The Case Against the Dartmouth Review
On Yom Kippur, the Dartmouth Review-an off-campus weekly publication having no official association with Dartmouth College-published in its credo a quotation from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf: "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."
This incident-and the subsequent explanations and accusations-have been widely covered by the national media, including The Wall Street Journal. First the Review issued a statement promising that the staff member (s) responsible would be punished. Later, almost as an after-thought, it pleaded that it might have been the victim of sabotage. But exactly how a quotation from Hitler happened to get into their paper is not the real issue.
The real issue is that' over the past decade this publication has created an impression of Dartmouth College that is untrue and that hinders our efforts to attract a diverse applicant pool of talented individuals. We, the trustees, have remained largely silent; we felt that to respond to Review-created incidents and issues would merely give them credence. The time has come to set the record straight.
Dartmouth today is an institution where intellectual and social diversity abound, where academic excellence and academic matters predominate, and where civility, compassion and reason rule.
That will not change. We will not allow it to.
Some Review supporters unaffiliated with Dartmouth tell us they support the Review in order to advance a national
agenda to alter the course of American higher education. Other backers of the Review are Dartmouth alumni loyal to the memory of the college they attended in previous decades all male, almost all white. But like our country, our college has changed since World War 11. Dartmouth, like most of America's colleges and universities, has striven to keep America's promise of equality of opportunity to women and minorities and to reflect more closely America's society as a whole.
Some national commentators want America to believe that the Review is just a typical student newspaper. Judge for yourself.
How many typical college student papers are funded by wealthy benefactors having no association with that college? How many receive $295,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation, headed by former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, as the Review has in the past decade? How many typical student papers rely on an advisory board that includes a Patrick Buchanan, a George Gilder and a William Rusher-none of them a Dartmouth alumnus? The Review's masthead gives "special thanks" to William F. Buckley Jr.-also not an alumnus. In fact, none of the 10 people on the Review advisory board is a Dartmouth alumnus. Why do these nationally syndicated columnists support a student paper unless it is to advance a national-or personal-agenda?
How many typical student newspapers exist virtually without advertisers or paid subscribers on their own campuses? How many student journalists are rewarded by their national benefactors with prestigious jobs in government, public-policy institutes and national media?
How many typical student papers have members of their boards, who, when a crisis arises, fly in from Washington to hold a press conference in which they attempt to keep the student editor in chief from answering reporters' questions?
The Review's infamous history should be well-known. It hosted a champagne-and-lobster feast the day an Oxfam fast drew attention to world hunger; published an article entitled "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive, Bro," implying black students were illiterate; had members who sledgeharnmered, in the night, symbolic anti-apartheid shanties on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday; cartooned Dartmouth President James Freedman, who is Jewish, with Nazi uniform and Hitler mustache on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht; published a lengthy piece entitled "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Friedmann," alluding to the Nazi slogan, "One Empire, One People, One Leader"; equated as "equally tragic" the deaths of 1,400 Moslem pilgrims in Mecca and 7,000 penguins in Australia—and in a succeeding edition offered "a heartfelt apology" to "all the penguins of the world."
Nor should we forget the routine intolerance and incivility that pervades the Review's pages weekly. Surely we should not excuse all this as mere "sophomoric excess." Surely no one can claim these are the actions of a typical student paper.
We firmly support the right of free speech and are prepared to accept-and indeed are now reaping-the consequences of often reckless and distorted characterizations of our college. We encourage the publication of responsible student voicese they conservative or liberal, mainstream or far out. As President Freedman has said, Dartmouth would be enriched by any number of conservative papers in the tradition of Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold and Alexander Bickel. But bigotry is not conservatism, and we reserve our right to speak out vigorously against it.
It is unfortunate the Review has ceased to be a credible conservative voice on campus. It has succeeded only in forging a strong consensus at Dartmouth that its insensitive attacks on individuals and groups, often based on race, religion, gender or sexual preference, are attacks on the entire community and are wrong. Recently, more than 2,200 students (of the 3,600 on campus) signed petitions and attended a student-organized rally to decry the Review. These actions are vivid testimony that the Review, with its handful of student writers, does not speak for Dartmouth-and never has.
Many years ago, Joseph Welch stood up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Today one might well ask the same question of the Review and its prominent, off-campus supporters.
Mr. Munroe is retired chairman ofPhelps Dodge Corp. and chairman of thetrustees of Dartmouth College.
