Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/12/08/weighing_the_freedman_presidency.php
Saturday, December 8, 2007
i
After the Dartmouth trustees interviewed James O. Freedman and chose him as the successor to John David McLaughlin as president of Dartmouth, trustee John Steel told me that I would really like this man. Apparently he had impressed the Board of Trustees.
So I was surprised, to put it mildly, by his actual performance as president. In at least two cases involving The Dartmouth Review, Freedman behaved not as an educator but as a political ideologue using charges of “bigotry” and “hate” to attack his own students and score political points he knew would be welcomed by many members of the faculty.
Particularly egregious was Freedman’s behavior regarding a quote from Mein Kampf that had been smuggled into the masthead of The Dartmouth Review.
Good sources in Cambridge tell me that Freedman had been among the 3 or 4 leading candidates for presidency of Harvard, long his ambition. His handling of the Mein Kampf incident, which attracted the attention of the national media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, destroyed his chances at Harvard.
ii
In 1992 William F. Buckley published In Search of Anti-Semitism, a misleading title, one of his best books. In it he analyzes the behavior of writers who may legitimately be called anti-Semitic, and he also examines charges of anti-Semitism made for political purposes. In support of his judgments he adduces letters from such authorities on the subject as the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’Rith and from recognized Jewish spokesmen whose opinions on anti-Semitism possess credibility. His careful analysis of James Freedman and the Mein Kampf episode occurs on pp. 45-87, and on page 87 he concludes that among those using false charges of anti-Semitism “the principal malefactor of the season was President James Freedman of Dartmouth College.”
On page 45 Buckley outlines the facts in the case. Kevin Pritchett, in the Fall of 1990 the editor of The Dartmouth Review, and who is black, had not noticed an anti-Semitic quotation from Mein Kampf smuggled into the newspaper’s masthead. The identity of the staffer who perpetrated this was discovered, in fact through a letter I myself published on the controversy in the Wall Street Journal. I received an abusive anonymous phone call from him, this episode ending in Hanover Court, but that is another story.
When Pritchett discovered the quotation, Buckley observes, all issues of the Review not distributed were destroyed. An apology was printed and distributed throughout the campus. Pritchett asked the District Attorney of New Hampshire to conduct an investigation as to who inserted the quotation, a felony under N.H. law. He asked the Board of Directors of the Review to dispatch a member to conduct his own investigation. Pritchett offered to take a polygraph test to determine whether he had foreknowledge of the sabotage.
In other words, Pritchett did everything imaginable to disavow and condemn the Mein Kampf quotation.
When the Wall Street Journal asked Freedman how he would feel if it were in due course established that the Hitler quote was inserted by a saboteur, his reply was, “I just haven’t thought about that.”
That was astonishing from a man who had a law degree from Yale and had been Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
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Freedman, however, seized the occasion for all that he could wring out of it.
Parkhurst organized an Anti-Hate rally in the middle of the Green. Freedman conducted an interview with Fox Butterfield of the New York Times insisting that the quote from Hitler had been published intentionally and reflected the editorial policy of the Review.
At the Anti-Hate rally Freedman spoke to several hundred students through an amplifier, his remarks containing these words:
"For ten years The Dartmouth Review has consistently attacked blacks because they are black, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews."
Freedman probably didn’t know that standing there was the editor Kevin Pritchett, who is black; or, if he did know, didn’t care. Also in the crowd was a former Review editor, Dinesh D ‘Souza, whose background was subcontinental Indian, and who was rather brown. D’Souza considered climbing on to the platform and trying to rebut Freedman, but decided not to because the Rally Against Hate had stirred up so much hate that it might be dangerous. D’Souza could have cited the several Jewish editors of the Review, several Jewish business managers (presidents) and Jewish staffers, also the female editor whose family came from the Indian subcontinent who is a Sikh. In fact, The Dartmouth Review has enlisted minorities and women in greater percentages than the College itself. The Dartmouth Review has a recording of the demagogic rant at the Rally Against Hate.
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A few years earlier than the Mein Kampf incident and the Rally Against Hate, Freedman had exploited the tangled Bill Cole case, which also attracted the attention of national media.
Christopher Baldwin ‘89 was editor of The Dartmouth Review. One day, as I understand it, a freshman appeared in his office and began to make allegations about what Professor Cole was doing in his introductory Music lecture course. It all sounded so unlikely that Baldwin told the student he must be exaggerating.
So the young man left, but a few days later returned with a tape recording of a Cole lecture. Baldwin printed an excerpt in the newspaper. Cole appeared to be using his lectures to go on and on about a great many things that were on his mind and had little or nothing to do with music. For example, he praised a man, obviously demented, who was threatening to blow up the Washington Monument.
The transcript of Cole’s lecture printed by the Review became a subject of discussion on campus. Some said that many professors use their classrooms to ventilate opinions of all kinds. I myself doubted that. Then Baldwin and two others from the Review made a mistake. They wanted to offer Cole space in the Review to comment on what the paper was alleging. Instead of sending Cole a registered letter, they went to his lecture room after class was over intending to invite him to reply to what the Review had printed. Words were exchanged. There appears to have been a scuffle.
And the incident went to the College disciplinary committee, then known as the CCSC, College Committee on Standing and Conduct.
Before the hearing before the CCSC took place, Freedman interpreted the behavior of the Review as racist. The editors would have said that no, it all had to do with academic integrity and classroom behavior. But Freedman spoke through amplifiers from the steps of Parkhurst about racism and hate. Before the CCSC hearing took place the dean’s office also organized a candle-light procession against racism, and as this vigil was planned to wind down through Webster Avenue, the fraternities were told to turn out or else.
At the CCSC the defendants didn’t have a chance.
The charge, however, was unusual: “Vexatious oral exchange.” That sounded like something outlawed in Georgia.
But the buildup to the CCSC hearing had defined the charge as “racism.” All three were suspended for six terms. More or less expelled.
So they sued.
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The trial took place in the North Haverhill, New Hampshire district court. It attracted the attention of the media. CBS-TV “Sixty-Minutes” came to Hanover and ran a segment on the case. Morley Safer struggled to make it a “racism” issue, unsuccessfully. I later met him at a party in New York and we joked, or at least I joked, about his problems in trying to make that story-line plausible.
At the trial, Freedman testified as a witness. I recall the judge asking him if he thought six terms excessive. Freedman answered No. For some reason I never fathomed I also testified, saying that I knew of no evidence that the students were bigots. The questions put to me were tangential at best.
The judge ruled that the CCSC hearing had been thoroughly compromised by what Freedman had done before the hearings had occurred.
Had the CCSC cleared the defendants they would have been in the position of defending racism and hate.
So the students were reinstated in the College, which had the option of going to another CCSC hearing. It declined.
The suit had cost the students, really their families, $300,000; and presumably the costs to the College had been comparable, its attorney a capable lawyer from Manchester.
Freedman had an arrow left in his quiver. At a meeting of the College faculty he declared that the cost of the suit would affect their annual raises.
I was the target of some unfriendly glances. Of course Freedman’s statement was a lie. Such a sum as $300,000 is trivial in the faculty salary budget.
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In my adventures with Freedman a wonderful episode took place in the Spring of 1992.
The College was about to undertake a major capital fund drive. Someone in Parkhurst had a bright idea. To attract attention to the excellence of Dartmouth as a teaching institution, medals would be awarded for distinguished teaching at Lincoln Center in New York before a black-tie audience of important donors. Just who would receive those awards was determined by consulting recent graduates.
I wish I had been in Parkhurst when the results came in. Freedman had to give me one of the medals, which turned out to be very large objects indeed.
Only Freedman himself did not hand me the medal. Or hang it around my neck. I’m sure the plan had been to award the medals on the stage before that important audience in the largest auditorium at Lincoln Center.
Instead, an administrator handed the medals to us as we straggled in through the front door of the building. The other recipients must have been surprised by this. Only I knew the reason.
In 2007 Freedman’s memoir Finding the Words was published posthumously. On page 3 Freedman said that The Dartmouth Review is anti-Semitic.
Although the Review has never been anti-Semitic, a wit once remarked that Freedman would have been enough to turn Jesus himself anti-Semitic.