The Dartmouth Review: A History

By Michael C. Russell | Saturday, October 4, 2008

Editor’s note: For the benefit of the freshmen, below is a brief history of The Dartmouth Review. Upon reading this, if freshmen are interested in joining ranks with us, but missed our freshman open house, stop by our office for our weekly meeting: 6:30 p.m., Monday nights, 38 South Main Street (behind Ledyard Bank).

So, you’re reading this article and clearly ignoring all the best advice shared with you by your trip leaders, the DOC, and whatever other undergraduate who sits you down to explain the ways of Dartmouth. Congratulations, you’ve managed not to listen to them. Regardless of what they tell you, The Dartmouth Review remains the only independent, student-run paper that takes on the inane and ridiculous efforts of students, professors and administrators on this campus.

Now, it would be easy to be as dismissive of them as they are of us (except when the need for outrage is too great to feign ignorance), but they do have a point when they say that The Review has been setting the campus dialogue, for better or worse, since its founding 27 years ago. There is hardly a controversy or scandal The Review hasn’t been in the middle of reporting on; and sometimes, we’re the ones being reported on.

Perhaps because The Review was born out of controversy it became destined to remain near the center of it. We need to look back to alumni governance to understand the history of The Review and its origins. Before the wild electioneering that marred the past few Trustee and Association of Alumni elections, there was Dr. John Steele ’54 who ran as a petition candidate for the Board of Trustees in 1980. Dr. Steele ran against the trustee candidate of the administration of then-President Kemeny. Dr. Steele ran on a platform opposing the various changes that had occurred during Kemeny’s presidency, such as: the expelling of the ROTC program from campus, the neglect of the athletic program, and the removal of numerous Dartmouth traditions, most notably the Indian. When Greg Fossedal, the Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Dartmouth, wanted to write an editorial endorsing Dr. Steele he faced an insurrection in the ranks of the editorial staff, which resulted in a successful attempt to remove him from his post.

Undeterred, Fossedal and three other editors of The Daily D—Gordon Haff, Ben Hart, and Keeney Jones—decided to found their own newspaper, The Dartmouth Review. With the help of Professor Jeffrey Hart, a friend and advisor to all in The Review family, they raised the funds necessary to print their own paper from foundations and alumni around the country. The vocal support of Professor Hart’s longtime friend and conservative icon William F. Buckley, together with other luminaries of the conservative movement, brought financial stability and a national spotlight to our new endeavor. The Dartmouth Review provided the first platform on any campus in the country for conservative students to speak out against the administration-endorsed change on campuses throughout the sixties and seventies.

Within its first few years The Review experienced a phenomenal growth in its staff and readership, all the while establishing a firm editorial line in favor of traditional Dartmouth. Admittedly, this had a great deal to do with timing, for The Review emerged at a crossroads. The rise of conservatism around the country coincided at Dartmouth with a belated rise in liberal campus activism. It was as if Dartmouth had missed the 1968-memo for campus outrage and activism but was determined to find issues to be outraged and active over anyway. From building shanties to throwing tampons at the foot of the president of the College, everyone had a cause and an asinine way of fighting for it, and The Review was there at every turn to confront every self-righteous activist.

The writers and editors of The Review’s first decade have gone on to become some of the country’s most dynamic conservative writers, such as Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham. Less publicly, a legion of TDR writers descended on Washington and took up important positions in the Reagan Administration. Of these, current Trustee Peter Robinson ’79, who was always a close friend of The Review’s, is known most prominently for his role as a presidential speechwriter. He wrote the immortal words Reagan spoke at Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Home at Dartmouth, The Review had several seminal moments.

The most memorable incident happened during the Winter Carnival of ’86. Several students had built a small village of shanties on the Green as a way to promote divestment from South Africa (think a more dramatic—and meaningful —version of the Darfur divestment project). As Carnival approached, the shanties, which the town had ordered demolished, provided an eyesore for students and returning alumni, so several writers and editors associated with The Review founded the “Committee to Beautify the Green.” The Committee went out one night and with sledgehammers attempted to bring down the surprisingly sturdy shanties, which resulted in an outburst of campus “outrage.”

The other, far more ludicrous anecdote from this era stems from The Review’s interaction with former professor of music Bill Cole. In the January 17, 1983 issue The Review marked Professor Cole and another female professor as two of the worst professors at Dartmouth. With this review, the latter professor reformed her class, heeding the criticisms published here, while Bill Cole began his vendetta against this paper. Cole rapidly proved that he would not take this criticism sitting down. The Review received a call from Cole—that was subsequently recorded and published—in which he called The Reviewers racists for attacking him and used what one could call “un-scholarly” language to get his point across. Following this, reviewers approached Cole after class to ask for a comment and to obtain a picture of him, but were again treated to a wild outburst during which Cole broke their camera.

The eighties closed without a major controversy and with The Dartmouth Review as strong as ever. This moment was short lived.

Theodore Roosevelt’s quote has topped the masthead since the first issue, with one exception. After the issue had been laid out and was ready to go to press in the fall of 1990, a disgruntled staffer surreptitiously broke in and replaced the Roosevelt quote with one from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Upon realizing, to his horror, what had happened, the Editor-in-Chief went around campus to collect all of the issues he could find and issued an apology to the campus for having published it.

That was not enough to stem the wave of emotion against The Review, as its detractors finally had something solid to latch onto and attack The Review for. This “rage” culminated in the “Rally Against Hate,” during which student leaders and then-President of the College James Freedman denounced The Dartmouth Review in front of the national press corps.

However sympathetic the press may have been to the attacks on The Review, the viciousness that Reviewers were being subjected to by their own college appalled many across the country. This “Rally Against Hate” has been mentioned as the primary reason that Harvard never considered Freedman as a replacement for their outgoing president, Derek Bok. Yet, as embarrassing as the moment was for the College, The Review experienced several lean years as the staff jumped ship during the “Rally Against Hate” witch-hunt and only recovered slowly, thanks to the new found stigma attached to the paper.

The nineties proved largely uneventful besides the consistent thorning of Freedman, who never passed up an attempt to make a fool of himself by engaging The Review in debates that even when he won, he lost. Politically, Dartmouth changed little after the rally under Freedman. However, it experienced a deliberate and effective, albeit slow, change from an athletic, hard partying school to one that still embraced that ideal, but now had many students outside the social scene “translating Catallus” in the Tower Room, as Freedman’s “lone scholar” vision required.

President Wright’s administration, which followed Freedman’s, began inauspiciously with the Student Life Initiative, an attempt to end the Greek System “as we know it.” The Dartmouth Review joined the uprising against the SLI, though the Inter-Fraternity Council coordinated efforts, which included canceling all Winter Carnival parties, marching on the President’s lawn, and the first genuine campus protest movement at Dartmouth. After the administration pulled back on their plans to up-end campus social life, they moved toward a safer and more successful agenda that primarily involves improving campus facilities.

That said, the launch of the “Lone Pine Revolution” began one of the more venomous episodes of college politics under President Wright’s tenure. Not happy with the direction the College was taking, alumni spoke out and nominated T.J. Rodgers ’70 to the Board of Trustees by petition in 2004. SLI and President Wright’s desire to make the College a “University in all but name” were among the reasons why alumni were dissatisfied by Wright’s administration.

The Dartmouth Review supported Rodgers and then later Peter Robinson ’79 and Todd Zywiki ’88 as they won their petition trustee elections to the Board. We provided a platform for the candidates to get their message to alumni, and we provided a fresh perspective on the debate to campus. Their elections led to several efforts by the College to undermine the influence the alumni could carry in electing the Board. This first manifested itself as a motion to change the Alumni Constitution and dilute the voting power of alumni in electing trustees to the Board. The new Constitution also created a bizarre new council that would have over-represented various “minority groups” within it.

After the new constitution was soundly defeated by alumni, the administration tried to dilute the voting power of alumni once more by expanding the Board, and alumni, in the form of the Association of Alumni, took the College to court for that measure. By attempting to add eight appointed trustees, the Board overthrew a 117-year tradition of parity between Board-appointed and alumni-elected trustees. The Association of Alumni, after a change in leadership last spring, voted to withdraw the lawsuit from court. Alumni fought last spring’s Association of Alumni election more fiercely than any previously, as groups like Dartmouth Undying and Dartmouth Parity sent out scathing press releases to alumni and ran advertising campaigns to argue their side. On campus The Review battled for parity and even made it into a Board of Trustee letter endorsing Dartmouth Undying, in which they called the candidates for parity “The Dartmouth Review’s slate of candidates.”

Although Dartmouth Undying won, the election did see increased alumni involvement and brought The Dartmouth Review to the center of campus politics again, which is our place when important events play themselves out on this campus. With the retirement of President Wright, and the search for a new president, The Dartmouth Review is looking forward, once more, to being in the center of a very important campus debate.

The Dartmouth Review: A History

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