DR. WHEELOCK'S JOURNAL

The Dartmouth Review apologizes, and then thinks worse of it.

Former Dean Thad Seymour was reputed to have said, "Dartmouth is like the Fiji Islands. Everyone knows where it is, but nobody knows what's going on there."

Even if you had been snorkeling on Fiji over the past couple of weeks, however, you could hardly have missed the word that an unknown person, possibly a staff member, altered the masthead credo of the Dartmouth Review's October 1 issue from its usual quotation by Theodore Roosevelt to include a few phrases from Hitler's Mein Kampf: "Therefore, I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord's work."

Soon after the issue hit the streets, the editor, Kevin Pritchett '91, fell all over himself to apologize to the Dartmouth community and especially to its Jewish members, vowing that the perpetrator would be "sought out and thoroughly punished."

Most students didn't seem to buy the apology, including two members of the Review staff and its president, who resigned. Some 2,000 students signed a petition condemning the Review. And the Student Assembly organized a Green-packed campus rally.

Despite his early apology, Pritchett's reaction to the reaction was more characteristic of the Review. In an ad in The Dartmouth (an ironic place, since the Review has long claimed to be the better-read paper), he resumed the offensive: "We are angered and frustrated that intolerant people on campus have been feigning anger and hurt, while at the same time they are gleefully seeking their own political ends." This tactic was echoed at a Review press conference at which past editor Dinesh D'Souza '83 referred to the affair as "Dartmouth's Tawana Brawley case" and called President Freedman "the Al Sharpton of academia"

Indeed, Rep. Chester Atkins, Democrat of Massachusetts, tried to make a little political hay by calling attention to the fact that his Republican rival for a Congressional seat, John MacGovern '80, was a founder of the Review and a former member of its advisory board. Eighty-four members of Congress took time out from the budget crisis to sign a letter to President Freedman condemning the Review's "odious behavior." And perhaps the most urgent message of all was Freedman's. "My quarrel is not so much with the handful of undergraduates who write for the Review," he wrote in an op ed for The New York Times, "as it is with those outsiders...who continue to support it."

To get back to the "prank," or whatever it was: if it was indeed a prank it sure wasn't funny. However, the Review can't disclaim responsibility for having generated the atmosphere which could have led someone to try it or even for the technique of its timing. The issue appeared on Yom Kippur. This might have been a coincidence, except that some years ago, on Oxfam's World Hunger Day, the Review editors ostentatiously treated themselves to a lobster and champagne dinner at the Inn. It was on the eve of Martin Luther King Day that they trashed the shanties. Those "coincidences," together with their headline "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann " (which strangely appeared on the 50th anniversary of kristallnacht), doesn't make it easy for us to grant their editors complete absolution.

What next? Students admit to having read the paper a couple of years ago. But now, says Jonathan Douglas '92, "the Review is likely to be found unread, lying in dormitory hallways. And those who do read the paper largely consider it a paragon of inept journalism." Even that now-traditional bastion of Review staffers, Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity, seems uneasy about its ties to the paper. House members voted 14 to seven to boot out editor Pritchett. The vote was short of the three-quarters required, however; Pritchett stayed in, but four of the brothers depledged to protest his membership.

It's too early to predict the paper's collapse under the weight of its current unpopularity. Next year's editor could have the dexterity to bring the paper back to its original irreverence—minus its original offensiveness. But if he or she soft-pedalled the offensiveness while remaining politically conservative, and developed a style of irreverent but friendly needling, would that be the answer? Or would the paper's Wall Street angels then pull the plug and turn their attention to another of the several dozen Review imitators which are giving fits to several dozen other campuses?

Or is offensiveness and rude insult slowly on its way out, among students? Dream on, Eleazar.

You will recall that in last month's issue, Ken Johnson '83 wrote about the famous "fifth-down" game between Cornell and Dartmouth, after which Cornell gave up its championship hopes and turned over the win to the Big Green. Could the same thing happen today, Ken asked? "Common sense and a quick check of the sports headlines tell us that few teams in 1990 would give up their national-championship aspirations to correct a bad call," he replied to his own question.

Well, Ken is not the sort of person to say "I told you so," so, in case you missed the sports headlines early last month, we will tell you so for him: it did happen again a fifth-down game, that is. Forty-nine years and 11 months after The Forfeit, Colorado beat Missouri in the last play of the game which horrified officials later discovered to be an extra one. This time, however, true to Ken's astonishingly well-timed prediction, Colorado the recipient of the bad call refused to give up its national-championship aspirations by rescinding the game. Its president thus failed to show the sportsmanship and class that Cornell President Edmund Day (Dartmouth '05) displayed on November 18, 1940.

Ken told you so.

Some time ago we told you about the ten-week, 1,685-mile voyage down the Danube last summer by eight intrepid Canoe Club paddlers. We were privileged to meet two of them, Andrew Backer and John Burke, both '90, and hear about their Ledyardian journey. After going a month without any familiar food, they found a McDonald's in, of all places, Budapest. An older man noticed the Dartmouth lacrosse jersey one of them was wearing, and shouted, "Wah-Hoo-Wah!" They were so surprised at the encounter that they asked his class 1924 but forgot to ask his name. (He was, we learned later, Ted Nilsen.) They also said that at first, "Wah-Hoo-Wah" sounded to them as if he were speaking Hungarian.

Andrew's father, William '64, was one of those who made an earlier Danube canoe trip and wrote the account of it that appeared in National Geographic's issue of June, 1965. The accompanying pictures were by Dick Durrance '65, who was drafted into the Army the next year and, as a combat photographer, shot the horrors of jungle warfare which 20 years later became a book, WhereWar Lives: A Photographic Journal ofVietnam. An exhibit of black-and-white photos from his book was at the Hood Museum last month, one of the more dramatic events of a campus-wide program on the Vietnam War that included lectures, panel discussions, and a series of 17 films.

The Hood, by the way, has lost its popular director, Jim Cuno, to Harvard, where he will be director of the university art museums. In response to your next question, about a certain other person in the administration leaving for Harvard, the answer as we see it is an unequivocal "no."

We don't expect "Wah-Hoo-Wah" to be uttered too often during the next several months, during which the Native American Program will be celebrating its 20th anniversary at Dartmouth. October 5 to 7 saw the first-ever reunion of native alumni at Dartmouth, and next May there will be an arts festival to coincide with the colorful spring pow-wow that has taken place in Hanover for the past few years.

Other events will include a film series that covers the native American image in the movies, from the traditional to the present; many visits from American Indian leaders; and a conference of native American writers, including, of course, adjunct anthropology professor Michael Dorris and his wife Louise Erdrich '76, both nationally known authors. Colleen Larimore '85, member of the Comanche tribe and director of the program, reports that there are currently more than 100 American Indians, Alaska natives, and native Hawaiian students at Dartmouth, and over the last ten years, the graduation of these groups has been 80 percent, compared to less than ten percent for colleges nationally.

Will viewers of the PBS documentary, The Civil War, ever forget the love letter that Major Sullivan Ballou sent his wife? Anticipating his death a week later, he wrote: "when the soft breeze fans your cheek it shall be my breath. Or as the cool air cools your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by"

A handwritten copy, Bill Hartley '58 reminds us, is in Baker Library.