The Review's Bedfellows Get Stranger

Just when it seems as though the squabbles over the paper the campus loves to hate, the Dartmouth Review, are finally over, and the small band of conservative students at last settles down to producing an earnestly conservative paper, one group or another feels obligated to conduct a clumsy experiment with the First Amendment.

This particular incident started in early spring, when the Review did an unflattering story about the student who was the heir apparent to the leadership of the Afro-American Society. The student, Amiri Barksdale '96, objected to the story, calling it racist, and with a couple of his friends went into dormitories picking up the offending copies of the Review. The editors appealed to the administration, charging that their right to speech had been trammeled. In reply, Lee Pelton, the popular dean of students, asked Barksdale and his friends to stop picking up the paper. When the Review demanded sterner action, College spokesman Alex Huppe responded that the paper is not a campus publication and therefore no more deserves protection than, say, menus for Chinese restaurants. From the administration's standpoint, Huppe said imaginatively, the Review is nothing more than "litter."

To which, naturally, the Review responded with voice-crying-in-the-wilderness indignation. Suggestion: the paper could cease publication and save trouble and money by simply waiting for various campus entities to shoot themselves in the foot.