The Dartmouth Review

The Dartmouth Review

Nemo me impune lacessit
Type	Biweekly newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner	The Hanover Review, Inc.
Founder	Gregory Fossedal, Gordon Haff, Ben Hart, Keeney Jones
Editor-in-chief	Sterling C. Beard
Founded	1980
Political alignment	Conservative
Headquarters	Hanover, New Hampshire
Circulation	14,000[1]
Official website	dartreview.com

The Dartmouth Review is a conservative, independent, bi-weekly newspaper at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (U.S.). It was founded in 1980 by disenchanted staffers—including Gregory Fossedal, Gordon Haff, Ben Hart, and Keeney Jones—from the college's daily newspaper, The Dartmouth. It spawned a movement of politically conservative independent U.S. college newspapers such as the Yale Free Press, Harvard Salient, California Review, Princeton Tory and Cornell Review, and has been at the center of several lawsuits.

Past staffers include author Dinesh D'Souza, talk show host Laura Ingraham, the Far Eastern Economic Review's Hugo Restall, Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Rago of The Wall Street Journal, and The New Criterion's James Panero. Author, columnist and former Nixon and Reagan speechwriter Jeffrey Hart, now Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College, was also instrumental in the founding of the newspaper and has been a long-time board member and adviser. As of 2006^[update], it claims 10,000 off-campus subscribers and distributes a further 4,000 newspapers on campus.

Stances and controversies

The Darthmouth Review has consistently favored a stronger voice on the part of alumni who share its worldview in college governance and alumni issues, particularly elections to Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. In 1980, the paper reported on the election of John Steel, who later became an anti-seal activist in California, to the board after a contentious petition campaign. (Eight members of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees are known as Alumni Trustees because they are nominated by alumni.) More recently, the paper was a driving force behind what it called the "Lone Pine Revolution," in which the alumni independently nominated and then saw elected four trustees critical of the college's stances on "free speech," athletics, "alumni rights," and the college/university dynamic. Several of these trustees said their campaigns were aided by the newspaper's favorable coverage of them.^[2]

In addition, the Dartmouth Review has been a conservative voice on campus issues. The paper has consistently supported a college curriculum based on the Western Canon, criticized Dartmouth College's alcohol policies as too strict, and resisted "political correctness" on campus. In 2002, Dartmouth's liberal newspaper, the Dartmouth Free Press, documented other issues on which the Dartmouth Review had taken a stand, most of them campus-oriented.^[3] The paper has often maintained a flippant yet humorous tone. For example, former editor Bill Grace described one of the college's departments as a "Whitman's Sampler" of professors in one issue.

In defending and promoting Dartmouth traditions and conservative positions, the Dartmouth Review has often provoked controversy. The Dartmouth Review gained national attention and notoriety early on for positions on social issues regarded as politically incorrect. Examples from the newspaper's history:

• The Dartmouth Review continues to refer to Dartmouth's sports teams as the "Indians" after the traditional school mascot which was officially discarded in the early 1970s. To promote the Indian mascot as well as the Indian symbol, the newspaper sold Dartmouth t-shirts emblazoned with the symbol. (To poke fun at these shirts, members of the Native American Society printed "Dartmouth Whites" shirts featuring the Monopoly Uncle Money Bags character in place of the Indian symbol.)
• When the Alma Mater, originally called "Men of Dartmouth," was changed to be gender-neutral, the paper printed and distributed copies of the original lyrics. These lyrics are reprinted each year for incoming freshmen.
• In 1986, students affiliated with "The Dartmouth Review formed the Committee to Beautify the Green and dismantled, with sledgehammers and early in the morning, the shanties that had been erected on the campus quad as part of an ultimately successful campaign to cause Dartmouth to divest itself of South African investments during apartheid. No one was under attack. The shanties were said to be blocking the College's annual Winter Carnival and were considered by many to be eyesores; the town of Hanover had ordered the illegally-constructed structures torn down. When the College had moved to remove them, 150 students blocked the workers. Ten Dartmouth Review staffers who dismantled the shanties were disciplined by the College, even though there was physical or verbal form of "attack," and the shanties were illegal to begin with.
• In 1984, the Dartmouth Review sent a reporter to a public meeting of the Dartmouth Gay Students Association. The Dartmouth Review got The Dartmouth Gay Students Association's message out to campus by publishing excerpts from the meeting with the names of the group's leaders.
• In 1988, the Dartmouth Review published an article criticizing a black professor by judging one of his courses "one of Dartmouth's most academically deficient." After hearing a profanity-laden phone call from the professor after publishing the story, staffers sought a comment, the professor yelled at them and attacked a student. The school accused the students of harassment.^[4]
• In the fall of 1990, the Dartmouth Review (whose staff was at the time one-quarter Jewish) was accused of anti-Semitism for its publication of a quote from Mein Kampf in its masthead in place of its usual quote from Teddy Roosevelt. The quote was discovered by Dartmouth Review staffers three days after the paper was distributed. The Dartmouth Review recalled the issue and then editor-in-chief, Kevin Pritchett issued a campus-wide apology. According to Review backer William F. Buckley, Jr.'s book In Search of Anti-Semitism, this incident was the work of a disgruntled former staff member.
• In response to the Hitler quotation in particular and the Review's stance in general, almost two thousand people assembled on the Green for a "Rally Against Hate".^[5] Both the rally and President Freedman were later criticized by some among Dartmouth alumni and by the national media.^[6] The "Hitler Quote incident," as it came to be known,^[7] came on the heels of several smaller incidents allegedly suggesting anti-Semitism on the part of the Review. The incident led to a satiric response by the Harvard Lampoon, who in April 1992 replaced the usual Dartmouth Review newspapers with their own "All Hitler Fashion Preview," including a quote page with exclusive (and fake) Hitler quotes. During the same period, College President Freedman, who was Jewish, was caricatured as Adolf Hitler on their front page with the caption "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedman."
• The November 28, 2006, issue of the Dartmouth Review featured a cover image of an Indian brandishing a scalp, with the headline: "The Natives are Getting Restless!" The illustration is widely used by national anti-Indian coalitions;^[8] the paper itself included multiple pieces criticizing both Native American students' complaints about a string of incidents perceived as racist, as well as the College's apologies for them. On November 29, 2006, more than 500 students, staff, faculty members and administrators responded to the issue by gathering for a "Solidarity Against Hatred Rally" in front of Dartmouth Hall. In an interview with the Associated Press, the Dartmouth Review editor-in-chief said the paper was in response to "the overdramatic reaction to events this term."^[9] Editors subsequently issued statements expressing "regret" and called the cover, but not the issue's content, a "mistake".^[8][10][11]

Influence and legacy

In 2006, the newspaper celebrated its twenty-fifth year of publication by releasing an anthology entitled The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty-Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper, in which William F. Buckley lauded the newspaper as "a vibrant, joyful provocative challenge to the regnant but brittle liberalism for which American colleges are renowned."^[12] Some claim the newspaper's influence with current students may be on the decline, especially after the founding of moderate and liberal campus newspapers (The Beacon, a short-lived monthly campus publication, was founded by a former Review staffer). A February 17, 2003 article in The Nation, co-authored by a founder of the liberal Free Press, quotes early Review editor-turned-national-pundit Dinesh D'Souza as saying that the Review's current "impact on campus is debatable" since the paper no longer dominates campus debate as it did during his editorship.^[13]

References

1. ^ "About Us". The Dartmouth Review. http://dartreview.com/about/. Retrieved 2007-11-21. 
2. ^ Glabe, Scott L. (2005-10-07). "Lone Pine Revolution Continues". The Dartmouth Review. http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/10/07/the_lone_pine_revolution_continues.php. Retrieved 2008-03-08. 
3. ^ Waligore, Timothy P. (2002-09-18). "Into the Shadows: A History of The Dartmouth Review". Dartmouth Free Press. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thepress/read.php?id=257. Retrieved 2007-01-03. 
4. ^ The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty-Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper
5. ^ Beyer, Jeffrey (2005-05-30). "The Dartmouth Review carries the banner of conservatism". The Dartmouth. http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=1995053001090. Retrieved 2007-02-22. 
6. ^ Simon, William E. (1990-10-20). "Demagoguery at Dartmouth". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFDD1630F933A15753C1A966958260. Retrieved 2008-03-08. 
7. ^ "Introduction: The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent" (PDF). Intercollegiate Studies Institute. http://www.isi.org/books/content/390intro.pdf. Retrieved 2007-02-24. 
8. ^ ^{a b} Toensing, Gale Courey (2006-12-15). "Dartmouth College rocked by racist controversies". Indian Country Today. Archived from the original on 2007-09-19. http://web.archive.org/web/20070919062423/http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414179. Retrieved 2006-12-15. 
9. ^ Wang, Beverly (2006-11-29). "Dartmouth rallies for minority students". Boston Globe (Associated Press). http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2006/11/29/dartmouth_rallies_for_minority_students/. Retrieved 2006-11-30. ^{[dead link]}
10. ^ Desai, Nicholas; Emily Ghods-Esfahani (2006-12-06). "The Cover Was a Mistake". The Dartmouth Review. http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2006/12/06/the_cover_was_a_mistake.php. Retrieved 2006-12-15. 
11. ^ Linsalata, Daniel F (2006-12-02). "The Cover Story". The Dartmouth Review. http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2006/12/02/the_cover_story.php. Retrieved 2006-12-15. 
12. ^ Shapiro, Gary (2006-04-28). "Dartmouth Review Celebrates 25 Years". New York Sun. http://www.nysun.com/article/31813. Retrieved 2007-01-03. 
13. ^ Ruby-Sachs, Emma; Timothy P. Waligore (2003-02-17). "A Once-Bright Star Dims". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030217/sachs. Retrieved 2007-01-03. 

Further reading

• Ben Hart, Poisoned Ivy (Stein and Day, 1986). ISBN 0812862562.
• James Panero and Stefan Beck, ed (April 2006). The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty-Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper. Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISBN 1932236937. 

External links

• Official website of The Dartmouth Review
• Dartmouth Free Press article on the Review
• Stories from the New York Times on the shanty scandal