Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/04/21/dunkirk_for_ivy_liberalism.php
Friday, April 21, 2006
Originally Published June 14, 1982.
Have you bitten anyone lately? No. Well, neither have I. Still, it does seem to happen. About a week ago, a Dartmouth senior was making his rounds delivering copies of The Dartmouth Review to various locations on the campus. All of a sudden, in Blunt Alumni Center, he was set upon by an Alumni Fund official, a fifty-three-year-old black gentleman named Samuel Smith. Mr. Smith hit the student from behind, tried to push him through a plate glass door, broke his glasses, and, finally, bit him on the chest. The student filed complaints with the deans and with the local police. In due course, Smith was found guilty, fined, and given ninety days probation. The student received tetanus shots. The most interesting part of the story is yet to follow.
A couple of days after Smith’s assault, the faculty of Dartmouth College held a meeting, and passed overwhelmingly a vote of censure against . . . The Dartmouth Review. Not a word was breathed critical of Mr. Smith’s acts of violence. The assumption seemed to be that The Dartmouth Review had somehow unhinged the administrator to the point where he went berserk.
Of course, that is ridiculous, but I think something important is going on here, something worth pondering. The Dartmouth Review is a feisty, often irreverent paper, and it has won national awards both for its cartoons and for its reporting. In its two years of publication it has printed around 1,100 articles, of which perhaps five or six have been cited by some people as offensive.
I myself wrote one of these offending articles a month or so ago, a satire written in black slang and directed at a number of targets: reverse discrimination, separatist arrogance, cultural impoverishment. A lot of people thought it was funny, a lot didn’t, but—after all—the thing was intended as humor, as a lampoon. I was astonished to find that some people were referring to it in terms more suitable to an official statement by Heinrich Himmler. the Boston Globe—no doubt to the surprise of its readers—addressed itself to the article in a major editorial; and for the past week the Dartmouth campus has been crawling with reporters and television crews.
It seems to me that The Dartmouth Review has come under attack for two main reasons.
One, it was the pioneer nationally of the independent conservative campus newspaper. It was the first. Others have sprung up at Princeton, Columbia, Yale, UCal-San Diego, and I have learned that perhaps a hundred are in the planning stages for next fall. To attack the Review is a way of attacking the whole phenomenon.
Second, though George McGovern was buried in 1972 and bounced in 1980, his spirit lives on among many college faculty members—see the faculty vote mentioned above. Furthermore, the spirit of the 1960s lives on as well.
For example, out in the real world we don’t hear much anymore about black separatism. The Panthers and the Muslims and all the rest of it are a distant memory. In the real world, blacks hold elective office, occupy executive posts, and have no desire to be isolated. Most Ivy League colleges, however, created segregated black facilities during the 1960s, and these still exist as entrenched campus interests. Ditto the militant feminist institutions. If you attack these stale legacies from the 1960s, you are immediately called a racist or a sexist—language which, among some intellectuals, takes the place of thought.
Well, the Review is alive and well, and it cannot be intimidated. If College administrators feel that it threatens their mental stability, perhaps they should be required to wear muzzles. We try to provide food—for thought, that is. We want to be in good taste, but not literally eaten. And though the Dartmouth faculty could not bring itself to condemn violence, we eschew it—no pun intended.