Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/04/07/res_ipsa_loquitor_remembering_freedman.php
Friday, April 7, 2006
James O. Freedman accomplished one good thing in particular at Dartmouth. He brought some excellent senior faculty members to Dartmouth, not an easy thing to do, because to introduce a senior and tenured professor to any department changes the configuration and affects the changes of promotion for junior members.
He seems to have been a collector rather than a reader of books. He liked to be photographed with a book in his hand, or gazing at shelves of books. But judging by his own books, he gazed at books rather than into them. I was asked by an excellent journal to review Liberal Education and the Public Interest, but after reading it, I told the editor he could do better things with the space available than print a negative review of a nullity. I explained that a bad book is worth reviewing if it is bad in an important way. This book was banal and full of clichés.
Freedman’s relations with The Dartmouth Review were disgraceful.
In the famous Prof. Bill Cole affair, when the Review exposed the indefensible behavior of Cole as a lecturer in his introductory music course, and as a result got into an argument with Cole, the editor of the Review and two staffers were charged before the disciplinary committee with “vexatious oral exchange,” an odd-sounding offense.
Before the disciplinary committee met, Freedman spoke from the steps of Parkhurst over an amplifier about the evils of racism; and the Dean’s office ordered up a candlelight parade against racism. That was the real charge, not “vexatious oral exchange,” which sounds like something outlawed in Georgia.
The committee sentenced the Review students to several semesters’ suspension, effectively expulsion.
They sued. The judge ordered them reinstated because of a prejudiced judicial hearing.
The suit cost the students some $300 thousand, and the College presumably a comparable amount.
President Freedman told a meeting of the general faculty that this would reduce their annual raises, though $300 thousand was small change for the College.
In October, 1990, a disgruntled former staffer with a perverted sense of humor introduced an anti-Semitic quotation from Mein Kampf into the paper’s masthead.
The editor, who was black, apologized, ceased distribution, and collected what papers could be reached in the midst of distribution.
What more could he have done?
Freedman took advantage of this, calling a RALLY AGAINST HATE in the middle of the Green. Of course a great deal of hate came out over bullhorns from the platform, not least from Freedman himself.
This performance was denounced in The Wall Street Journal. Afterwards, Freedman said it had been his “Gettysburg Address.” He had probably been watching Ken Burns’ TV series “The Civil War,” and was seeing himself as Lincoln.
All this was covered by William Buckley, in his book In Search of Anti-Semitism, a somewhat misleading title. Its subject is the misuse of the charge of anti-Semitism for political purposes. The book judges Freedman the worst malefactor in this respect of all those considered in this book.
Those are the bare facts.
I shall not offer a judgment. The ancients were wise in advising that unless we can speak favorably it is better not to judge the dead. They did not enjoin us against recording the facts for history. James O. Freedman, RIP.