Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/03/04/buckley_and_the_review.php
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
For nearly three decades, William F. Buckley, Jr. put his wit to the service of defending free speech, democracy in trustee elections, fraternities, and The Dartmouth Review itself. What follows is an assortment of excerpts of his writing in these pages.
The principles which are at stake, for instance, in your alumni election, however, are general in their application: namely, a college, to a relevant extent, is an instrument for the preservation of the values which its alumni hold fast and foster. You have got to answer yes to this, because if you answer no, I am at a loss to come up with another reason for private colleges existing, as opposed to state colleges. If alumni are going to finance the College, they cannot be perceived as inactive agents who visit the area once a year for the annual stimulation of their philanthropic glands.
I think The Dartmouth Review is an exciting and lively publication. I would hope that the Dartmouth administration would welcome the paper, especially as its rhetoric pays so much attention to the vigorous exchange of ideas.
—“The Role of Alumni: An Interview with William F. Buckley, Jr.,” April 13, 1981
A season or two back Dartmouth College was in the news when two or three students in a moment of high exuberance, skated across the ice between periods at a hockey game, wearing Indian feathers and whooping a war cry. The crowd loved it, the Indian having, of course, been the totemic symbol of Dartmouth for a couple of hundred years. The authorities, on the other hand, all but assembled the Nuremberg Tribunal to try the students for genocide. If you have lost the point, it is this: that the perpetuation of the Indian symbol is deemed offensive by official Dartmouth to an ethnic minority. Since no alumnus of Dartmouth has been known to have harbored an unfriendly thought against Indians since Sitting Bull’s excesses at Little Big Horn faded from memory, the alumni began to fidget, wondering whether the administration at Dartmouth had adopted fresh and trendy totemic symbols of their own, far more mischievous than the innocent Indian head.
—“Carnival Time in Dartmouth,” April 20, 1981
And now, no doubt, the Review will once again be censured, this time on the grounds that it causes certain alumni of Dartmouth to act like the Ku Klux Klan, and alumni magazine editors to publish material normally unpublishable. Thus Versailles is said to have begot Hitler.
— “Fever-Swamp Time,” December 16, 1982
What’s going on at Dartmouth is a kind of solipsistic crystallization of ideological interest groups whose cause militant, a few years ago, was the elimination of the Indian, which for generations was Dartmouth College’s symbol, implying ethnic prejudice against Indians only to the extent that Yale graduates could be accused of a comtempt for bulldogs. Their causes proliferated: gay rights, apartheid, peacenickery, you name it: and there arose, a sign of health, a student newspaper which, although now and again more hot-blooded than kind of thing you’d have expected from the Founding Fathers meeting in Philadelphia, has nevertheless been a robust and bright attempt to restore balance. The students who tore down the shanties were mostly associated with that paper, the clearly-intended victim of the vindictive petulance of the Committee on Standing. The president is on the spot. He should try amnesty, and a fresh start for Dartmouth College.
—“Hanover Blues,” February 27, 1986
A group that actually calls itself the Committee on Standards has recommended that one senior and one junior at Dartmouth (John Sutter and Christopher Baldwin) be suspended from college for a year and a half. Two other students were given lesser penalties. There is (as always) an avenue for appeal. But the judge who decides the question whether to hear an appeal is a pronounced partisan, a hostile critic of The Dartmouth Review, of which Baldwin and Sutter are the principle figures.
—“What Happened at Dartmouth?” April 6, 1988. This column had to do with the Bill Cole incident.
I have been fighting anti-Semitism in the conservative movement for thirty-five years. This is well-known, and has been documented in academic and biographical studies. I am an enemy of anti-Semitism, and also an enemy of the use of anti-Semitism as a weapon designed to discredit and to silence opposition. I am not, as it happens, on the advisory board of The Dartmouth Review. For reasons that have never been explained to me, the editors list me below their masthead as someone to whom the Review owes “special thanks.” I take the opportunity to reciprocate those thanks to the editors of The Dartmouth Review who, for all that they occasionally betray their age and inexperience, persevere in their struggle risking the heaviest penalties an academic institution can level against challengers to radical chic.
—“To Professor Hoyt Alverson, et al.” November 9, 1988
Kevin Pritchett is a black student, rather sensitive to race prejudice. For three summers he has worked with the Wall Street Journal, distinguishing himself as an intern. Nobody has ever heard him utter an anti-Semitic word.... But so anxious was President Freedman to give the impression that the Hitler quote was the collective responsibility of all the editors of the Review that he called an anti-hate rally, in which a thousand or so convened to prove that they hated hate more than anybody since St. Matthew.... But the hate-haters are going to have to practice a little, as witnessed by the treatment of one writer for The Dartmouth Review. Outside his dormitory, students gathered to chant “Sieg Heil!” And outside his door a large swastika was placed, decorated with the phrase, “Nazi Pig.”
—“Hating Hatred at Dartmouth,” October 15, 1990
It is so with The Dartmouth Review, which suddenly has to “prove” that it is not anti-Semitic, having been charged publicly by Dartmouth president James Freedman with being so because someone stole into its computer one night a few weeks ago and inserted into its logo a couple of let’s-all-hate-the-Jews sentences from Mein Kampf. The (black, by the way) editor of the Review, upon discovering the mischief, recalled the issue, launched an investigation designed to establish the identity of the mischief-maker, and invited the State Attorney General to investigate what is a felony under New Hampshire law. All of this is substantially ignored by the President of Dartmouth and his epigone in the press, who simply assume that The Dartmouth Review is anti-Semitic.
—“Prove You’re You,” October 25, 1990
It was at the formal opening of the Roth Center for Jewish Life and Culture that President Freedman disclosed the history of Dartmouth’s quota on Jewish students. Now the presumed design of the Roth Center is to invigorate Jewish life and culture, which certainly includes Jewish religion. It was the official enthusiasm shown by Mr. Freedman and others for this enterprise that prompted me to ask whether, even as the Roth Center is designed to Judaize Jews, Dartmouth mightn’t explore more vigorous means of Christianizing non-Jews. I asked, “In welcoming students from other creeds, is it expected that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?” I went on to ask the question which I judge it is my primary responsibility here tonight to explore. As I put it, “Is an effort to inculcate Christian values and Christian teaching a morphological act of anti-Semitism?”
That question needs to be probed at levels religious, social, and political. It is useful to begin by asking what it is that Judaism and Christianity have in common. The answer is a great deal. Irving Kristol put it succinctly: “Like the greatest Jewish theologian of this century, Franz Rosenzweig, I see Christianity as a sister religion to Judaism, as a form of ‘Judaism for the Gentiles.’”
—“Christianize Dartmouth?” was a speech delivered at Rollins Chapel on January 21, 1998.
Enter the term ‘binge drinking.’ It has only recently become a household term, and means drinking too much. But pollsters require definitions. Accordingly, it crystallized that a binge drunk was a man who had consumed five drinks at a single occasion or a woman who had consumed four. It was not, in the study, specified that these drinks should have been imbibed within a [period] of one hour or five hours.
Many Dartmouth students, male and female, emerge from fraternities as binge drunks though their coordination is such as to permit them to walk over a tightrope while conjugating irregular Latin verbs.
Which does not mean that there aren’t just plain drunks coming out of fraternities at Hanover, but does raise the question, can you remove the drunks by removing the fraternities?
Manifestly, the answer is no. At Dartmouth a student caught wobbly on campus at night is given draconian treatment, much more severe than if picked up by local police. It can include a five hundred dollar fine and commitment to spend time at alcoholic abuse centers.
—“Dartmouth’s Fraternity Row,” February 17th, 1999
The role of the college trustee is endlessly nibbled about in academic politics. Mostly, the college establishment is regnant. Trustees are expected to be affable creatures, preferably rich and generous. They are not expected to weigh in on college affairs, which are adequately handled by presidents, provosts, deans, and lesser administrative folk.... Social observers have to acknowledge that there is a role for independent-minded alumni trustees. In the case of Stephen Smith, someone who with every disadvantage known in the land (poverty, single parent, black skin) has triumphed, in an enormously competitive environment, against East Coast snobbery and insularity. This is a moment when one wishes one were an alumnus of Dartmouth, so that one could vote for Steve Smith.
—“The High Cost of Loving Dartmouth,” April 24, 2007