women's Resource Center and the Gay Students Association. In like style, the Review suggested that several College employees be punished when they offered draft registration counseling to students, not because they mistakenly printed their letter on College stationery, but because they alluded to options other than compliance, because they exercised their right to speak out in a way that the editors of the Review disapprove of. Add to blackmail: character assassination, theft, censorship.

The aspect of the whole sad business that most astonishes me is that, despite its mudslinging and the fantasies its writers pass off as objective reporting, the Review had managed to convince some alumni that it is the victim of College harassment, harassment intended to prevent terrible secrets from reaching alumni ears. For instance, the disagreement over the use of the name "Dartmouth" in the title of the paper was a commonplace dispute over the legal right to the use of a name. What it wasn't was an attempt to squelch dissenting views. There's a considerable logical gap between the two. If anything, the College has leaned over backwards to let the Review say what it will whether out of a respect for freedom of speech or the wallets of some wealthy benefactors I cannot say.

The Review, it seems to me, has destroyed whatever credibility it might have earned with its never-ending halftruths and vitriol, with its incessant attacks on President Kemeny, the Board of Trustees, liberals in general, Robert Field '43, Ronald Schram '64, their supporters among the alumni, communists, John French '3O, Senator Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, critics of the Indian symbol, homosexuals, Latin American rebels, antiapartheid protesters, the College administration, the Undergraduate Council, feminists, the organized black community, the staff of The Dartmouth, Professor Michael Green, Professor Marysa Navarro, supporters of minority studies, and so on down the line. The Review, in short, deals in hate. And, as we all have cause to know, hate justifies everything.

But I don't know that I only blame the editors and staff of the Review for their hates, for their corruption of journalism, for their subversion of the good will that had characterized most of the operations of the College. I think that much credit goes to the alumni who fund the Review and then applaud it as an organ of free speech because it echoes their opinions. They seem to show no restraint whatsoever in attempting to foxce their view of Dartmouth on everyone, even to the point of tacitly encouraging students to blackmail, lie, and steal all with malice aforethought. And then there is Professor Jeffrey Hart '5l, Dartmouth's resident conservative ideologue and the cell leader of a line of right-wing students. It was he, no doubt, who brought students and alumni together to create the Review, who unerringly points out the enemies of Western Civilization.

Ultimately, though, perhaps the greatest fault lies with the College itself: Shouldn't a Dartmouth education undermine our pieties just enough to dissolve the foundations of our hatreds?