When Dialogue Turns to Diatribe

Is speech at Dartmouth as free as it should be?

If we believe what we read, bad things are happening at Dartmouth: people are being persecuted for what they think. A New Hampshire judge has ordered the College to reinstate a couple of editors of The Dartmouth Review, on grounds that a member of the disciplinary committee that suspended them was prejudiced against the off-campus student paper. William F. Buckley Jr., in his National Review, says "the whole Dartmouth establishment has been discredited," and he accuses the College of "incandescent hypocrisy" when it talks about freedom of speech. A Wall Street Journal editorial says the College is fostering "an atmosphere that is not liberal. It is sneering, condescending and intolerant of uncongenial views." A respected federal judge, Laurence Silberman '57 of the D.C. Court of Appeals, has rejected an alumni award, accusing Dartmouth of "intellectual intolerance" and "McCarthyism." Even The Washington Post—no friend of the Review or its right-wing allies—concludes that Dartmouth's commitment to free speech "is the real issue."

These are serious charges, and they have to give pause to all of us who believe in the College. Freedom of speech and thought are a basic part of what we learned here; it would be against the grain of everything the College stands for if it were trying to punish its own people for saying unpopular things, no matter how repugnant they might be. Sadly, there have been similar problems with speech at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Massachusetts, and even Yale. And now we read that students have been disciplined by Dartmouth after they engaged in something the College called "a vexatious oral exchange." What's going on?

The Alumni Magazine asked me to take that question seriously, look into it without bias, and write a report on the status of free speech at Dartmouth. And I have tried to do that. In two weeks on campus this January, I talked at length to 33 students, teachers and administrators, ranging from President Freedman to The Dartmouth's sophomore cartoonist, Jake Tapper. I visited old friends in Hanover and had informal conversations with another two dozen people involved with the College. I brought with me only one prejudgment: that there is an awful lot of speech going on at Dartmouth, and on the whole, the lively clash of opinions is probably good for education.

But in the end, I had to modify that cheery view. All the smoke does involve some fire; there is a climate of intolerance fostered by both left and right. On national television, "60 Minutes" observed recently that Dartmouth is at war with itself, and the College is slowly coming to acknowledge that. On one side, the Review and its allies indulge in malice, mischief-making and intellectual dishonesty; on the other, too many campus liberals are self-righteous, either naive or disingenuous about their own tolerance of dissent, and too quick to impose their values as eternal truth.

On and off campus, people marvel that the College is so tormented by the antics of an off-campus student newspaper. But Dartmouth officials over the years have seemed to lend credence to the Review's complaintsby apparently punishing right-wing offenders more heavily than liberal transgressors, for example, or introducing Angela Davis as a campus speaker without noting that she was a Communist Party candidate for vice president. And between the two sides, there is so much venom in the air that dialogue turns into diatribe. As in any war, both sides demand unquestioning loyalty: if you're not 100 percent with us, you must be against us. Speech at Dartmouth is not as free as it should be, and the College is suffering for it.

I make no claim to omniscience, and I haven't done the investigative reporting that would be needed to untangle all the charges and countercharges in the recent campus controversies. That could take months and still reach no conclusion. But I have tried to be honest and fair. I count myself mainly on the liberal side in politics, but I'm grinding no axes here. This piece represents my judgments and mine alone; the magazine can be held accountable only for setting me in motion. Aly hope is that it may help establish some facts, clear the air and point the way to a little more honesty on all sides.

It's odd and a little frustrating, one of my friends on campus remarked, that a discussion about freedom of speech should turn out to be mainly about The Dartmouth Review. But it is probably inevitable. The gadfly newspaper has been trying for nine years to provoke and torment what it sees as a left-wing campus, and then to holler persecution whenever it gets an angry response. The Review in turn is backed and amplified by an unprecedented coalition of right-wing alumni and a national media network.

The alumni of the Hopkins Institute don't quite say outright that they want to capture control of Dartmouth College and install their own faculty and curriculum, but they do keep backing insurgent candidates for the Board of Trustees; and George Champion '26, chairman of the Institute, bluntly told The Dartmouth in February that "there has to be a new look" for a College now controlled by "socialist, communist gays." The Hopkins alumni, with money from the Olin Foundation and other sources, have funded the Review's adventures for years and now are backing a sweeping legal assault against Dartmouth. The Review editors who were suspended for harassing Music Professor William Cole have sued the College for breach of contract in the state courts and accused it of race discrimination under federal law. (The federal suit was dismissed in March.) They have also challenged Dartmouth's right to collect $38 million a year from the federal government. So far, the College says it has cost $3 00,000 to defend itself. The Review editors have been represented by Harvey Myerson, a prominent New York lawyer who could bill corporate clients in the range of $500 an hour or more for courtroom time. Myerson has told the press he took the Review case at reduced rates; nobody has said how much he has been paid, or by whom.

Along with legal help, the Review's network of media backers gives it a national button that can be pushed almost at will. The Review can count on the editorial support of its journalistic godfather, The National Review, along with a chorus of right-wing columnists led by Patrick Buchanan and Dartmouth's own nationally syndicated English professor, Jeffrey Hart '51. The Review can mobilize these battalions almost at will, conjuring up head-wagging comments from Buckley, The Wall Street Journal's L. Gordon Crovitz, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and William Simon about the brilliant student journalists and the repressive College. Inevitably, the national coverage feeds doubts about Dartmouth, among the general public and the alumni as well.

The national network tempts the Review staffers with another blessing: the prospect of good jobs and a bright future. Review staffers have gone to work at The National Review, the Journal, several conservative foundations and think tanks, and even the White House, where former editor Dinesh D'Souza '83 was a policy analyst for Ronald Reagan. When staffers Christopher Baldwin '89 and John Sutter '88 were suspended after their harassment of the black music professor William Cole last year, they spent their time off campus working at The National Review, the Leadership Institute in Washington and the New York City Tribune, a paper founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Review editors are not like other members of the Dartmouth community, one professor told me somewhat bitterly: Reviewers profit by damaging the College. "They're like ticks, drawing the lifeblood out of the institution," he said.

The Review, of course, has been mischievous from the beginning. Even liberals on campus concede that the paper is well written, intelligent and often dead right in picking targets for its investigative pieces. What's more, its basic editorial stances—favoring a "Great Books" curriculum, for instance, a and opposing affirmative action for minorities in admissions policy—are at least debatable. But its staffers' tactics, particularly their personal attacks on opponents, are all but universally deplored. Even President Freedman, portrayed as a modern-day Hitler, suffers the editors' abuse. "Their professional sin is to take their smartass nasty humor about 50 yards too far," says Douglas Yates, a professor of policy studies who writes for the Review and somewhat ambivalently defends it.

Litde wonder, then, that the Review is not loved on campus. Given its nine-year record, it would hardly be surprising—it could even be called inevitable—that when Review staffers are caught in actual transgressions, the reaction of a tormented community might be to throw the book at them. But a liberal college aspires to a higher sense of justice. Its assumption is that its people can be dispassionate enough to judge individual acts, not the long record. College officials say they would never allow unequal punishment. "I would throw the book at anybody who threw the book," says •Dean of the College Edward Shanahan, chairman of the disciplinary Committee on Standards (COS). That is an ideal that the Review is happy to endorse. Its current editor, a Sikh woman named Harmeet Dhillon '89, says she doesn't expect Dartmouth to be grateful for the gadfly in its midst, but she does expect evenhanded justice and doesn't get it. New Hampshire Superior Court judge Bruce Mohl agreed with her on the Cole case, finding that a member of the COS, Film Studies Professor Albert LaValley, had previously signed a letter harshly criticizing the Review; thus he was prejudiced and should have removed himself from the case. As with the students who had smashed antiapartheid shanties in 1986, and many other cases, says Dhillon, the formal charges were just a pretext: the College aims to "bludgeon to death" the paper and "eradicate" its staff.

Disregard the hyperbole: the Review has not been censored. Its editors are allowed to distribute it on campus, and the College hasn't even followed through on its threats to force the Review to stop using Dartmouth's name. Judge Mohl specifically said there was no persuasive evidence that the College had "retaliated against" the Review staffers because they wrote for the paper. But there is indeed a record of unequal sentencing over the past decade, and it poses troubling free-speech questions.

Direct comparisons of disciplinary cases are tricky. Many details of evidence are kept confidential, and sentences may take into account a student's unpublicized prior record. The Cole-baiters were charged with disorderly conduct, harassment and invasion of privacy. One was put on probation for a year, and another was suspended for six months; Sutter and Baldwin drew suspensions of 18 months, and sued the College. It was Sutter who carried the hidden tape recorder, and Baldwin had been involved in the shanty-bashing.

The Review has cited several cases to prove that the suspensions were cruel and unusual punishment. The most troubling was the whole record of turmoil over the shanties in 1986. It's clear that the students who put up the shacks, in support of divestment in South Africa, repeatedly defied orders from the College to take them down and publicly challenged Dean Shanahan to do something about it. The College backed down, permitting the shanties to remain on the Green for months. It wasn't until the Review staffers and some friends tried to knock them down that any disciplinary action was taken: three of them were suspended for varying periods, and eight were put on probation.

There is indeed a difference between open, peaceful civil disobedience and a violent action in the dead of night. But the case didn't end there. Twenty-nine students who pressed the divestment cause by staging a sitin in the Parkhurst Hall office of thenPresident McLaughlin were found guilty of obstructing College business, but the COS decided that because of their "strongly held convictions" about issues "vital for Dartmouth and the larger society," there would be no punishment. A second sit-in after the attack on the shanties brought only a round of reprimands. And when the College finally decided that the remaining shanty had outlived its usefulness and tried to cart it away, a crowd gathered to block the action. Town police arrested 18 students, one of them for assaulting a cop. Charges were later dropped, and the COS declined to punish anyone. By this time Dean Shanahan and McLaughlin himself were angry at the double standard. McLaughlin later said the cases had created a perception that justice is served more harshly to conservatives than to liberals.

Many liberal teachers and administrators agree, at least in private, that left-wing offenders have too often been let off too lighly. Dean of Faculty Dwight Lahr maintains that the Parkhurst Hall case was just "a bad decision," one that led to reforming the entire disciplinary structure. "There was no historical memory in the system at that time," he explains. "A decision in 1980 wasn't relevant to one in 1986." It wouldn't happen again, he says; and in a sense, it's unfair to invoke the 1986 cases in the context of last year. Even so, the Cole incident by itself can be seen as less than evenhanded: several people told me they were bothered by the faculty dean's ruling that Cole's language and conduct were justified in his confrontation with his tormentors.

Other issues and incidents bearing on free speech, some of them dating back to 1979, fit the same pattern of official blessings for liberal causes and intolerance for conservatives. Among them:

• The Indian symbol. This perennial grievance for right-wing alumni exasperates most liberals, including me. We at Dartmouth have invited native Americans to join our community, and if they tell us the symbol offends them, it is only elementary good manners to do away with it. But if conservatives still want to argue about it, that is included in their right to speak out. The two students who skated onto the rink in Indian costume at halftime of a 1979 hockey game were speaking just as symbolically as the shanty builders, but they were suspended for it until President Kemeny commuted the punishment. On the other hand, outraged blacks and native Americans who defaced the center-of-campus ice sculpture to protest the skaters' action weren't punished at all. It can be debated whether hurt feelings justify attacks on works of art, even such dubious art as ice statues—or, come to that, the Hovey Grill murals, whose drunken braves and all-too-nubile maidens are now hidden from view. But would anyone argue seriously that if the shanties themselves had been tepees, erected to promote the wretched symbol, the College would have left them standing?

• Personal harassment. Both left and right tell stories of intimidation, personal retribution for political beliefs and even physical threats. On the liberal side, deans and professors complain of the Review's personal attacks and the national attention it can attract; the result, some say, is that Dartmouth lecturers shy away from controversial subjects. James Breeden '56, dean of the Tucker Foundation, says he knows professors who have decided not to offer courses dealing with Marxism. (In fact, Dean Lahr says he knows of only one such course in the curriculum, leaving Dartmouth graduates ill prepared to deal with a large portion of the world.) Breeden says a black congressman who gave an unusually tepid speech on campus last year explained afterward that he didn't want to take flak from the Review. Such caution seems extreme, and Harmeet Dhillon jeers at the notion that her paper can intimidate tenured professors. But Carla Freccero, professor of French and Italian and one of the loudest leftist voices on campus, insists that the fear is real. She herself enjoys a fight, she says, but"some people just don't want that kind of visibility." In a small, sealed community like Dartmouth, "there really isn't that much room for civil libertarianism. It's almost like a commune—not like places where you can be a part of six or seven different groups."

Right-wingers make a similar case that they are being harassed. Dhillon says her car has been repeatedly vandalized, and two of her staffers use pen names to avoid getting bad marks from liberal teachers. Doug Yates says he feels he has to censor controversial material, even when it's pertinent. "When I teach, I am horribly selfconscious," Yates told me. "I gave a lecture on Martin Luther King this morning. I did not mention his womanizing; I didn't mention that two of his closest associates were communists. I don't want some black student, left student, saying I attacked Martin Luther King."

Conservatives also say the College is slow to pursue their complaints. Kevin Pritchett '91, a black Review staffer, charges that the College shrugged off his accusation that he was thrown out of an open meeting at Cutter Hall to discuss the Cole incident, and was physically threatened when he tried to join a march against racism several days later. It's worth pursuing that complaint in detail, if only to illustrate the thicket of contradictions that surrounds nearly every incident in the campus controversies.

Pritchett says he was recognized when he appeared at Cutter Hall with three other students, including a handicapped friend in a wheelchair. "We have Reviewers in here," somebody yelled, and Pritchett was immediately ordered to leave "for your own safety." He says students crowded around, searching his friend's bag for a hidden tape recorder, and forced the two to leave. Jacqueline Allen '89, then president of the Afro-American Society, says she was among the people around Pritchett; she acknowledges that he was asked about a tape recorder—naturally enough, in light of the Cole case—but denies that there were any threats or a physical search. She says Pritchett was asked to leave only because the meeting was closed to the press. Pritchett says a reporter for The Dartmouth was not only there but taking notes, which he later shared with Pritchett. Allen says she wasn't aware of any other reporters.

Several days later, when Pritchett tried to join the march against racism, he says he was surrounded on the street, jostled, denounced for his association with the Review, and threatened by someone who said, "I want to kick your ass." "I was scared as heck. I vacated the premises," Pritchett says. Allen says she wasn't in the group, but denies there were any threats.

Prichett complained officially about both incidents, but was notified by a letter several months later that no action would be taken on the Cole incident, and that the march affair was still under investigation. College officials explain that Pritchett never identified any individual students in Cutter as having threatened him. The student who confronted Pritchett during the march was later given a warning by the deans. Pritchett, along with Professor Hart, later said that death threats followed the incident. But the deans say Pritchett never made that claim to them, and that he didn't respond to a letter from the COS secretary asking him about the threats.

• Open calls for suppression of speech. I was astonished that anyone at Dartmouth would do this unabashedly. But last year Carla Freccero argued that South Africa's UN ambassador should not have been asked to address a symposium on apartheid. By inviting him, she said, the College was endorsing the idea that apartheid was "a legitimate way of running a country." The sponsoring World Affairs Council withdrew the invitation and aborted the symposium, explaining that it might touch off violent protests. The Dartmouth has also come in for heat when it printed unpopular views. Jake Tapper, the paper's cartoonist, takes his fun where he finds it in his editorial-page strip, "Static Cling"; he skewers the Review, blacks and feminists more or less impartially. But the conservatives don't complain, he says. According to Jamie Heller '89, last year's editor, it was the active feminists who argued that The Dartmouth shouldn't "sanction" Tapper's views by printing them. And in 1987, when 'the Dartmouth came out against a Women's Resource Center on campus, the reaction of some feminists was not just that the editorial was wrong, but that The Dartmouth had no right to publish it. "A lot of people around here just have a basic lack of understanding of free speech," says Heller.

She's right. It isn't.that there's a conspiracy, a leftist cabal plotting to close down the Review and drive all conservatives off campus. But there is a climate of opinion that makes the concerns of the left more acceptable, more urgent and more taken for granted than anyone else's. Most people would agree with Dean Lahr that "This is not a community of raving liberals." In truth, by most reckonings, the College administration includes more liberals than conservatives, but few extremists of either persuasion. The student straw poll last year favored Dukakis, but by the smallest margin in the Ivy League. The faculty is heavily tipped to the liberal side, but most professors stay out of the public arena, increasingly unhappy with the Review but reluctant to take any active role. "The phrase, 'organized faculty,' is an oxymoron," says Richard Winters, director of the Rockefeller Center. Almost by default, the terms of debate tend to be set by the activists of the left, who speak out in meetings, press their views in public and impose their values as a matter of course. "There is a kind of liberal bigotry, at Dartmouth and elsewhere," says Chauncey Loomis, former chairman of the English Department. "The liberal way of thinking becomes the only way, and they do their best to blind themselves to that fact."

The liberals also live in a world that seems almost hermetically sealed, with an astonishing lack of awareness or concern for the values of what George Bush would call the mainstream. To mark 15 years of coeducation at Dartmouth, for example, a special committee planned a week-long program of events, with outside speakers ranging from columnist Flora Lewis to Wheaton College President Alice Emerson. But the headline speaker was Angela Davis, the two-time communist candidate for vice president and onetime black radical who was tried and acquitted as an accessory in a fatal prison breakout of the sixties. Nobody argues seriously that Davis should not speak at Dartmouth, but conservatives were livid that neither Dean Lahr, who introduced her lecture, nor Carla Freccero, who wrote a laudatory piece about Davis in the leftwing campus paper Stet, bothered to mention Davis's party affiliation or her violent past. Lahr and Freccero say they are mystified by the criticism. Davis "wasn't invited to make a political speech," says Lahr, who notes that her scholarly reputation even predates her political activism; she was to talk about the subject of her book, Women, Race and Class. "We don't identify people's politics unless it has relevance to their subject," Lahr argues. (In reality the speech turned out to be highly political.) Freccero says she never dreamed it would be such a big deal; the whole incident "just made me realize how Big Brotherly the situation is at Dartmouth, that you can't be a member of the Communist Party."

As one person after another explained it to me, the issue boils down to community politics in a small, isolated place where one point of view has come to be received wisdom. "Within the community there is a sense of right and wrong," says Lahr. And increasingly, the community ethos values civility. Free speech isn't an absolute, many liberals argue; just as it is limited by the constraints of libel, treason and public safety, speech must stop short of inciting hatred or wounding minority feelings. That argument leaves many liberals uneasy, but there is indeed a kind of civility standard at Dartmouth. Again, enforcement is uneven. Remarks judged sexist or racist are pounced on, but the College has not identified or punished radical feminists who left red-dyed tampons and broken eggs on the doorsteps and even in the beds of people who offended them. The symbolism of that remains murky, but it is genuinely offensive to a good many people.

There wasn't much doubt about the sense of right and wrong in the Dartmouth community after the baiting of Professor Cole. The campus was outraged at the students who provoked him. There were angry meetings and urgent calls for action; at a rally in front of Parkhurst Hall, speakers condemned the Review and its works. And the administration appeared to endorse this view of the case. President Freedman told the crowd of his concern for "acts of disrespect, insensitivity and personal attack," and denounced "racism, sexism and other forms of ignorance." Later, when the Afro-American Society organized its candlelight vigil against racism, Dean Shanahan's office wrote the fraternities along the line of march, asking them not to cause problems and suggesting that they "encourage member attendance." Freedman met with a delegation from the Afro-Am, but didn't talk to the Review staffers until after their disciplinary hearing. Dean Lahr explains this sequence as a natural reaction to the community's feelings. "There was a sense of hurt and victimization, and the president put on his priestly robes and tried to comfort them," he said. "Within the community it seems to make sense, and there is a sense of justice." Just so. But from the outside it doesn't look fair.

As Freedman and most of the campus see it, he couldn't have done otherwise. At the court hearings, he was asked if he hadn't worried that his speech at the rally might prejudice the disciplinary cases against the Reviewers. "Not for a minute," he said; he was only doing what had to be done to preserve calm. Judge Mohl agreed that the president's statements hadn't poisoned the air for the Review staffers. In fact, the 1986 COS reform was meant, in part at least, to divorce the president from the disciplinary process so that he could speak out on such occasions. And if Freedman had left any doubts as to how he felt, he put them to rest with a scathing denunciation of the Review at a faculty meeting after the COS hearings. He made it clear that he would welcome a decent conservative voice on campus; even the Review, he said, was free to publish under the First Amendment. But he was under no obligation to like it, and his own freedom of speech included answering back. "What the Review has done on this campus has not been decent," he said. "It has been irresponsible, mean-spirited, cruel and ugly." He got a standing ovation from the faculty. But the Review inevitably, and unfairly, seized on the speech as further proof that Dartmouth is out to destroy it.

President Freedman says he's aware of' the widespread doubts about freedom of speech on his campus. He says they're not justified: "If the events of the past 18 months prove anything, it's that freedom of speech thrives at Dartmouth." What troubles him, he says, is that "we live in a society where the creation of images has such power." But he has faith in the alumni to distinguish the truth from the "images created by the media." And one by one, he dismisses these images. He knows of no double standard of justice, he says; the cases cited were before his time at Dartmouth. The students are bright enough to draw their own conclusions about speakers such as Angela Davis. In the turmoil over Cole, he was only trying to preserve peace. Of course he met with the Afro-Am, he says, but those students couldn't be called a "side" in the dispute; they just wanted to talk about how hard it is to be black in this environment. Does he wish he had done anything different? A long pause. Then, very quietly, "No."

Freedman wants civility at Dartmouth, but he wants good sense and basic respect to set the rules. He says he doesn't want speech curbed in the name of civility. "Every time you draw the line a little tighter," he told me, "you cut down a bit on what [the Supreme Court] calls the robustness of debate." He's right—but that is already part of the problem at Dartmouth. James Breeden was one of several people who told me that while repugnant ideas must hp examined, the line can be drawn at "the intent to hurt feelings." In practice, that delicate distinction is often impossible. The mere possibility of offending people can shut off a whole subject. Ron Lepinskas '89, president of the new Dartmouth Union debating society, says he wouldn't even try to schedule debates on affirmative action, the Review or the Indian symbol: "That would only invite the yellers." Feelings have become so polarized that they hamper communication.

President Freedman is also concerned about the bad publicity the College is taking: "A lie that gets printed nationwide, and gets printed often enough, gets believed." He hopes that the Trustees and loyal alumni will speak out and write letters, giving the facts and explaining that Dartmouth isn't falling apart.

Thai may not do much good. For one thing, the national image is hopelessly confused. Some careless readers and TV viewers now have the impression that Dartmouth is a hive of right-wing weirdos who attack black professors. The Review and its allies want people to believe the reverse: that inoffensive conservatives are being hounded for their beliefs. What's inescapable is the stink of controversy. That clearly damages the College. Dartmouth leads the general decline in Ivy League applications for admission: we are down by 18 percent. For the Hopkins Institute, busily promoting strife, that is an actual triumph. And it's another trophy for the Review staffers, flush with victory and not about to stop goading their oppressors. "Why should they, if you ask who's got whom on the run?" says their uneasy friend Doug Yates. "I mean, they think they're going to be major national figures. They do not see that Dartmouth is suffering. I don't know how you get out of that." It's important to remember that Dartmouth has been here before. Student publications from The Aegis to the Jack O'Lantern have periodically got crosswise with the administration. In 1935 and again in 1950 it was The Dartmouth that was making trouble, under editors Budd Schulberg '36 and Ted Laskin '51, both flaming leftists by contemporary standards. National newspapers hurled editorial thunderbolts; wealthy donors canceled gifts and wrote Dartmouth out of their wills; worried alumni besieged the College with letters. Couldn't The Dartmouth be made to shut up? At the very least, couldn't the College make the paper stop using its name?

To their eternal credit, Presidents Hopkins and Dickey stood up for free speech. We are here to examine ideas, said Hopkins; if Lenin and Trotsky themselves were available to speak at Dartmouth, we would welcome them. And Dickey took all the McCarthyite bombast of Colonel Robert McCormick and his Chicago Tribune, which was branding Dartmouth a hotbed of reds and treason.

He even kept his sense of humor under fire. One day, when Laskin showed up in Dickey's office and asked if the president had read his editorial that morning, Dickey said no, what have you done to us now? How can you run the College, Laskin demanded, if you don't read my editorials? Dickey said: "Ted, I can read you or I can defend you. I can't do both."

This, too, will pass. Dartmouth is old enough, and tough enough, and great enough to endure another round of controversy; and in James Freedman, it has another president who believes in free speech. In the long run, it is the passionate clash of convictions that makes for education.

But free speech at Dartmouth now requires a change in climate, beginning with the admission that for all their excesses, the forces of the right do have a couple of modest points on their side. If we are to endure, we will do it only by being true to our own ideals and purpose; we will not win by adopting the tactics of our adversaries.

The moderates—on campus in the faculty and administration, off campus among the alumni—are going to have to take a hand. All of us, the whole Dartmouth community, have to stop letting the zealots of the left and right control the dialogue. It's time for some common sense.

SHANTIES ON THE GREEN, BY TOM LOWES

WILLIAM COLE AND THE REVIEW STAFFERS, BY TOM LOWES

FREEDMAN AT THE ANTI-REVIEW RALLY, BY TOM LOWES

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY AND ANGELA DAVIS, BY TOM LOWES

Newsweek's Veteran Reporter When we first conceived the idea of inviting an alumnus to come to campus and examine speech at Dartmouth, veteran journalist Larry Martz '54 immediately came to mind. In his 28 years at Newsweek, Martz has covered stories ranging from the civil-rights movement of the sixties to the Watergate scandal and the John Tower imbroglio. He recently wrote a brisk-selling book, Ministry of Greed, on Jim and Tammy Bakker and the other televangelists. Martz was on the Alumni Magazine's editorial board from 1976 until 1983, when he quit after a dispute with the administration resulted in Editor Dennis Dinan's resignation. Six years later, we asked Martz to give his informed opinion on the question: Is the exercise of unpopular speech at Dartmouth restricted in any way? —Ed.

"If the shanties hadbeen tepees, erectedto promote thewretched symbol,would the Collegehave leftthem standing?.

"The Review editorswho were suspendedfor harassingProfessor Cole havesued the College forbreach of contract andaccused it of racediscrimination."

"Even the Review,was free to publishunder the FirstAmendment. But hedidn't have to like it,and his own freedomof speech includedanswering back."

"It can be debatedwhether hurtfeelings justifyattacks on works ofart—even suchdubious art as theHovey Grill murals,whose drunken bravesand all-too-nubilemaidens are hiddenfrom view."