The Review Welcomes You to Dartmouth

Welcome to Dartmouth, class of 2030! By now you’ve surely returned from First-Year Trips covered in pine needles, a few new friends in tow, ready to delve into the undergraduate experience. I’ll do my best to give you an overview of The Review, in case you find our paper to be of interest (which I wager you will, given that reading our paper is on your list of to-dos during O-week).

There are a number of places online (most especially our website [www.dartreview.com]) in which you can read the full history of The Review. To put it succinctly, though, The Dartmouth Review traces its origins to 1980, when several staffers at The Dartmouth, disgruntled with the paper’s left-wing bias, elected, under the mentorship of the late Professor Jeffrey Hart, to form their own off-campus publication, one which would embody the spirit of Dartmouth’s historic commitment to free expression. Since then, The Review has been Dartmouth’s preeminent independent newspaper, voicing opinions independent of both the administration and the anti-intellectual hivemind which so severely plagues so many parts of our campus.

You will likely hear many descriptions of what The Review is from many on campus. Lest you form your opinion before hearing it from the horse’s mouth, let me try to describe our paper to you. The Review plays the role of Dartmouth’s leading dissenter. In the wake of administrative overreach on Greek Life, on traditional academic thought, and on Dartmouth’s traditions as a whole, all of which have accelerated in recent decades, The Review exists to fill a gap on our campus, offering a consistent, critical view of the lockstep, consensus-driven activism that has become endemic to the college experience. At a moment when the window of tolerance has nominally opened, we see an opportunity to exemplify what a Dartmouth that refuses to let its traditions fail can look like. Our campus is distinct from its peers in its steadfast commitment to the values that have defined it for centuries: open inquiry, rigorous debate, intellectual curiosity, and a mind expansive enough to consider beyond the boundaries of its own certainty. We see the threats that have emerged to those values, and we stand in stark opposition to them.

In short, the historic mission of The Review has been, and always will be, to foster an environment in which the constraints of anti-intellectual “academic hegemony” do not dominate – even as they do so in so many other spaces on this campus. Despite its historically conservative leaning, rest assured that we are not a monolith. The Review includes people of all majors and interests, as well as those of diverse viewpoints, many of whom contribute to the vociferous debates that we see at our weekly meetings. All of this is to say that, regardless of your personal party affiliation or other inclinations, the rest of our staff and I welcome you to our paper, asking only that you bring the open-mindedness and passion for dissension that have defined our paper for many years.

The Review has cultivated a long line of independent thinkers and iconoclasts, many of whom now occupy positions of power and influence, including Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza, Congressman Brandon Gill, and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (the latter two of whom The Review has recently had the pleasure of interviewing), as well as many more. The Review’s traditions, such as that of the College, are many and are bold.

As an aside, you will soon find that most of the clubs that you’ll learn about at Club Fair are paywalled behind a rigorous application process that may require the creation of your very first resume. Rest assured, no such application window exists; interest in The Review in and of itself proves to be a robust screening mechanism for editorial competence.

So, welcome to Dartmouth – words you’ve certainly heard before by now. We hope to be welcoming you to The Review before long.