Dartmouths in Town Again Run Girls
AT DARTMOUTH THE CLASH OF '89
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February 26, 1989
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2 DAYS INTO THIS Yr, ON January. 3, A NEW Hampshire judge ordered Dartmouth College to reinstate two suspended students. Chris Baldwin, former editor in chief of The Dartmouth Review, and John Sutter, executive editor, were suspended last spring for disorderly acquit, harassment and invasion of privacy. The central incident in the case was a classroom confrontation between four Review staff members and a Dartmouth music professor, William Cole, whom The Dartmouth Review has frequently attacked. The Committee on Standards, the school's disciplinary board, constitute Baldwin guilty ''because he initiated and persisted in a vexatious oral exchange with Professor Cole, despite Professor Cole's repeated requests to go out his classroom.''
The students took a serial of actions terminal summer - one with the National Endowment for the Humanities asking for an investigation of what they saw as civil rights violations, 1 in a Federal court charging Dartmouth with racial bigotry, and one in a New Hampshire courtroom contending that their rights to due process and to free speech every bit guaranteed in the Dartmouth Pupil Handbook had been violated. All of those matters are notwithstanding pending, but the injunction, announced on the 24-hour interval that classes began for the winter term, is a legal triumph for The Dartmouth Review in the commencement round of the New Hampshire suit.
I came up from the University of Virginia, where I teach English language, to spend a week at Dartmouth checking out the positions in what ane professor chosen a ''moral and intellectual civil state of war.'' I'd known about Dartmouth through my family - four generations of relatives had been students there. I wasn't a Dartmouth grad myself, but I certainly heard a lot about the place while I was growing upwards. Many of the students I chatted with I met jogging effectually Occum Swimming, where I commencement ice-skated 45 years ago, across the street from my grandparents' old house. To most of these students, the printing storm over the Dartmouth administration and The Dartmouth Review seemed remote. Several of them considered the Review's staff non so much embattled journalists as merry, or not-so-merry, pranksters in the fraternity tradition.
Just what'south going on up in that location isn't simply a case of campus cutups getting likewise rowdy and being taken to the woodshed by the Dartmouth administration. It'due south a political struggle correct out of the 1960'southward - in ideological opposite. The scenario itself is eerily familiar: a small group of student activists, financed by outside money, encouraged by outside agitators, is attacking the assistants, comparing the school'south officials to Nazis. They want to get rid of professors who teach what these students think are irrelevant courses. They want to block the administration's programs and reform the curriculum.
The difference is that the Dartmouth insurrectionists are archconservatives. The college is determined to be progressive; the pupil agitators are adamant to keep it every bit it is. These students non simply trust a lot of people over 30, they aspire to work for them, to become them. Their goal is a job on The National Review or The Wall Street Periodical. Patrick Buchanan, George Gilder, R. Emmett Tyrrell and other notable conservatives are on The Dartmouth Review's advisory board. The masthead includes a box: ''Special Thanks to William F. Buckley, Jr.''
The Review crowd'south politics are reactionary in the plainest sense of the word. They are anti-affirmative-action and anti-counterculture. They accept a nostalgia for the manners and trappings of a pre-World State of war Two upper-class existence, including a taste for conspicuous consumption. They swear past Allan Bloom's ''Endmost of the American Mind.'' They believe that it is morally imperative to study the classics of Western civilisation in order to guarantee its survival. They want their reading list to be required at Dartmouth. All the same they are fierce advocates of individual liberties, especially of gratuitous speech and students' rights to shape the curriculum and atmosphere of the college. They are, for the most part, bright, energetic and articulate in their convictions.
From the get-go of its ix-year history, The Dartmouth Review's intent has been to shock. In 1982, it ran a column in ''black english'' titled ''Dis Sho' Ain't No Jive, Bro'' - which was meant to bear witness that black students were illiterate. In recent years, its members take leveled the shanties of anti-apartheid demonstrators with sledgehammers; staged a formal lobster-and-champagne dinner for themselves on the day of a pupil fast on behalf of world hunger; secretly taped a meeting of gay students and so printed the transcript. ''We are the anti-institution at present,'' says Harmeet Dhillon, the Review'due south current editor.
The establishment she is confronting is the liberal educational institution. The Dartmouth Review has attacked it every bit ''gooey-gooey,'' soft on Communism, soft on homosexuality, soft on minorities (but only certain minorities), and soft on the curriculum, which they say has been weakened by African and Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, Native American Studies -all of which they lump together equally ''victim studies'' or ''oppression studies.''
To weed out one of these courses is the ostensible reason they have persisted in attacking Professor Cole. Cole is a black musician who has a Ph.D. from Wesleyan Academy and has written two books, ane on Miles Davis, the other on John Coltrane. His colleagues in the music department regard him as an excellent musician, and, with their recommendation, he has been granted tenure and promoted to full professor.
Last Feb, the Review ran excerpts from a transcript of a Cole class. The concluding excerpt ends with: ''All you lot guys are honkies. . . .''
William Buckley, in a column that appeared in The Manchester Marriage Leader a month later on, wrote: ''Professor Cole, the tape recorder revealed, sounded as though he were strung out on dope, reciting a disjointed soliloquy on . . . poverty, racism and the kitchen stove, peppered by the language of the streets, equally one would nigh charitably call it.''
This is an inordinately stuffy and unfair summary. The Cole remarks are to some extent disjointed because Cole is answering questions. His riff on poverty is a reaction to a student journal entry: ''Poverty is kind of romantic.'' There is a chaotic finale, about two minutes long. Buckley's reference to the professor being ''strung out on dope'' is an innuendo that was published in The Review; it has oft been repeated by members of the staff but has never been substantiated. Cole has denied information technology. But it was a classroom confrontation with Cole that sparked disciplinary activeness. It occurred at the end of grade on Feb. 25, 1988, when members of the Review'southward staff crowded in on Cole after he had told them to exit. There was a near-scuffle during which Cole knocked the flash off the Review photographer'south camera. The students filed a complaint confronting Cole, which the dean of faculty dismissed. The students were charged, and the Committee on Standards arranged a hearing.
On Feb. 28, 1988, the Dartmouth Afro-American Society wrote Dartmouth's president, James Freedman, asking that the four students be suspended immediately.
Kevin Pritchett, a Review fellow member who is black, and ii of his fellows, were ousted from a meeting of blackness students, after being searched for tape recorders. Pritchett says he was threatened, and later received a bulletin by computer post - ''Someone wants to put y'all out of commission.''
In early March, there were 17 hours of hearings. Three of the four accused students were suspended. In July, two of them filed adapt. Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth professor of English language and occasional contributor to the Review, described the mood on campus: ''Frenzied.''
THE NEXT MAJOR FUSS WAS over The Dartmouth Review commodity of October. 19, 1988: ''Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann.'' It is a conflation of the history of the Nazi Party with the 1 i/2-yr history of the Freedman assistants, which it accuses of engineering a ''Last Solution'' to the campus-conservative problem.
Freedman's education and career are impressive: Harvard Higher, Yale Police School, clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, a yr at the police firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in New York City, professor of law at the Academy of Pennsylvania, where he also taught political scientific discipline and held a series of administrative posts, including those as university ombudsman and associate provost. He became dean of the police force school in 1979. From 1982 to 1987, he was president of the Academy of Iowa. In 1987, he became president of Dartmouth College.
Merely all this could be the curriculum vitae of a smart, dull administrator. Freedman is a vivid, lively guy. He is amiable in conversation in a way that suits his liberal optimism. His appreciation and knowledge of literature are real. His statements about preparing Dartmouth for the 21st century, about Dartmouth's making ''a greater contribution to national life'' aren't just lyrics prepare to ''Pomp and Circumstance.''
Freedman has three aims for the evolution of Dartmouth: intellectualism, diversity and a stronger graduate program.
Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., is the smallest schoolhouse in the Ivy League, and, figuratively speaking, has the virtually ivy. Its size, comparative isolation, the beauty of the campus and the nearby hills and woods, and (until 17 years ago) its all-male person population, gave Dartmouth students a crude tribal sense of themselves. Sometimes the tribe was thought to be living a pastoral idyll in an academic hamlet; sometimes it was a Viking raiding party - every bit the parody of the song goes, ''Dartmouth's in town again - run, girls, run!'' The motion-picture show ''Animal Firm'' was written by a Dartmouth graduate.
The conventional wisdom during my own college years (Harvard '61) placed Dartmouth in the middle of the Ivy League academically merely near the bottom in ''intellectualism'' and ''variety,'' if diversity is taken to mean a pupil body with a broad range of backgrounds and talents.
That has begun to change. Freedman has a higher of smart students, at least as measured by standard testing (the median combined S.A.T. score is 1,340). What he wants is for his students to take more ''intellectual risks.'' He wants to subtract participation in fraternities, which he thinks insulate the members from the general intellectual life on campus. By strengthening the graduate programs, he hopes that more students will stimulate the undergraduates by case and discussion. The kinesthesia's recent self-study written report espouses aims and assessments similar to Freedman's.
Freedman's other main goal is ''multifariousness,'' or, as he phrased it, ''a rich brew, a thick stew with a lot of sense of taste and flavor and spice.'' The cocky-written report written report made much of the arrival of women and minority groups, including a contempo endeavor to recruit Hispanic students. By ''variety,'' the report basically ways affirmative action. Attaining those goals is an uphill battle, according to the study's authors, simply Dartmouth is getting there.
Freedman is careful to accompany each of his suggestions for comeback with a preface about how practiced Dartmouth already is. He and other elders of the college sometimes seem to be saying that his assistants is just irresolute its image. Of course, office of his job is to point out that the nowadays Dartmouth has suffered from lingering stereotypes (''Camp Dartmouth,'' beer-boozing frat boys stuck in the woods, preprofessional yuppies) which discourage applications from the very students Freedman would like to concenter.
Dartmouth must take looked very inviting to Freedman. Information technology is a picture-perfect New England campus, surrounded by college buildings ranging from Georgian to Victorian. A venerable Ivy League institution with a kickoff-rate faculty and smart students. The tough battles of albeit women and undertaking some minority-group education had been won. What was needed adjacent was an intellectual vision that would comport Dartmouth even higher.
Simply it has turned out that Freedman's noble vision, conceived in centrist-liberal ideals, is vexed by the same problems liberalism has in general. The Review contends that Freedman's vision is ludicrous, that his attempts to enforce civility - to brand sure that no minority group feels unwelcome - are unfair. That his vision of diversity, whether information technology means affirmative action or people who should have gone to Harvard, is destructive of an ethos and fellowship that have a special Dartmouth identity. The Review isn't racist, it insists: anyone of any race is welcome to the fellowship, provided he go one of the fellows.
The trustees back up Freedman. The students are generally for him. The faculty is generally for him. Alumni giving is all the same strong. But there is this little cloud of the Review. Possibly v years at Iowa made him forgetful nearly how hateful folks in the East can be, but Freedman seemed surprised that there was such vehemence. Toward the end of our conversation, he said: ''In that location is an irony about my aims here. At Iowa they said I accept a great vision. At Dartmouth people see a threat.''
In his attempts to up the intellectual dues at Dartmouth, Freedman can get pretty lyrical. As he declared in a recent speech: ''We must strengthen our attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasures may non come up from the camaraderie of classmates only from the lonely acts of writing poesy, or mastering the cello, or solving mathematical riddles, or translating Catullus. We must brand Dartmouth a hospitable environs for students who march to a different drummer. . . .''
THE DARTMOUTH Review heard this passage, and others like it, as a annunciation of an intent to ''Harvardize'' the higher. Several students said to me, ''If I'd wanted to go to Harvard, I'd have gone to Harvard.''
Fair enough. What upsets many people around Dartmouth is the ugliness of its personal attacks. Cole's face up has been called a ''mud pie'' and a ''used Brillo pad.'' The dean of social studies has been called the patron saint of ''little Latin Commies.'' A history professor is reported to exist ''androgynous,'' and his course ''filled with fruits, butches and contrasted scum of the radical pupil left.''
Having read a stack of Dartmouth Reviews, one-time and new, I can say that many more of their stories and squibs are, to quote Freedman, when he finally spoke out against the Review, ''hateful-spirited, cruel and ugly.''
In Rudyard Kipling's ''Stalky and Company,'' a memoir-novel about schooldays, the grand old headmaster has Stalky and his pals before him on a accuse. He finds them not guilty. Then he canes them. In Kipling'south happy view, the boys take it like men. They take a Tory epiphany.
Some of the old alums who had originally been for the Review hold something like the Kipling view. I said, ''In my 24-hour interval, if someone had carried on like those boys . . . [ the schoolhouse's president ] would have chucked them out on their ear and then and there.''
For a number of faculty members ''Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann'' was the final harbinger. Afterward it was published, several wrote to William Buckley to ask him to disassociate himself from the Review. Buckley wrote back that the Review ''published a extravaganza, designed to make their betoken, which is that the Administration of Dartmouth is tyrannical. The metaphor was noisome; the students' motives understandable.''
Most of the faculty won't grant interviews to The Dartmouth Review or respond to its reporters' phone calls. However, two faculty members write regularly for the Review: Prof. Jeffrey Hart, who is also a senior editor of The National Review, and Prof. Douglas Yates, who is, equally he says, ''marrying into the Review.'' His fiancee is a recent Dartmouth graduate and a former member of the Review staff.
Hart is awfully busy on behalf of the Review. I had read some of his columns before I stopped by his house to talk with him. His prose is punchy and feverish, and he has a brisk and buoyant look. He characterizes the situation at Dartmouth equally a ''moral and intellectual civil war.'' He would similar to get rid of ''the politically motivated courses, the victim-condition courses, oppression studies.'' He lists African and Afro-American Studies and Women'due south Studies. He would go along R.O.T.C. - which represents ''one of the good values of Dartmouth.'' He predicts that Freedman will be gone within a year.
But in a less sanguine mood, he said he sometimes thought that the Ivy League should end: ''Let them be state schools. Sometimes I think the Ivy League should be just abolished.''
EIN REICH, EIN VOLK, EIN Freedmann'' concludes with a speech communication past one of the ''victims'': '' 'When they took abroad the Indian symbol, I did non speak up, because I was not an athlete. When they took abroad the Hovey murals, I did not speak upwardly, because I was non an fine art lover. When they took away the alma mater, I did not speak up, considering I was not a vocaliser. And when they came for the fraternity organisation, I did not speak upward, because I was non in a fraternity. . . .
'' 'When at terminal they came for me, at that place was no one left to speak up.' ''
I had boned up on the Dartmouth side of the history, especially the litany of conservative laments. When Dartmouth at concluding admitted significant numbers of Indians in the 1970'south, the Indians protested the Indian symbol. They didn't want to be mascots. They recommended that the administration discourage its use. Calvin Trillin wrote an article on the controversy in The New Yorker in 1979, ''The Symbol Is a Symbol,'' the gist of which was that the Dartmouth good ol' boy types regarded the Indian symbol as both macho and venerable. The Dartmouth Review and Jeffrey Hart think Dartmouth shouldn't cave in to protestation, that tradition outweighs present sensitivity - and anyhow, what nigh the Indian-head nickel?
There is a college regulation against hanging banners on college buildings. Supporters of The Dartmouth Review maintain that this regulation is selectively enforced against Indian-head banners. When students display Indian-head banners in the football game stadium, campus police confiscate the banners and report the students to the dean.
The Dartmouth Review distributes free Indian-head T-shirts to offset-year students.
Then in that location's the matter of the Hovey murals. Painted in the 1930'south, they're illustrations of ''Eleazar Wheelock,'' a song by Richard Hovey, course of 1885: Oh, Eleazar Wheelock was a very pious human, He went into the wilderness to teach the Indian, With a Gradus ad Parnassum, a Bible, and a pulsate, And five hundred gallons of New England rum.
The way of the murals resembles Maxfield Parrish's illustration of ''Old Rex Cole'' for the bar at the St. Regis. All the remarkably similar Indian maidens are sweetly pretty and wide-eyed. They are wearing, at virtually, tattered wisps of loincloths. One brave is a perfectly muscled Frank Merriwell, with a large D on his breast. The others are slightly sinister, including the one most to lap up the overflowing rum at Eleazar'due south feet.
The murals were covered with removable wooden panels on which other paintings can exist displayed. They are not lost, and they have been displayed on special occasions.
Another source of friction has been the alma mater, ''Men of Dartmouth'' - changed to ''Dear Onetime Dartmouth'' after the admission of women, but subsequently dropped from the higher songbook. It has the line ''And the granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains.'' I'one thousand surprised that Westward.O.D. (Women Overthrowing Dartmouth) and Witch (Women'due south International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell) haven't come out in support of it.
The fraternity question. The Review position is that fraternities are a freedom-of-association upshot. If a fraternity derived no benefit from Dartmouth, were indeed nada more than a shared business firm or a district, what business organisation of the higher would it be? But the relationship is non that distant and simple. In some cases, the college owns the fraternity house, or holds a mortgage. If a fraternity owns its own house, the college group insurance covers the house, so long as the higher recognizes the fraternity. Every bit information technology was explained to me, the college couldn't abolish fraternities, only withdraw support and recognition.
All Freedman's ruling does is delay from freshman to sophomore year the fourth dimension that new members may bring together. This regulation does have the upshot of reducing the number of dues-paying members in a fraternity firm. Freedman says that the purpose of the regulation is to go on the younger students from immuring themselves before they've really mingled with classmates, but he doesn't deny that he has caused a financial problem for the fraternities.
Freedman likewise understands the particularly intense feeling Dartmouth alumni accept for Dartmouth, and he is grateful for it. Only there is a group of alumni who desire, in Freedman's phrase, ''Dartmouth preserved in amber,'' and he is puzzled past their views. His bulletin to them is that his programme for Dartmouth is ''routine evolutionary alter,'' ''a different calibration of goals, non fundamental changes.''
WHILE SEATING the panel that would hear the case against the students from The Dartmouth Review, the Committee on Standards made what turned out to exist a crucial mistake. On the morning of the hearing a committee fellow member named Albert LaValley told the group that he had signed a letter to Freedman in the autumn of 1987 criticizing The Dartmouth Review. He didn't produce a copy, and he could not recall any item of it. The commission voted to continue him on the console.
The text of the letter, however, was introduced as testify in court. Judge Bruce E. Mohl, the New Hampshire approximate who presided over the case, wrote that ''the letter condemned The Dartmouth Review for its 'slanderous articles,' which 'seriously threatened the principle of academic liberty.' The letter deplored the Review's 'repeated sexist and racist label of Dartmouth Kinesthesia members.' '' The judge concluded that the letter of the alphabet ''demonstrates substantial bias and prejudice on his part confronting students who write for The Dartmouth Review.''
The letter is the swivel of Judge Mohl's opinion. He dismisses the students' charges of bias against three other panelists, ane of whom removed himself earlier the panel had reached its decision. Judge Mohl added: ''The court finds no persuasive evidence that Dartmouth Higher has retaliated against or otherwise pursued disciplinary action against the plaintiffs on account of their association with The Dartmouth Review.''
Approximate Mohl himself wrote in the decision of his stance that ''the parties have expended an extraordinary amount of legal and fiscal resources in bringing this case to this, but a preliminary, stage of a massive legal battleground.'' It could have been avoided, he noted, if all the participants in that brief meet on Feb. 25, 1988, had shown ''greater civility and less discourtesy.''
DISCOURTESY Hardly covers the case.
In that location accept been a series of anonymous detest letters mailed to gay people, feminists, and some administration and faculty members. Everyone seemed to know someone who had gotten such a letter.
I finally found a recipient: Becca Winters. She had received 3. When she and her friend Maura Nolan met me for breakfast, I learned that they were both well-known campus feminists. Becca is 4th year, a double major in History and Art, with a certificate in Women's Studies, magna cum laude. Maura majored in English language, got her B.A. in '88 and is applying to graduate schoolhouse.
They had both felt put upon and threatened by some of the macho elements at Dartmouth, simply they seemed to be more curious, confident and happy than most students I've encountered, non just at Dartmouth, but at other universities at which I've spent some time.
I asked them what they thought of Freedman. ''A benevolent patriarch,'' Maura volunteered. And what did she think of Dartmouth? ''I've been interviewing at graduate departments,'' she said. ''When they tell me who they accept in Medieval Studies, they also tell me the 3 professors I've had here every bit an undergraduate are as good a group equally I tin can look to have as a graduate student.''
I asked them if they would rather have gone to college somewhere else. They paused. Becca said, ''Well, they need us here.'' They both laughed.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/26/magazine/at-dartmouth-the-clash-of-89.html
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