In Memoriam: Professor Jeff Hart (1930-2019)

On February 17th, Professor Jeffrey Hart passed away, just seven days shy of his 89th birthday. Professor Hart was Professor Emeritus of English at the College. A Burkean scholar and a specialist in 18th Century English literature, Professor Hart taught in the English department for for thirty years until eventually retiring 1993 to focus on his writing. Professor Hart was a prolific writer, publishing numerous works of literary criticism, political commentary, and American social history. These include Political Writers of 18th Century England (1964), The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism (1966), From This Moment On: America in 1940 (1987), and The Making of The American Conservative Mind (2005) among others. Professor Hart also wrote speeches for Presidents Nixon and Reagan, as well as contributing frequently to numerous publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The National Review, where Hart served as a senior editor for thirty years.

During his time at Dartmouth, Professor Hart was legendary for his brilliant mind, sharp wit, and tireless advocacy for free, critical thought. In spite of — or perhaps because of — such a daunting reputation, Hart was beloved by Dartmouth students. One of his former students, Peter Robinson ‘79, recalls that Hart was “one of three or four professors every student learned about as a freshman.” Students flocked to Professor Hart’s courses on British and American literature in such large numbers that they frequently had to be held in Tuck’s 326-seat auditorium. Even this auditorium was not a suitable venue for Professor Hart’s final lecture of his 18th century English literature course. Due to popular demand, Professor Hart instituted a tradition in which he would open the final lecture of his most beloved course to the public. This lecture would regularly pack all 800 seats in Spaulding Auditorium with Dartmouth students and Hart’s fellow faculty members. Professor Hart relished crafting provocative titles for this lecture such as, “Two Cheers for the British Empire: Why Most of its Colonies Were Better Off When the Brits Were Running Them.” His reason for doing this was not merely to provoke his students — Hart made a point of always keeping his classroom discussions respectful and as politically neutral as possible. Professor Hart, however, was a firm believer that lectures must always be entertaining. As he once quipped “You can’t teach [students] if they are asleep!” This ethos allowed Hart’s great sense of humor to shine inside the classroom just as it did outside of it. As his colleague and friend Professor Bill Spengeman described him, Hart was a “delight” and a breath of fresh air at the College which is all too frequently characterized by a “leaden seriousness where any laughter or any kind of  playfulness is out of place.”

Hart first arrived at Dartmouth as a student in the fall of 1947. He had just graduated from high school in New York City where he was born and raised and intended to be a pre-med at Dartmouth. Hart was housed in Topliff his freshman year, dorm he described “god-awful” and “like a prison.” An avid tennis player, Hart said that Topliff’s only redeeming quality is its proximity to the tennis courts. During one of his first days on campus, Hart decided to walk down to the courts in search of friendly competition. Hart ended up playing another student that had been lingering outside of the court. Hart described the interaction saying “I saw a student waiting there. Nobody around. So we played a set. Not a real competitive set. I beat the guy.” As it turned out that guy happened to be the number one seed on the varsity tennis team. The coach of the varsity team arrived just in time to watch Hart beat his star player handily.  Before even introducing himself the coach chastised Hart for entering the court without his permission. The coach did not take kindly to Hart’s response that, if the coach wasn’t present he shouldn’t have to ask for permission.  This interaction, coupled with Hart’s defeat of the number one player, kicked off a rather tumultuous relationship between the two men.

Tiffs with the prickly tennis coach and disillusionment with his dormitory were not Hart’s only problems as an undergraduate at Dartmouth. Like many Dartmouth students today, Hart quickly decided that the life of a pre-med was not for him. He instead chose to pursue his interest in English. However, the Dartmouth English Department at the time was not particularly “rigorous” in Hart’s mind so he decided to leave Dartmouth and return to New York.  Back in the city, Hart took a year off from school during which time he worked for the New York publisher Dual Sloan and Pierce. During his time working, Hart was prevailed upon to enroll at Columbia, which then boasted the best English Department in the country. Professors in the Department included Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Jacques Barzun, some of the most highly-regarded literary critics of the time.

At Columbia, Hart became a real disciple of the late, great Lionel Trilling. Hart was a regular guest at Professor Trilling’s home, and Professor Trilling’s wife Diana Trilling described Hart as one of the “who’s who of the gifted undergraduates of the thirties, forties, and early fifties.” In addition to this academic success, Hart also found a great deal of athletic success. He walked onto the Columbia tennis team and was quickly elevated to the number one spot. Hart recalled one of his finest undergraduate memories as coming back to Dartmouth during Green Key weekend to have an official rematch with Dartmouth’s number one player. Hart won handily once again, but this time was actually congratulated by the Dartmouth coach. Though Hart accepted the coach’s congratulations graciously, he later remarked that he had “felt like saying a few other things.”

After graduating from Columbia in 1952, Hart enlisted in the Navy and served in Naval intelligence during the Korean War. After four years in the Navy, Hart returned to Colombia to pursue his Ph.D. in 17th and 18th century English literature. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Hart taught English literature at Columbia from 1962 to 1963.  Hart’s budding career as a professor paralleled his budding career at The National Review. While teaching at Columbia, Hart began to write book reviews for the conservative magazine and grew close with its founder William F. Buckley. Their relationship became a partnership and friendship that spanned decades, only ending with Buckley’s death in 2008. Hart’s closeness with Buckley and his prolific writing for The National Review also played a large role in his journey back to Dartmouth.

 Hart’s conservative views had never sat well with the extremely liberal English Department at Columbia. They were, however, particularly perturbed by his affiliation with Buckley and The National Review — so much so that Trilling, Hart’s mentor, encouraged him to stop writing for The National Review out of concern that it was endangering his path to tenure at Columbia. All of this became irrelevant when Hart was recruited back to Dartmouth by then-President John Sloan Dickey. Dickey offered Hart an essentially-certain path to tenure and was supportive of his voicing of contrarian conservative ideals. Dickey coaxed Hart away from other offers at Berkeley and the University of Virginia by arguing that Dartmouth would benefit greatly from adding a conservative, Burkean scholar to balance the English Department which was then dominated by Professor James Cox, an intellectual disciple of Mark Twain and self-described liberal populist. Despite Dickey’s prediction that these men would clash owing to their radically different ideologies, Cox and Hart became fast friends following Harts arrival in 1963. In a statement to the public following his father’s death, Hart’s son Ben wrote: “As a kid, I remember Cox and my dad would often discuss politics over dinner at our house until late into the night. The jokes and laughter between them would carry on typically until 2 a.m.”

Hart and his ideals were not always received so warmly on campus. This was especially true after the founding of The Dartmouth Review.  For those not schooled in our founding lore, The Review was founded in Professor Hart’s living room. Hart’s son, Ben, was among our student founders. The Review was created out of the disillusionment that student writers had with The Dartmouth, which they viewed as a college-controlled mouthpiece for the administration and a liberal echo chamber. Hart suggested that these students take matters into their own hands and create an independent publication that could freely voice the truth about Dartmouth issues. As The Review took shape, Professor Hart was not only our faculty advisor, but our loudest and most tireless defender. Professor Hart also took great interest in shaping the writing and rhetoric of Review staffers. Professor Hart would regularly lunch with members of the editorial staff at The Canoe Club, his favorite restaurant in Hanover.

Though Hart’s conservative ideals — firmly rooted in the writings of Edmund Burke — were well-formed and steadfast, Hart’s goal was never to force those beliefs on his students. In his classroom and in The Review, Hart advocated for one thing above all else: critical thought. In the classroom this manifested itself in difficult and detail-oriented tasks that would often leave his students flustered. Hart’s students were not so different from Dartmouth students today. They wanted to be tested on “big picture ideas”  and “course themes” rather than minute details from an individual text. In response, Hart reminded his students that if they did not remember a text in detail, then they likely did not understand it as thoroughly as they should have. Without such a thorough understanding, any critique they would give would lack a solid foundation.

Hart was never afraid to apply his critical mind to his own ideologies and political party. In the early 2000s, Professor Hart was a very vocal critic of President George W. Bush. In broad strokes, Professor Hart’s criticism of Bush centered on his belief that Bush’s politics were rooted in populism as opposed to conservatism. Professor Hart,  accustomed to criticism from the left, was equally unfazed when criticism sprang up from the right. His colleges at The National Review, some former students included,  disagreed with Hart’s assessment of President Bush. Though Hart admitted to having his views shaped by his colleagues in constructive and moderating ways, this did not dissuade him from publicly voting for President Obama in 2008. Hart stood firm in his understanding of conservatism, but was not too reverent to use humor to describe it. Of his conservatism Hart wrote: “My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up-to-date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.”

This definition certainly need not be definitive for The Review, but its spirit and humor — and that of its author — continue to define this organization. Professor Hart instilled this organization with such character. We intend to uphold it with gratitude.