Who Speaks?

Conservatives complain that outside speakers invited to the campus are overwhelmingly liberal in their views. The College pleads guilty, with an explanation. Rockefeller Center Director Richard Winters, who selects speakers for the Center's programs and thus has the biggest single voice in choosing political themes for airing on campus, concedes that liberals far outnumber conservatives. But he argues that prominent conservatives tend to charge such high fees that they price themselves out of the College's reach. "Getting Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Buckley and Henry Kissinger in one term would put me 50 percent over budget," he says. In any case, he argues, he doesn't aim to balance speakers on some ideological teeter-totter but to expose the campus to a wide spectrum of views. "My job is to be a kind of public-affairs bombthrower," he says.

Conservatives also complain that College bureaucrats put up barriers to speakers from the right. This case is less persuasive. Dartmouth Review Editor Harmeet Dhillon tells a long and detailed story of her efforts to bring Buckley to speak on campus. She says she was offered only small and remote auditoriums until she threatened to tell the whole story in the Review, and Buckley finally appeared in Webster Hall last fall. But others tend to smile in rueful recognition at that tale. "It sounds to me as if the Review has the same problems I do in scheduling events around here," says Deni Elliott, executive director of the Ethics Institute.

Speakers the College has invited to campus over the past year include Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, UN Secretary Javier Perez de Cuellar, Flora Lewis of The New York Times, Harrison Salisbury, former arms control negotiator Richard Perle, SDI proponent Gene Vosseler, British M.P. Shirley Williams—and Angela Davis.