Huffington Post Attacks Dartmouth, Again

The national media enjoys mentioning that “Animal House” is based off of AD, even when it’s irrelevant to the story.

In what is sure to be a surprise to no one, the Huffington Post came out swinging against Dartmouth, with a article titled “Dartmouth’s Drinking Culture Worships Beer Pong, But Can It Be Tamed?” that attacks our dear College and its fraternity system.  The Huffington Post piece is only the latest in a long string of negative press coverage from the national media establishment. (Bloomberg has also been at the forefront of negative Dartmouth coverage.)

As expected, the Huffington Post‘s article is incredibly distortionary and unfair to the College. It cites the outdated and inaccurate “Animal House” stereotype, distilling all of Dartmouth into a movie from 1978 and attempting to paint the College as somehow deviant and worse than peer institutions. And of course, the Huffington Post cites Assistant Professor of History Russell Rickford, who was denied tenure and will be departing for Cornell. A self-declared radical leftist known for agitating protests, asserting that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a tool of white supremacy, and calling Dartmouth “White Supremacy U,” Rickford is a far from a reliable source regarding the situation in Hanover and demonstrates sheer bias in the Huffington Post‘s coverage.

Furthermore, the article uses lies, damned lies, and statistics to support its unfounded claims. It is true that Dartmouth has the most alcohol and drug arrests in the Ivy League, but that’s largely because of differences in enforcement. Dartmouth does not have a campus police force, and Hanover Police has been much more aggressive in enforcing alcohol laws than police forces at other Ivy League institutions. The Huffington Post then progresses to attack beer pong, bizarrely portraying Dartmouth as “worshipping at the alter of beer pong.” Pong is indeed a beloved College tradition, but it is expectedly and unfortunately misconstrued as a harmful and dangerous obsession. For the vast majority of campus, this is far from the truth. And quite often, pong is played without alcohol at all.

On campus, the response to these distortions has been one of outrage. Many students have expressed displeasure at the unfair targeting of Dartmouth and the lack of journalistic integrity displayed by the Huffington Post. We shake our heads and move on, but the national media seems bent on sullying our good name with their yellow journalism.