It is with a heavy heart that we must announce the passing of Jeffrey Hart on Saturday, February 16, 2019. He was just seven days shy of turning eighty-nine. Professor Hart’s son, Ben Hart, said in a Facebook post about his father’s passing: “No need for tears. His was a life well lived. He influenced many. He was joyful till the end—no fear of death whatsoever.”
Hart was Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth, the former National Review senior editor, and the founding advisor of The Dartmouth Review. For more than thirty years, Hart taught 18th Century literature, gracing the Dartmouth English Department with a Burkean conservative. As the campus free-speech crisis developed, he facilitated the formation of The Dartmouth Review in 1980 with a group of students in his living room. Over the years, he contributed a number of pieces and provided invaluable guidance, helping build a campus newspaper that he referred to as “Dartmouth’s school of journalism.” Each year, the Freshman Issue would contain the wise words of Professor Hart: “The main job in getting a college education is to make sure the large essential parts are firmly in place, after which you can build upon them.”
Always a heterodox thinker, Hart had a national reputation for challenging the ideological deviations of Republicans and neo-conservatives. His rigorous thinking, prolific writing, and thoughtful teaching will be missed by all at Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Review. In the coming weeks, we will be taking a look back at all the great work that Professor Hart did at The Dartmouth Review.
If you would like to learn more about Hart’s influence on conservatism, here is an article that attempts to capture a sliver of Professor Hart’s long career.
I was student of Jeff Hart at Columbia; I got to him when I found Susan Sontag to whom I was originally assigned unbearably a cynic and show off.
Not knowing anything about Prof. Hart, nor about anything at all , .. I was just turning 17 and growing up in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, which explains my ignorance… But I did tell Quentin Anderson in a very loud voice that frightened him … he was in august man and chairman then … “”my mother didn’t send me to Columbia college to be taught by a cynic.”
The story doesn’t end there however; did I know anything about conservatism or even that Jeff heart was a conservative? No not at all. I knew that I used to laugh at his droll stories concerning the life and habits of Jonathan Swift:; it was then so intimate a joke one felt the presence is of Jonathan Swift in the classroom in Hamilton Hall with us
Later, towards the end of the war in Vietnam I become briefly a Marxist, even a Maoist; that did not deter my affection for Jeff Hart or for his wonderful humor and his incredible ability to reach students like me
It was something of a scandal that Columbia let him go
A few years later I reconciled with Jeff Hart; I became his correspondent and enjoyed writing to him in the many years before his death, l when I myself had become reconcile to America