D'Souza Remembers the Early Days

By Dinesh D'Souza | Thursday, September 22, 2005

Editor's Note: The Review has produced many notable alumni over the course of its history; in celebration of our twenty-fifth anniversary, we present a series of reflections by notable past editors and staffers. Dinesh D'Souza served as Editor in Chief from 1982 to 1983, heading during the Review during one of its most tempestuous times.

I arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 1979, having come to the United States the previous year as a Rotary exchange student from Bombay, India. I started out as a pretty typical Asian American student. I was not a conservative. In fact, I didn't see myself as political. In retrospect, I realize that by the end of my freshman year my views were mostly liberal. If you had said "capitalism," I would have said "greed." If you had said "Reagan," I would have said "washed-up former actor." If you had "morality," I would have said, "can't legislate it." These were not reasoned convictions. Rather, I was carried by the tide.

My plans were to major in economics and to earn an advanced degree in business, either in the United States or in London. I enjoyed writing, however, and I signed up to write for the The Dartmouth. Toward the end of my freshman year, a major schism occurred at The D. The editor of the paper, Greg Fossedal, came out of the closet as a conservative. He began to write editorials supporting the candidacy of Ronald Reagan for president; the other editors, scandalized by this offense, began the process of getting him fired. They succeeded, and Fossedal resolved to start an alternative weekly newspaper [see "A Quarter Century of TDR," TDR 6/12/05, for more on the founding].

I joined The Dartmouth Review for two reasons: one aesthetic, the other intellectual. The first was that I found a style and a joie de vivre that I had not previously associated with conservatism. The best example of this was adviser Jeffrey Hart, a professor of English (now emeritus) and a senior editor of National Review. Hart was exactly the opposite of the conservative stereotype. He wore a long raccoon coat around campus, and he smoked long pipes with curvaceous stems. He sometimes wore buttons that said things such as "Soak the Poor." In his office he had a wooden, pincer-like device that he explained was for the purpose of "pinching women that you don't want to touch."

Even more outrageous than Hart's attire and equipment was his mind. Hart's writing was striking for its lyricism and candor. His most controversial column about Dartmouth was called "The Ugly Protesters." He wrote it during the time of the protests against white rule in South Africa, when the Green was regularly occupied by a horde of angry young men and women shouting various slogans. Hart wrote that he was puzzled by the intensity of the protesters. What possible interest could they have in events so remote from their everyday lives? Observing the protesters, Hart noted that their unifying characteristic was their state of dishevelment. Exploring the connection between their demeanor and their political activism, Hart decided they were protesting their own ugliness! Hart's column caused a sensation on campus. Walking to class the next day, I saw a remarkable sight on the Green. In an attempt to disprove Hart's characterization, the protesters had shown up in suits and long dresses. But they had made a strategic blunder because their suits were so ill-fitting that they looked even more ridiculous. Watching the scene from his office in Sanborn, Hart blew billows of smoke from his pipe and chuckled with obscene pleasure.

In part because of his political incorrectness, Hart was one of the few people I have met whose jokes made people laugh out loud. For a taste of his sense of humor, consider a contest that National Review held among its editors following the publication of a controversial Bill Buckley column that suggested those with AIDS receive a small tattoo on their rear ends to warn potential partners. Buckley's suggestions caused a bit of a public stir, but the folks at National Review were animated by a different question: What should the tattoo say? A contest was held, and the winner by unanimous consent was Hart. He suggested the lines emblazoned on the gates to Dante's Inferno: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

I remember some of those early dinners at the Hart farmhouse. We drank South American wine and listened to recordings of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Robert Frost reading his poems, and Nixon speeches, of comedian Rich Little doing his Nixon imitation, George C. Scott delivering the opening speech in Patton, some of Winston Churchill's orations, and the music from the BBC version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. There was an ethos here, and a sensibility, and it conveyed to me something about conservatism that I had never suspected. Here was conservatism that was alive; that was engaged with art, music, and literature; that was at the same time ironic, lighthearted, and fun.

The second reason I joined The Dartmouth Review was that I was greatly impressed by the seriousness of the conservative students. They were passionate about ideas, and they argued vigorously about what it meant to be a conservative, and what it meant to be an American, and who was a liberally educated person, and who should belong to a liberal arts community, and whether journalism could be objective, and whether reason could refute revelation, and whether corporations should give money to charity, and why Joseph Stalin was a worse man than Adolf Hitler, and why socialism was not merely inefficient but also immoral. Once, in the middle of a serious argument, I proposed a break for dinner and was greeted with the response, "We haven't resolved the morality of U.S. foreign policy and you want to EAT?"

I realized that these students, who were not much older than I was, had answers before I had figured out what the questions were. Their conversations, peppered with references to classical and modern sources, revealed how much I could learn from them, and how much I had to learn on my own. Thus I began to read voraciously, not just my classroom stuff but also Edmund Burke, David Hume, Adam Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Freidrich Hayek, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Gradually, I found myself developing a grounded point of view. For the first time, disparate facts began to fit together, to make sense. Conservatism provided me with a framework, durable and yet flexible, for understanding the world. And having the world, at the tender age of twenty, I was ready to change it–as a member of The Dartmouth Review.

The first thing I should note is that we were an outrageous bunch. I didn't start out that way; in fact, for the first year I was considered a moderating influence on the paper. The reason I became radicalized is that I saw how harshly the conservative newspaper was treated by professors and by the administration. No sooner had the first issue appeared on campus than the administration threatened to sue The Dartmouth Review for using the name "Dartmouth." The college maintained that it owned full and exclusive copyright to the name. Never mind that Dartmouth is a town in England. In fact, some two dozen establishments in Hanover all used the name. These were commercial operations unaffiliated with the College. By contrast, we were a group of students publishing a non-profit weekly about the College and distributing it to the Dartmouth community. Clearly the motive of the lawsuit was ideological.

The administration did not stop with legal threats. In 1982, founder Ben Hart was distributing copies to the Blunt Alumni Center, when administrator Sam Smith went berserk, attacked Ben, and bit him! Smith grabbed Ben from behind, Ben attempted to free himself by wrapping his around Smith's neck, and Smith proceeded to bite him on the chest. When Ben–who is the son of Jeffrey Hart–entered his dad's office and explained the bloody gash, his father's terse response was, "Thank God you didn't have him in a scissors hold." Smith was eventually convicted of assault and paid a small fine.

Such incidents point to the larger dilemma facing conservative students in a liberal culture. The dilemma can be stated this way. Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But what if the existing society is liberal? What if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must stop being conservative. More precisely, he must be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical. This is what we quickly understood at the Review. We recognized that to confront liberalism fully we could not be content with rebutting liberal arguments. We also had to subvert liberal culture, and this meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism. In other words, we had to become social guerillas. And this we set out to do with a vengeance.

Reading over old issues of the Review, and sharing recollections with my former colleagues, I am sometimes amazed to realize what social intellectual renegades we were. We were not above using ad hominem attacks. We described one professor as sporting "a polyester tie and a rat's-hair mustache," When he wrote to complain, claiming we were inaccurate on both counts, we printed an apology: "We regret our error. In reality Professor Spitzer has a rat's hair tie and a polyester mustache." Feminists and homosexuals were a regular target of satire. Founder Keeney Jones, now a Catholic priest, wrote that "The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth. The question is whether women should be educated at all." The Review also printed an alumnus's Solomonic observation that "any man who thinks a woman is his intellectual equal is probably right." And the Last Word featured the observation: "Homosexuality is fine," said Bill, half in Ernest.

That some of these quips are in bad taste goes without saying. But is this scorched-earth approach effective? Let's consider an example. When Dartmouth refused to stop funding the Gay Students Association, despite numerous Review editorials questioning why funds should be awarded based on sexual orientation, we decided to test the consistency of the administration's policy. We founded the Dartmouth Bestiality Society. We appointed a president, a vice president, a treasurer, and a zookeeper. We wrote up an application and developed a budget. Then we went before the Committee on Student Organizations.

The administrators were appalled, of course. "There is no interest in, ahem, bestiality at Dartmouth," one said. To which the president of the Bestiality Society gamely replied, "That may be true, Dean Hanson, but it is because of centuries of discrimination! Those of us who are inclined toward animals have been systematically excluded and ostracized. Our organization will provide a supportive atmosphere in which people of our particular sexual orientation are treated with respect. At Dartmouth, if not in society, let us put an end to beastophobia." No, we didn't get recognition or funding. But we did make our point, and the point was well-covered in the local media. One newspaper printed a hilarious feature titled, "Students Go to the Dogs."

As I recall some of the sophomoric things we did, you must keep in mind that during this time we were sophomores! Having turned forty a few years ago, I now have a somewhat different perspective than I had when I was twenty. Thus in bringing back adventurous times, it seems worthwhile to ask what we accomplished. Conservative newspapers like the Review have sprung up on college campuses across the nation, in large part following the example we set in those early days of the Reagan Revolution at Dartmouth. Conservatism isn't just a doctrine for stuffy reactionaries; on the contrary, it is vibrant and timeless. The Review could not have survived for twenty-five years without so sturdy of a foundation, and it is a testament to those early days that it is today every bit as intelligent, irreverent, and insightful as it was then.

D'Souza Remembers the Early Days

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