Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

By Harmeet Dhillon | Friday, April 21, 2006

On October 19, 1988, The Dartmouth Review published a column by James Garrett entitled “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann.” The column drew an analogy between President James Freedman and Adolf Hitler, and compared his administration to The Third Reich. The column, written in the tradition of “shock” journalism started by Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, was hyperbolic. Given the intentionally strong, admittedly excessive nature of the comparison, the Editors of The Dartmouth Review can understand how members of the Jewish faith might be offended by the column.

What we cannot understand, however, is the professed outrage over the column by several prominent members of the Dartmouth community. The Dartmouth Review has, several times in its history, gone too far in its criticism of College policies so that other people will feel compelled to go far enough. But to characterize young student journalists attempting to provoke debate and intellectual discussion on this campus as “pre-fascist thugs” and “anti-Semites” (as several top faculty members and administrators have, in their public letters), is nothing short of an attempt to crush dissent and stigmatize critics of the College with a pernicious label. This episode of public breast-beating is yet another example of the liberal hypocrisy that has been practiced and institutionalized at Dartmouth over the past generation. Unfortunately for them, however, Dartmouth’s soi-disant arbiters of public sensitivity have chosen the wrong issue upon which to challenge The Dartmouth Review, because the charge that the Review is anti-Semitic is patently absurd. I will not give credence to the allegations of these hate-mongers by naming the dozens of Jews who have written for and occupied top positions in The Dartmouth Review over the years.

No publication on this campus can claim to be a stronger supporter of Israel’s right to exist than The Dartmouth Review. In fact, James Garrett, the columnist who is being currently excoriated, wrote a column published in the Review on February 10 abhorring the College’s recognition and funding of a pro-PLO student organization, the “Committee for Palestinian Rights.” Referring to recent acts of terrorism against Jews, he commented, “The actions perpetrated in the name of Palestinian rights should fill every civilized man and woman with bottomless revulsion and disgust. The sanctioning of those terroristic acts by an organ of the Dartmouth administration should shock all of us no less deeply.”

Let us examine Dartmouth College’s record of support for Jews and Israel over the past few years. The College has recognized and funded the abovementioned “Committee For Palestinian Rights” since 1987. Last year, when the World Affairs Council invited an ambassador of Israel to speak at the College, members of the CPR heckled the speaker and disrupted the event; their disorderly conduct was ignored by the College. Dartmouth has, for several years, funded and granted office space and privileges to Stet, a leftist journal that regularly supports the PLO in its pages. In fact, Stet’s latest issue is entirely devoted to the condemnation of Israel and the denial of Israel’s very right to exist.

Just a few weeks ago, Dartmouth paid an honorarium estimated at $10,000 to Angela Davis, Communist and emerita of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Criminals list (she was wanted for the murder of a judge). When a Jewish student stood up after her keynote address and challenged her to condemn the anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan, she actually laughed at him and said that Farrakhan’s beliefs were laudable compared to those of “fascist” George Bush.

Ironically, among those who stood and cheered after Davis’s meandering diatribe against men, whites, Jews, and anyone else she could think of were Deans Richard Sheldon, Gregory Prince, Maryssa Navarro, and Dwight Lahr, all of whom have publicly expressed their “outrage” at The Dartmouth Review’s “incredible insensitivity” for printing Garrett’s column. Where were these deeply caring individuals when black Review staffers were threatened with physical violence by members of the Afro-American Society (in full view of many witnesses)? They and faculty members who have signed similar letters to the community “deplore” the language used by the Review to criticize President Freedman, but where were they when similar language was used, in letters printed in the Alumni Magazine, to criticize Professor Jeffrey Hart, a conservative whose feelings are apparently not protected by the blanket sensitivity insurance the College promises to others? Where were Dartmouth’s outraged historians when Professor Thomas Roos called one Review action “brownshirt bullying on the order of Kristallnacht”? Where were the defenders of “fair play” when Professor Deborah King, in front of over a thousand Dartmouth students, faculty, and administrators, called Review staffers “on par with the Ku Klux Klan?”

Growing up in North Carolina, I and my family have been the victims of explicit and implicit harassment by the Ku Klux Klan; several other minority staffers have faced similar bigotry and hatred; yet Freedman and his cronies have encouraged an atmosphere where Dartmouth faculty and students feel free to make casual comparisons between the Review and a group that lynched a black man as recently as 1981. It is shocking that charges of racism and anti-Semitism are thrown around so freely by mature “intellectuals” whose only information about intolerance comes from books, movies, and their own self-righteous fantasies.

As if this hypocrisy weren’t nauseating enough, the fact that the entire “groundswell of outrage” is a public relations ploy for the College should make every self-respecting son and daughter of Dartmouth sick. That’s right, this entire ugly escalation of name-calling has been engineered by the College’s PR puppeteers for the express purpose of discrediting the Review in the weeks before its lawsuit against the College for the reinstatement of students in the Cole case (The State of New Hampshire Superior Court, Grafton County, SS; The Dartmouth Review, et al., v.

Dartmouth College). Consider the facts:

—The College is already losing the case; so far, every challenge Dartmouth’s lawyers have brought to limit the scope of the Review’s suit has been rejected by the courts.

—The College, with a losing case, has over $30 million at stake as well as its credibility as an intellectually tolerant institution; it simply can’t afford to lose, even if winning means spreading vile lies about its opponents.

—The “outrage” over the allegedly inexcusable column took nearly three weeks to materialize.

—The College’s propaganda officer, Alex Huppe, contacted the Review for the addresses of members of our Advisory Board two days before the first “letter to the community” ever appeared in the Daily Dartmouth; this, despite the fact that the faculty and administrators writing the letters claim to be acting independently, out of their own moral indignation.

—The so-called “personal” letters of indignation were in the hands of top reporters at the Boston Globe and The New York Times days before they were sent to their addressees.

—November 4th’s article in the Times is its third in two weeks to criticize The Dartmouth Review and praise President Freedman—surely no one will claim that such adoring coverage of Dartmouth’s position is a coincidence. The Times is even planning to write an editorial on the issue—unprecedented attention to the contents of a student publication. Dartmouth’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, George Munroe, is also a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Times Corporation, and can be expected to use his influence at the Times, considering the fact that he is one of the defendants in the Review’s lawsuit.

If the editors of the Daily Dartmouth expect anyone in this community to believe that it took them three weeks to convert their “visceral repulsion” at Garrett’s column into an editorial, they are only kidding themselves. Professor Arthur Hertzberg, a member of Dartmouth’s current cabal of moralists, called the Review’s editor a “pre-fascist thug . . . [a] dog” in virtually the same breath with which he deplored Garrett’s comparison of Freedman to Hitler. If he expects us to believe that he has been reining in his seething outrage for three weeks, then he, too, insults the intelligence of this community. Other professors and administrators who signed on to this ill-conceived hate campaign have already shown us that their intellectual integrity is nonexistent.

The significance of the three-week lapse between column and reaction is exactly this: three weeks is how long it takes to get Dartmouth College’s various far-flung resources assembled, organized, choreographed, and set into motion. No other explanation can account for the remarkable escalation of this incident into a crisis.

If the stakes weren’t so high and the charges so serious, this transparent effort by Dartmouth’s masters of distortion might almost be comical. But the lowball tactics of the administration force the Review to treat the accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and any other -ism the press office chooses to try (what will they think of next?) with the utmost gravity. In fact, this entire episode has served to point out the frightening accuracy of the Review’s warnings to the Dartmouth community about President Freedman and his cohorts. Which intellectual community in this, the freest nation on earth, would seek to bludgeon to death the only independent, provocative, and nationally significant journal on this campus? Does any other college have a small army of lawyers, administrators, and public relations officers who trip over one another in their bumbling attempts to eradicate an independent group of twenty-year-olds?

Over the past two decades, several ominous events have come to pass at Dartmouth. A vigorous effort to erase Dartmouth’s history has been largely successful. Songs have been banned. Historical artwork has been plastered over. Religious icons have been boarded up. Students who sport certain symbols have been punished. Those daring to espouse certain beliefs have been exiled.

President Freedman’s personal contribution to Dartmouth College has been the elevation of the popular community ethos above the personal rights of the individual; he has legitimized this dictum by making it the preeminent judicial principle of Dartmouth. Webster’s Dictionary defines as a fascist a person who rules a community based on the above principles.

You be the judge.

Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

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