Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/10/01/jeffrey_hart_outside_the_ivory_tower.php
Monday, October 1, 2001
One spring night in 1992, two men faced off against each other amid a sea of wealthy benefactors in Lincoln Center. One of those men was President James Freedman, giving out the award for outstanding teaching at Dartmouth. The other man was Professor Jeffrey Hart, accepting this award. The two men could not be more ideologically opposed, yet the ceremony was another victory for the controversial and conservative Hart over the college establishment led by Freedman.
While a professor of literature at Dartmouth from 1963 to 1993, Hart frequently found himself at odds with the administration and his colleagues, flaunting his nonconformity to changing times on many occasions. In an era of animal rights protestors, Hart wore an ankle-length fur coat to football games and would take swigs from a silver hip flask after each touchdown. In an age of concern over fossil fuels, Hart drove around campus in an enormous Cadillac, leisurely taking up two parking spaces outside of Sanborn Library. Hart would walk around campus in a yellow seersucker suit with a walking cane. For all of his performances outside of class, however, Hart was a serious teacher who inculcated deep respect and genuine curiosity in his students.
In 1968, Hart took a leave of absence from Dartmouth College to join the Reagan campaign for president. His role in that regard was to inject Reagan's speeches with greater stress on the classics. An article on Hart in the Worcester Sunday Telegram quotes Hart as saying that Reagan was looking for 'someone like (Theodore) Sorenson, which meant Sorenson liked to put quotations from Aristotle into (John F.) Kennedy's speeches and make him sound like an intellectual. So that's what I became for Reagan. "
After Reagan's loss to Nixon in the Florida primary, Hart was immediately brought on board Nixon's speechwriting team. After Nixon won the election, Hart went to Washington, DC, briefly. 'I hated it,' he said, and soon returned home to Dartmouth.
In 1969, Hart joined the National Review as a senior editor of the fledgling conservative publication with William F. Buckley, Jr. Though a full-time professor at Dartmouth, Hart found the time to fly down to New York every other week for editorial meetings. Hart's interests were securely vested in Western culture and civilization, and even now works as the magazine's poetry editor.
In 1992, Hart won Dartmouth's outstanding teaching award after well-known Dartmouth alum Reggie Williams nominated him for the honor. Williams, an NFL football player and later Disney executive, was one of many students struck by Hart's love of what he taught and ability to convey that appreciation to others.
In October of 1996, Hart won the Young America's Foundation $100,000 Engalitcheff Prize for his championing of conservative ideals and battling of political correctness at Dartmouth.
In 1998, Hart taught briefly as a visiting lecturer at Nichols College in Massachusetts. The course he taught there, 'Literature and the Western Mind; Understanding Western Literature,' focused on, not surprisingly, Western civilization, particularly the creative tension between spiritual and intellectual pursuits that gave rise to the West.
In 2001, his Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe was published after several years of work. By pairing together often-disconnected strains of Western culture, it serves both as a guide to great literary works of the past, and as an attempt to remind modern readers of the intellectual power behind these writings.
Hart continues to write a column for King Features Syndicate on everything from his love for Ivy League Football to the current situation in Afghanistan. Though retired from active teaching, Hart continues to lead the energetic but focused life of an individual with much still left to do.