Dartmouth’s J-School

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in January 2006

More or less, The Dartmouth Review was launched in the living room of my house in Lyme, New Hampshire. There should be a bronze plaque on the house because a) the Review has been Dartmouth’s School of Journalism, and b) it became and remains the flagship example of independent college conservative newspapers across the country.

I myself had nothing to do with launching the newspaper and was only a benign spectator. Living in my house at the time were my son Ben ’81 and Dinesh D’Souza ’83, two founders of the Review. Other students came and went. Sometimes things turned into a party. As a freshman, D’Souza had  been a reporter for the Daily Dartmouth, the regular student newspaper. There he had shown conspicuous talent, marked especially by humor. One notable article covered a talk given by the novelist William Styron in the Wren Room at Sanborn House, home of Dartmouth’s English Department.

During the question period, as covered by D’Souza, Professor Donald Pease of the English Department, widely known as a man of many words, asked Styron a question of about 136 words. Styron answered, “No.” D’Souza wrote this up with a straight face. Thus a major talent hove into view. When The Review was being launched, D’Souza saw it, correctly, as an opportunity to write longer and more wide-ranging articles. As I remember it, he was not especially political as a freshman, but experience moved him in a conservative direction.

That the Review has been Dartmouth’s School of Journalism ins obvious. Dinesh D’Souza is now famous, emerging in the public arena with two important night, Illiberal Education and The End of Racism. He has, of course, published many more, and become famous as a debater on public on public platforms, scoring well against such as Stanley Fish and Jesse Jackson. Laura Ingraham ’85 became a reporter for MSNBC, a best-selling author, and radio host. Deborah Stone ’87 went to work for John Stossel at ABC News. As for the editors of this present volume: James Panero ’98 is now Managing Editor of The New Criterion, our leading journal of the arts, where Stefan Beck ’04 is associate editor. Joseph Rago ’05, a recent Review Editor, won an internship at the Wall Street Journal, and then, as almost never happens, was appointed to a permanent position in the editorial department. Kevin Pritchett ’91 also became an editor at the Wall Street Journal, while Hugo Restall ’92 went from The Dartmouth Review to the Wall Street Journal in New York to the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Now he is Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, another Dow Jones publication, also in Hong Kong. Benjamin Wallace-Wells ’00 is an editor at the Washington Monthly. Steve Menashi ’01 has worked as Associate Editor of Policy Review and served on the Editorial Board of The New York Sun. Andrew Grossman ’02 now works for the Heritage Foundation. Alston Ramsay ’04 is an editor at National Review. Michael Ellis ’06, the most recent editor of the Review, has worked for the Republican National Committee while taking a full schedule of courses. His future is unlimited. The Review now has a startling number of gifted writers, any one of whom might emerge as an important journalist.

The Dartmouth Review got launched because of converging circumstances. Little known is the importance of a very liberal assistant priest at Aquinas House, the Catholic student center. This priest’s liberalism took several forms, but most conspicuous was his donning of vestmests incorrect for the Mass to be celebrated. The group of students who objected to this and other extravagances planned a newsletter to express their protest against the deviations of this priest.

There was also the candidacy of Ronald Reagan and the conservative-reaction to the Kemeny presidency-trustee candidacy of Dr. John Steel. At this time in mid-1980, Greg Fossedal ’81 was editor of the regular student newspaper, the Daily Dartmouth. He supported Reagan, and in a signed column endorsed Steel. This proved indigestible. He was removed from his editorship, evidence that the paper is anything but independent.

That event was pivotal for The Dartmouth Review. An editor with a newspaper, Fossedal brought to the Review idea the practical skills necessary to putting out an actual newspaper rather than the hypothetical newsletter. He even put up some of his own money to finance an initial issue, which duly appeared at Commencement 1980 with a cover cartoon by Steve Kelley ’81, now nationally known as the cartoonist SKelley. With the first issue out, it was possible to raise money from alumni, who have been the principal support for the paper ever since. Fossedal designed the format of the newspaper along the lines of National Review: letters, then short editorial paragraphs, articles, and “culture,” here including sports.

On the Review’s success, one point is impossible to stress too much. Tax-deductible status was essential, as it facilitated alumni support. Most colleges’ imitations of the Review foundered on that vital matter. Rep. Jack Kemp became interested in Dartmouth through his son Jeff, quarterback on the football team and helped out with achieving tax-deductible status.

With the appearance of The Dartmouth Review, which flourished on into the fall of 1980, when Reagan won in a landslide over Carter, and far beyond, it was widely thought among faculty members that I was writing for it. I was known as a conservative. In 1968 I had been a speechwriter, first for Reagan, taking leave to go to Sacramento out in Lotusland, and then for Nixon in his successful 1968 run, as he slid swivel-hipped between Humphrey and Wallace.

It was not widely known, however, that I never introduced current politics into my courses, considering that to be unprofessional and otiose. That I had time to write for the Review would have been a preposterous notion for anyone who knew my schedule. Since 1969, I had been flying twice a month to New York for my duties at National Review, and during this period wrote two commercially successful books inspired by college tuition bills for sons and daughters. Otherwise, I was more than fully occupied with my teaching and writing on literary subjects.

My benign relationship to the Review has exacerbated my relations with some on the faculty. But, as Dartmouth football coach Earl “Red” Black said, and made the title of his memoir: You Have to Pay the Price. It was not much of a price to pay. And even without the Review I would have created trouble, I suppose, some of it comical.

For example, I recall a faculty cocktail where, during a conversation with a Government professor, the subject of South Africa unfortunately came up, apartheid a matter on which moral superiority was delightfully easy, cost-free, to achieve. I observed, mischievously, that more or less all of the countries in Africa were dominated by one tribe or another, that the white tribe was running South Africa, and, except for a few Bushmen, had been there first, the Zulus pushing south later. The Government fellow drew himself up to his six-foot-three height or something like that and with matchless pomposity actually declared, “No gentleman would defend South America.”

Secure in my own status as a gentleman, I didn’t care. Its possible that this attitude communicated itself rather widely. I knew some reporters for Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing tabloid the New York Post, especially a Murdoch investigative reporter who was trying to dig up Mafia connections involving then-Governor Mario Cuomo. It must have been through his agency that the editorial cartoonist for the Post made an ink drawing of my supposed coat-of-arms. It featured the usual shield in the middle, plus symbols representing my interests, a pair of skis on one side, crossed tennis rackets on the other, a quill in a bottle of ink on the shield, and, as a spectator interest, a football helmet at the top, no doubt in place of the usual knight’s helmet. Where the usual motto should be on the shield, instead of Lux et Veritas, Excelsior, E Pluribus Unum, or some such respectable thing, it said “I Don’t Give a Shit.”

That is not exactly how I see myself, and I would have preferred something maybe from Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” There, he is urging Americans to resist the tyranny of the majority, a feature, as Tocqueville and Emerson saw, of post-aristocratic societies in which there are few or no barriers to mass opinion.

About the football helmet a word might be in order. My father graduated from Dartmouth with the class of 1921, and my first connection otherwise with the College was through football. Every year, from about the age of five, he took me to the Dartmouth-Princeton game at Palmer Stadium. The train going back to Nassau Hall left from Penn Station and was always packed with Dartmouth people celebrating the expected victory, celebrating to the extent that some, I feel sure, failed to make it off the train at Princeton Junction. A couple of beautiful sentences written by Francis Russell epitomize for me my recollection of those distant afternoons at Palmer Stadium: “It is that hushed moment before the two teams surge onto the empty field and the rival captains walk toward each other for the toss-up. Any hushed moment, however, is apt to be shattered by the crash of a hip flask inadvertently dropped on the concrete.”

The mention of Emerson and “Self-Reliance” focuses for me the quality I have admitted at The Dartmouth Review from the start in 1980. If you don’t like the existing newspaper, well, start a better one. It is that quality of self-reliance, independence of spirit, that has always characterized the Review, despite repeated attempts to crush that spirit through intimidation and even official calumny. Such independence is an indispensable quality for anyone that would be a writer, that is, indispensable for finding one’s own voice. The Review has exposed scandals, as with the “teaching” of Music Professor Cole; it has taken risks, hilarious sometimes, as with the performance of Keeney Jones. In the early days of the Review, the influence of Brideshead Revisited was palpable, not so much the novel as the television movie, narrated by Bill Buckley.

That influence showed up in croquet matches on the lawn in front of Sanborn House, with gin and tonics catered from the Hanover Inn, and, once, lobster and champagne on the Inn porch to protest the self-congratulation of World Hunger Week. Sebastian Flyte should have been there, and perhaps he was, in spirit.

For all this joking, during this first Reagan-era period of the Review, the talent of its student editors became recognized. The White House mess looked like a Review staff meeting/

The faculty, to be sure, no doubt objected all along to the Review’s regular “course guide” characterizations of individual teachers and courses. But, where I have the knowledge of the individual, these have been pretty much on the mark. One definition of good journalism is printing things that someone does not want printed.

It is both remarkable and not remarkable that the Review has now flourished for twenty-five years. The Review has had a great many talented and courageous editors and staff members, and, in my judgement, is now in a spectacularly successful phase.