Dartmouth Review

In 1980, a small band of intellectually inclined conservative students caught the national wave of Reaganisin and surfed it right into a reluctant College campus. Lovingly copying the venerable National Review, the students started the paper at a time when academia was dangerously close to groupthink a doctrinal sameness somewhere left of the American center.

While the paper throughout its history has occasionally lapsed into the sOphomoric bombast typical of post-sixties student polemics, early editor Dinesh D'Souza '83 points out, "We happened to be sophomores."

Besides reintroducing the political right to the academy, the students made a couple of innovations that may in the long run have even greater effect than their politics: sophisticated fundraising; an attractive, flexible layout; and an editorial appeal to forces offcampus. Student publications throughout the political spectrum, from gays to feminists, have attempted to imitate the Review's techniques. At the same time its conservative progeny—most of them with "Review" as their last name—now thrive on dozens of college campuses.

Early Reviewers Ben Hart '81and Steve Kelley '81.