Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/03/03/the_review_and_the_olin_foundation.php
Friday, March 3, 2006
The John M. Olin Foundation began its association with The Dartmouth Review in 1981, barely months after the newspaper was launched. According to the Foundation’s files, Benjamin Hart, then the editor of the Review , sent an appeal for assistance to William E. Simon, president of the Foundation, who was delighted to endorse the request. He (along with the trustees and staff of the Foundation) was encouraged by the example of students with the courage and moxie to take on the campus establishment and to raise the banner of liberty and reason on the Dartmouth campus. The trustees quickly approved a contribution of $10,000 for the fledgling conservative publication. They hoped that The Review would become a force on the Dartmouth campus, and also that a conservative publication at such a prominent college would encourage students at other institutions to establish their own newspapers. This initial grant in 1981 was followed up by annual contributions of $5,000 in 1982 and 1983. These grants were made as a way of lending support to the enterprise and of giving encouragement to the editors. But as the Review began to establish itself as a conservative voice at Dartmouth, the College administration, goaded on by left wing faculty and radical campus groups, raised the stakes by trying to silence and suppress the publication entirely. “Free speech for me but not for thee,” cried the administration and faculty in a near-chorus. Campus leftists openly published their own papers and pamphlets, brought speakers to campus, staged demonstrations, and even illegally occupied college buildings to make their ideological points. Yet a conservative newspaper on campus was regarded as beyond the pale. There is no great mystery as to why this was so. Like many colleges, Dartmouth had embarked on a crusade to promote diversity on the campus, which meant in practice that traditional academic and scholarly standards had to be sacrificed in order to give representation on campus to members of preferred groups, all of which were affiliated with the Democratic party. Conservatives, not being Democrats, counted for less than nothing in the College’s calculus of representation, and were in fact regarded as something of a nuisance. The students on The Dartmouth Review , with good reason, criticized the administration’s efforts to put the diversity ideology into practice, as they understood more clearly than their elders that the representation of interest groups on the faculty and in the curriculum was antithetical to the ideals of liberal education. The paper attacked the collapse of standards at the College, the introduction of trendy courses designed to appeal to left wing groups, the hiring of faculty whose main qualifications were that they could teach such courses, and the promotion of radical causes on the campus. It was precisely the Review ’s opposition to these diversity policies that convinced the administration that the paper had to be suppressed. Over the next several years, from roughly 1983 to the early 1990s, the College steadily escalated its attacks on the publication, trying at times to discredit the editors and at other times to intimidate them with threats of suspension or expulsion. The trustees of the John M. Olin Foundation, for their part, saw an important principle at stake, and sought to support and defend the editors at every opportunity. There were, however, some ominous rumblings coming from the administration and faculty from the very day the publication was launched. In April of 1981, in one of its early issues, the Review published a long inter-view with William Simon in which editors Greg Fossedal and Wendy Stone raised a host of questions dealing with national politics and economic policy. Near the end of that interview Simon noted that he and other supporters had received calls from Dartmouth administrators and alumni discouraging them from donating funds to the Review . Simon, of course, rightly disagreed, as he felt that this kind of publication was precisely what was needed to add intellectual balance to that campus. It was thus obvious to Simon that the Dartmouth administration was trying to strangle the infant conservative paper in its crib. Moreover, such calls reflected the wildly erroneous view among some in Hanover that the paper was merely a front for conservatives in New York and Washington and would not exist save for their financial support. The paper, according to this paranoid view, was inserted into the Dartmouth scene by “outside agitators.”
Two episodes, one in 1988 and a second in 1990, brought these conflicts out into the open, and generated national controversies that brought the John M. Olin Foundation and The Dartmouth Review into closer collaboration. In both cases, the controversies were created by irresponsible and imprudent conduct by Dartmouth’s trustees and administration. The campaign to silence the Review , it is plain in retrospect, was among the most unwise and destructive enterprises undertaken by any college administration in modern times. It brought lasting damage to Dartmouth and disgrace to the trustees and administrators who participated in it. The first episode was sparked in 1988 when the editors of the Review taped the classroom remarks of a radical professor and published them in the paper. The transcripts revealed that the professor’s classroom presentations were stocked with fulminations against racism and ideological rants unrelated to the subject matter of the class. The professor, who happened to be black, took umbrage at the publication of his remarks, it being a presumption of radical professors that it is unfair to hold them accountable for their own statements. The administration, viewing such remarks as an acceptable form of diversity, defended the professor’s right to free expression. Some weeks later, editors of the Review approached the professor outside his classroom with an invitation to defend his views in the paper. The student journalists, after all, were merely covering a story by seeking comments from a controversial figure on the campus. The professor, however, was not amused by such journalistic methods. Harsh words were exchanged and, according to the students, the professor shoved one of the editors. In a bizarre Orwellian turnabout, the College responded, not by reprimanding the professor, but by suspending the journalists from school on trumped up charges of “vexatious oral exchange.” When the students appealed these suspensions in a state court, the John M. Olin Foundation stepped in to pick up some of their legal expenses. As the proceedings dragged on for some months, with the College defending its strange con duct all the way, these expenses were substantial and beyond the means of the students involved. The court eventually vindicated the student journalists by overturning the suspensions, and ordering the College to readmit them. Yet this black eye for the College only stimulated the administration’s appetite for revenge. The second and certainly climactic episode occurred in the Autumn of 1990 when an unknown student, probably not even a member of the Review ’s staff, sought to sabotage the paper by inserting an anti-Semitic quotation into its masthead after this particular edition had been put to bed by the editors. When they discovered the sabotage, the editors quickly recalled the papers and issued an apology for their oversight. It was plain to any fair-minded person that the editors never intended to publish these hateful comments, for if this had been their intention they would have published them openly instead of burying them in the masthead of the paper. The episode should thus have ended with the apology by the editors. Yet the College administration, led by the new president, James Freedman, seized on the episode as a pretext for getting rid of the Review once and for all. Freedman, a former law school professor well versed in the First Amendment, certainly should have known better than to highlight this unfortunate event on his campus. Yet, like too many in leadership roles at Dartmouth, he was in thrall to left-wing ideology which undermined any sense of prudence and responsibility he might once have had. In the cocoon-like environment of Hanover, it was perhaps too easy to conclude that the ravings of left-wing interest groups reflected the mature judgment of the wider world. Freedman thus responded to critics, like the editors of the Review , by alternately whining that he had been unfairly treated or by thundering irrationally that they must be censured and driven off campus.
Freedman’s presidency brings to mind the familiar scene in Woody Allen’s film, Sleeper , which is set many hundreds of years in the future. Allen’s character relates the fact that late in the twentieth century the earth was blown up in a nuclear holocaust. When queried as to how this had happened, he explained with wry humor that, “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got a hold of a nuclear warhead”—a reference to the head of the New York City teachers’ union, who led a series of teacher strikes in 1968. This comment was most unfair to Mr. Shanker, who was a distinguished and level-headed union leader. Yet for those familiar with Dartmouth’s history, the quotation would be perfectly understandable if Freedman’s name were substituted for Shanker’s. Freedman’s recklessness was quickly displayed when he called a campus “rally against hate” to denounce the editors of the Review for publishing those comments and for encouraging a climate of “hate” at Dartmouth. He was not moved by the fact that the comments were published unintentionally, that the offending publication had been withdrawn, or that sincere apologies had been made. Nor, apparently, did he see any irony in calling a rally against hate in order to promote hate against the editors of The Dartmouth Review , who, after all was said and done, were still students of the distinguished college over which he exercised responsibility. It was especially perplexing to those familiar with the paper who knew that its editor at the time was a black student, and that among previous editors were Jewish and Indian students. Outsiders, meanwhile, looked in on these developments at Dartmouth with a mixture of surprise and incomprehension.
Freedman next poured still more gasoline on the inferno he had started by taking his case to the New York Times in an effort to embarrass the off-campus supporters of the Review , including, most especially, the trustees of the John M. Olin Foundation. He had decided to make a national issue of an event that any sensible administrator would have tried to contain at the local level. The head of the Boston bureau of the Times was no doubt surprised to hear from the public affairs office that the College wished to promote across the nation the idea that bigotry was rampant on the Dartmouth campus. Yet this reporter was happy to oblige the College, no doubt thinking naively (as Freedman did) that public opinion might be focused with surgical precision against the Review and its backers. In one of the many ironies of this episode, the distinguished newspaper that took pride in its devotion to the First Amendment was about to join a campaign to suppress another newspaper. In fairness to the journalist involved, however, the decision to publish such an article may have been influenced by the fact that the chairman of Dartmouth’s board was then a director of the New York Times Company. When the article appeared in the national edition of the paper, filled with news about the “rally against hate” and accusations back and forth of bigotry and suppression of free speech, Freedman had gotten his wish. The public was now aware that something was wrong at Dartmouth. There then followed an exchange of op-ed columns in the Times between Freedman and Simon, along with follow-on articles and editorials in other leading publications. Along the way, he also advanced scurrilous charges of bigotry against the editors of the paper and its supporters.
Freedman pointedly criticized the John M. Olin Foundation for underwriting legal expenses for students the College had wrongly suspended, a bizarre position for a legal scholar to take. Simon, for his part, defended the Review along with the Foundation’s support for it, and blasted Freedman for “demagoguery” in the service of left-wing orthodoxy. George Munroe, chairman of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees, went so far as to suggest in the Wall Street Journal that the Review should be suppressed because it interfered with the College’s efforts to recruit a “diverse” student body. Thus, while the College respected the First Amendment, no one could be allowed to criticize its diversity policies. The controversy thus gave the public an early window into what would later be called “political correctness” on the campus: the idea, in other words, that open debate on important subjects must be suppressed in the name of “diversity.” The College soon reaped the damage that Freedman had so irresponsibly sowed. Soon the opinion settled across the nation that there were problems at Dartmouth, that the faculty was filled with left-wing zealots, that conservatives or Republicans were not welcome on campus, that bigotry was rampant, that the president of the institution was given to making wild accusations. Parents wondered if it was really safe to send their youngsters to Hanover. Freedman’s public relations campaign had backfired against the College. Now Freedman and his enablers were forced to backtrack, to reassure the public that all was in order at Dartmouth, that cries of bigotry and anti-Semitism were exaggerated and had been blown out of proportion. It was true that such cries had been blown out of proportion, but they had been done so by no one other than Freedman himself. He was the arsonist who now had to put out the fire he had ignited. A few on campus, most notably Jeffrey Hart, distinguished professor of English, called for Freedman’s dismissal, which was clearly in order.
Freedman was without a doubt the worst president in Dartmouth’s long and distinguished history, more embarrassing to the College even than Nathan Lord, who was forced out by the trustees in 1863 for his pro-slavery views and because he refused to approve an honorary degree for Abraham Lincoln. The only difficulty here was that the trustees who would have to dismiss Freedman were themselves implicated in his destructive policies. No academic institution in modern times had been more badly served by its president and trustees than was Dartmouth in these years. The trustees of the John M. Olin Foundation, for their part, were duty-bound to stand behind the editors of The Dartmouth Review during these troubled times. To have done otherwise would have betrayed fundamental principles of fair play, and would have left conservative students at Dartmouth and elsewhere at the mercy of activist faculty and administrators. Fortunately, the newspaper survived these efforts to kill it on the part of the College administration and national institutions like the New York Times . Today the paper continues to be a vital voice for conservative ideas on the Dartmouth campus. The Dartmouth Review as an institution has much to be proud of as it celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. Many of its editors and writers have moved on to distinguished careers in journalism, business, and other fields. Perhaps just as important, The Dartmouth Review spawned a movement to establish conservative newspapers on college campuses across the nation. Today there are to be found conservative newspapers and magazines on nearly one hundred campuses, all of them outgrowths from the original example of The Dartmouth Review . The John M. Olin Foundation has allocated funds to support these papers, just as it did for The Dartmouth Review in its formative years. In this sense, the collaboration between the paper and the Foundation continues. Thus, despite these controversies and difficult times or, rather, because of them, the influence of The Dartmouth Review lives on.