The Week in Review

Friday, October 31, 2008

Not-so-Average Joe

Joe Lieberman visited Dartmouth College on Thursday October 23, speaking for about a half hour and taking questions at the Top of the Hop in the Hopkins Center. His appearance marks what those in the business call a “last ditch effort” to get his friend and colleague John S. McCain elected President. Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic candidate for Vice President, apparently represents the type of politician who actually supports the policies he believes in, rather than following party orthodoxy for the sake of an easy reelection (see the Ned Lamont Affair of 2006).

At the Hop, Lieberman was met with a remarkably low level of heckling for a speaker invited by the College Republicans, with only a single outburst in the beginning of his speech to show off Dartmouth’s thriving progressive community. He delivered eloquent, commonsense explanations of policy points in which McCain is the superior candidate, many of which sounded geared to a left-leaning audience. Carbon credits and leaving ANWR alone are all well and good, but as the days run out Lieberman and the McCain campaign are going to have an increasingly difficult job of convincing moderate and center-left voters that they are not, in fact, The Ones They Have Been Waiting For. Best wishes, Joe.

Philosopher Kings Support “The One”

Forget Hillary’s crocodile tears, Reverend Wright’s antics from the pulpit, or the vice-presidential nomination of Sarah Palin. Hold your breath for the real surprise of the 2008 presidential election season: donors from academia favor Barack Hussein Obama by more than an eight to one margin. Through the end of September, professors and college administrators have donated roughly $1.5-million to John McCain and an overwhelming $12.2-million to the junior Senator from Illinois, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

While academics have always leaned heavily to the left, the $12.2-million stands far above the $8.4-million given to John Kerry in 2004 and the $983,000 to Al Gore in 2000. The Democratic candidate’s idealistic vision and highbrow aura of intellectualism have made many educators more comfortable with Senator Obama, who used to teach Constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Even at Dartmouth College, a number of professors could be spotted sporting their enthusiasm for Obama at a recent rally, highlighted by the appearance of DNC chairman Howard Dean. At The Dartmouth Review, we cannot help but recall William F. Buckley Jr.’s admission on professors and politics that “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

NE Republicans, an Endangered Species

“How can you say you’re a Democrat and you’re for endangered species, and then go after the last Republican in New England?” It’s nice that Representative Chris Shays (R -CT) hasn’t lost his charming wit, because it looks as though he might lose just about everything else come November 4. Mr. Shays is indeed the last Republican Congressman in New England and appears to be in real danger of losing that noble distinction. Recent polls have Mr. Shays and his opponent, Jim Himes, tied at 44% each, with 10% undecided.

It seems that being a moderate and actually running against a former Wall Street executive are not enough to sway voters who have already been convinced that anyone with an “R” following their names was personally complicit in the devaluing of their IRA. Connecticut, the state that has already given us George Bush, Ralph Nader, Ned Lamont, and Christopher Dodd (one of the people actually responsible for the financial crisis) seems to be caught in a struggle to the death; the far left incompetents versus the regular garden variety incompetents. New England’s collective breath is held for an outcome.

Hatin’ on Friedman

Milton Friedman was an economist, Nobel Laureate and Republican of a libertarian stripe who earned his M.A. and taught at the University of Chicago for thirty years. Though he was originally a Keynesian supporter of the New Deal, his later espousal of monetarist and laissez-faire policies—considered radical when originally advanced—influenced world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

It should therefore come as no surprise that an academic at the same university wants to do away with his memory. As the Chicago Maroon reports, professor James Heckman, a member of the Milton Friedman Institute faculty committee at U of C, said during a public panel (10/17/08) that he wouldn’t be opposed to changing the Institute’s name.

“I think it’s a good idea. We could change the name,” he said. Though he does not speak on behalf of the committee as a whole, this comes as a bit of a surprise because the faculty committee has stood firm against objections to the Institute, including claims that naming the Institute after perhaps U of C’s most eminent alum and professor could influence the research conducted there.

It seems odd then that Heckman, a Nobel laureate himself who had worked with Friedman, would decide not to back the faculty committee’s resistance. Friedman’s ideas helped lead to Reaganomics and a long-standing boom in the U.S. economy; it’s only natural to name the Institute after such a famous alumnus and professor. Bias is not reason enough to change the name. That act, Heckman himself concedes, “would probably cost the initiative a lot of support.” While The Dartmouth Review applauds efforts to remain unbiased academically, ignoring Friedman’s pioneering work and breaking with a group of faculty at what may be the world’s foremost economics department isn’t the way to go about it.

Latte-Sippers Keep Jobs Despite Worsening Econ.

College towns like sleepy little Hanover and Lebanon, NH attract an interesting sort of person. There are the service workers, the Volvo drivers who sip lattes over the New York Times, and the professors. Then there are the once-Gender Studies majors who took the only job they could find in some sort of “diversity” position at the College. As it turns out, this eclectic group of people may have been the most accidentally economically savvy people in the nation. According to a new Forbes Magazine survey, Lebanon is the strongest micropolitan area in the country, and best suited to withstand the current financial and economic turmoil.

As anyone with a rudimentary economics education can guess, the College and DHMC provide job stability and perpetually low unemployment for the area, allowing other businesses to survive national trends. The Forbes article did not indicate whether such an optimistic outlook would curb the trend of Hanover High kids muttering and flashing obscene gestures at passing College students.

One More Reason to Love Dean Crady

On Tuesday, October 21, the College released the new Alcohol Management Program, a proposal to remove distinctions between types of social events on campus and require organizations to submit a weekly schedule of all events at which alcohol will be served.

Those of our readers who have had to sit through the numbing fifty minutes that is the current SEMP training will appreciate that the current system is a series of winks and nods: the trainer admits that there is very little that the College can do to support the elements of the current system that are sufficiently unpopular. The restrictions on kegs and hard liquor are byzantine and more or less arbitrary, with the vague goal of limiting the flow of alcohol in some manner or another; nobody in living memory is quite certain.

Dean of the College Tom Crady has acknowledged the utter lack of cooperation with SEMP and has taken the novel approach of giving Greek organizations both more rights and more responsibilities. While The Review is reasonably certain that a few particular Greek houses will find a way to screw this up within a week of its planned spring enactment, one hopes that this is a sign of good things to come with the relationship between the administration and the Greeks.

The Week in Review

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