o say that The Dartmouth Review is notorious is an understatement: it is impossible to attend Dartmouth and not hear about it. In its illustrious history of 25 years, the conservative paper has repeatedly attacked “sodomites;” printed the names of officers of the Gay Straight Alliance, outing several students; and printed a transcript of a covertly recorded GSA meeting, illustrating the article with a man peering over a toilet stall. The Review’s articles have been laced with racial references such as the’83 article “Bill Cole’s Song and Dance” which described a black professor, whom the Review claimed was incompetent, as looking like a “used Brillo pad.” In a midnight raid, Review staffers used sledgehammers to knock down shanties erected on the Green in protest of the College’s investments in apartheid South Africa. In’90, a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in the Review’s credo.

The Review has survived these numerous controversies through the strong support of alumni and national conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, William F. Buckley and Dinesh D’Souza. When Review founder Greg Fossedal accepted a post in the Reagan administration, he received a letter with this praise from the President: “I must say, it’s an impressive paper. You should be proud to have started this important movement; let’s hope that your fine efforts will be imitated elsewhere.”

You will hear many explanations and versions of events from people about what happened at the Review, and many of the excuses offered by past and present Review staffers and defenders only serve to obscure the issues further. Unfortunately, most first-year students are misinformed or uninformed about the role the Review has played on this campus in the past twenty years. Understanding this history will be key in helping to instigate meaningful change.

Early Beginnings

The Dartmouth Review was founded in’80 to hearken back to a past that its founders saw as threatened by a Dartmouth administration working to change the College. The spark for the paper’s creation came when Greg Fossedal, then editor of The Dartmouth, wrote an editorial in support of John Steele, a tradition-minded candidate for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. Feeling that the Dartmouth administration was composed of a Stalinist politburo and wanting to start an anti-Establishment conservative paper, Fossedal left The Dartmouth and took several members of the staff with him.

The Dartmouth Review demanded a return of the Indian symbol, an end to year round schooling (now known as the D-Plan), advocated a curriculum based on western civilization, opposed affirmative action, claimed that the “administration has given in to every minority demand,” complained that professors were punishing students with pro-American and pro-Christian beliefs, and proclaimed the need to protect “traditional values.” The Review eventually blossomed as it found funding from wealthy conservative alumni whose agenda it hoped to promote. (One early fund raising letter said that the Review is “designed to publish Alumni opinions, which coincide with the opinions of many undergraduates.”)

The Dartmouth Review probably could not have survived without the national publicity it received by claiming Dartmouth was trying to silence its conservative voice. The first big controversy erupted when the College threatened to sue over the use of the name ‘Dartmouth’ in the paper. The Dartmouth administration and faculty were incensed by the Review’s frequent name-calling and innuendo such as calling one visiting pro-choice speaker “allegedly syphilitic.” The College blocked the incorporation of The Dartmouth Review, Inc., but when Fossedal said he would change the name of the company to the Hanover Review, Inc., the College immediately phoned the New Hampshire secretary of state to drop its objections. But, as Greg Fossedal told me: “I never promised them the Hanover Review, Inc. wouldn’t publish [a paper] called the Dartmouth Review!” And the relationship between the Review and the College only went downhill from there.

Homophobia and the Review

In’81, The Dartmouth Review printed the names of the officers of the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) along with material that had been taken from the GSA’s confidential files. The grandfather of one of these closeted students found out his grandson was gay when he read his copy of The Review. Another of these outed students contemplated suicide. When asked about this, founding editor Greg Fossedal says: “I felt terrible about it.” When students held a protest over the printing of the names, however, Review staffers played croquet on the other side of the Green.

Editor Dinesh D’Souza said they had not known the GSA had an exemption from making its officers’ name public. The Review was attacking the secrecy of the funding of the GSA, which was supposed to be funding “intellectual activities,” D’Souza told me, while its members were writing about how great it was to get money for “gay parties, gay orgies or whatever.”

In’84, the Review printed a splashy tabloid cover screaming “Exclusive Report on the G.S.A.” Printed inside was a portion of a transcript of a Gay Straight Alliance meeting, secretly taped by Review staffer Teresa Polenz, with an accompanying picture of a man peering over a bathroom stall. The state of New Hampshire opened an investigation into whether the Review reporter has violated wire tapping laws. A former attorney general of the United States came to defend The Review, but the state dropped the investigation after a New Hampshire Supreme Court handed down a ruling in an unrelated taping case. As a result, Dartmouth decided not to bring disciplinary charges against any students, but Dean Shanahan sent a letter encouraging members of the Dartmouth community calling on them to “censure” the Review for its “insensitivity.”

Whatever the ethics of its actions, the Review has often been able to claim victory through not losing lawsuits. However, in’85, Associate Chaplain Richard Hyde filed a libel and invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the Review, claiming that the publication’s articles over the past two years incorrectly said that Hyde defended the views of the North American Man Boy Love Association. One April’84 article is a terrific example of the Review’s reporting: “Unequivocally the most out-landish comments on the topics discussed came from none other than the young Mr. Hyde… Still operating under the guise of associate chaplain of Dartmouth, he plainly states that his goal here is ‘to decriminalize homosexuality and premarital sex’… Some members of the faculty and administration say Hyde was married sometime last year in a civil ceremony. Others aren’t quite sure. Hyde, himself, says he still looks forward to the day when he can enjoy the happiness which marriage can offer. Figure it out for yourselves.” The Review eventually settled the case and ran an apology, but neither side would say if Hyde had received any money.

In the mid-1980s, the Review constantly referred to gays as “sodomites” and joked about how great it would be if an identification system were established so they would not be able to spread their “diseases.” If the Review’s cause was political, its language was virulently hateful. Review covers, from as recently as the mid-1990s, featured tiny fruits like an apple, a pear, a banana, each with faces, holding various signs such as “HOMO POWER.”

While insisting the Review was not racist or anti-Semitic, former editor Dinesh D’Souza told me that “this antigay thing is a little bit tricky.” While there were times when the Review said things about gays he wish it hadn&
#8217;t, D’Souza says, “[i]t’s not clear the Review’s target was homosexuals per se.” Of course not.

Talkin’ Jive? Racism and the Review

According to Nutshell magazine, one Review editor wrote an article calling for the return of the Indian symbol and called modern day Indians “drunken, ignorant, and culturally lost.” The Review printed an interview with a former Ku Klux Klan leader, illustrated with a dummy of black person in a noose tied to a tree. The paper also claimed in an open letter on parents’ weekend that affirmative action at Dartmouth “explains your son’s stupid friends.”

The Review’s attacks on affirmative action and on those they felt did not belong at Dartmouth were often extremely crude. On March 15,’82, the Review ran a piece called “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” bylined by former Review Chairman Keeney Jones. It was the third in a series of articles, in the first of which Keeney said he wished he could have a medical operation to change his skin color so he could more easily get into graduate school. In the second piece Keeney said he was taking speech lessons to learn black manners of speech. The third piece contained the following “satire,” in which Keeney seems to have perfected what he thinks is black dialect:

“Dese boys be sayin’ dat we be comin’ to Dartmut’and not takin’ the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hes’ dey all be co’d in da gound, six feet unda, and whatcha be askin’ us to learn from dem? We culturally ‘lightened, too. We be takin’ hard courses in many subjects, like Afro-Am Studies, Women’s Studies and Policy Studies. And who be mouthin’ ‘bout us not bein’ good road? I be practicly knowin’ ‘Roots’ cova to cova, ‘til my mine be boogying to da words! And I be watchin’ the Jeffersons on TV ‘til I be blue in da face.”

After receiving a copy of the “Jive” article, Congressman Jack Kemp resigned from the Review’s advisory board saying Keeney’s article was not in good taste. “Instead, it relied on racial stereotypes. I am sure that many of your readers were offended by it. I am even more concerned that others found in it some support for racist viewpoints,” Kemp said. “I do not want my name to appear in your paper. I am concerned that the association of my name with The Dartmouth Review is interpreted as an endorsement and I emphatically do not endorse the kind of antics displayed in your article.”

The Review took Kemp’s resignation in stride, saying they were looking to add Jerry Falwell to their board. Editor Dinesh D’Souza sought to shift responsibility away from the paper, then telling the Manchester Union Leader: “It is not The Dartmouth Review but the Afro-American Society which is the primary cause of racial tension on campus.”

Soon after the “Jive” article was published, an associate director at Dartmouth’s alumni fund, Sam Smith attacked and bit a Review founder, Ben Hart, as he was distributing issues of the Review at Blunt Alumni Center. Smith was suspended by the College and received a minor fine. The undergraduate council and the faculty voted to condemn the Review for creating a racially divisive atmosphere. Dartmouth’s President McLaughlin wrote a letter in which he said that the Review performed “offensive practices” but that the issue could not be solved by “violence or intolerance.”

Mein Kampf and The Review

In’82, after drunken vandals destroyed a sukkah, a temporary construction erected on the Green to celebrate a Jewish holiday, the College Rabbi blamed the Review for serving as inspiration. The Review had pictured the sukkah in an article titled “Grin and Beirut” and compared it to an Israeli settlement “on the West Bank of College Hall.” Even the Manchester Union Leader, an ultraconservative paper usually very supportive of the Review, ran an editorial scolding the paper. One of the article’s coauthors, both of whom were Jewish, said he had regrets about writing it. The Review reluctantly ran an apology, insisting it is “committed to fighting not only vandalism but also the psychological bigotry that can precipitate it.” For a rare moment, the Review seemed especially sensitive to the consequences of its actions and words, something not in evidence in later acts, such as its staffers themselves destroying anti-apartheid shanties in’86 and the paper’s many offensive printed comments.

In’88, the newspaper published a front cover which depicted then-President James Freedman, who is Jewish, as Hitler. An article inside the issue said Freedman was looking for the “final solution” to the conservative problem at Dartmouth. The Review later apologized not to Freedman personally but to those who might have been offended. The Review continued attacking professors, warning that one had classes full of “sodomites and liberal scum who probably carry something communicable.”

In July’90, the Review said that the deaths of 1,400 Muslim pilgrims and 7,000 Australian penguins were “equally tragic.” Three months later, the Review offered “a heartfelt apology… to all the penguins of the world.”

That same year, the situation escalated when a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf was printed in the credo on the Review’s masthead: “I therefore believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” The Hitler quote in The Review’s masthead caused Dartmouth President James Freedman to strongly condemn the paper: “The Dartmouth Review has consistently attacked blacks because they are black, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews.”

The editor-in-chief, Kevin Pritchett, had all the issues collected and he and three other senior staffers sent out an open letter disassociating the paper from the quote, saying they were investigating whether the quote had been inserted by an insider on staff. Supporters of the Review in D.C. and New York repeatedly insisted that someone from outside the paper had inserted the Hitler quote and called for an investigation by the Anti-Defamation League to find the “saboteur.”

Review advisor Jeffrey Hart attacked Friedman’s language: “That statement has no truth in it whatsoever. The Review indeed has opposed racial quotas. But not attacked skin color. It has a black editor-in-chief. It has had three women editors, and two from India. It has not attacked homosexuals as such, but opposed Dartmouth’s funding of gay groups.” President Freedman said the quote was “consistent with the level of hatred that has filled the Review. It’s hard to believe it was an accident.”

Unlike previous Review controversies, the center did not hold. “I cannot allow the Review to ruin my life any further,” C. Tyler White declared soon after he resigned as President of the Review, “The official Review response, which I co-signed and helped distribute, avoids the main thrust of the issue. It does not emphasize our sorrow in this dreadful act of malice, nor does it claim responsibility for letting it reach newsprint…. The editor-in-chief has failed in his job, and now we must wear the albatross of anti-Semitism because he won’t take responsibility for the issue’s contents.” Review contributors David Budd and Pang-Chun Chen also resigned saying, “We are conservatives, but we are not Nazis…” Budd noted that the paper’s apology implied “let’s put the blame on someone else.”

While alumni on the Review’s board had said there was evidence that an outsider w
as at fault, the Anti-Defamation League’s investigation found that the Hitler quote matched one from a frequently used quote book in the Review’s office and concluded that someone on the Review staff had definitely inserted the quote. The Review is staunchly pro-Israel, but the ADL commission concluded that the insertion of the quotation was “obviously an anti-Semitic act.” The head of the ADL commission said: “Prior acts of the Review and the past conduct of its members have contributed, the commission believes, to the creation of an environment which condoned and even encouraged a member of the Review to include the offensive Hitler quote.”

Defenders of the Review still insist a senior editor would not have inserted the Hitler quote, despite the Review’s a history of printing inflammatory quotes such as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and “genocide means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Slipping Into Obscurity

After such scathing attention from the Hitler quote, the Review finally lost steam. The Review would still print offensive images, obsessively printing and re-printing images of the Dartmouth Indian “mascot.” But in the’90s, the Review produced few antics the national press felt worthy of attention.

Yet The Review still continues its silly sexist and racially insensitive campaigns: during first-year orientation in 2001, the Review passed out Indian stickers and music sheets with the lyrics to “Men of Dartmouth,” the gender-specific version of the Alma Mater that the College changed in the’80s, when it finally realized that women also attended Dartmouth.

In 2001, one student anonymously complained that when a bunch of brothers on the rooftop porch of Psi Upsilon fraternity saw her walking by, they added a sexist element to an old “Indian” cheer by shouting, “Wah-hoo-wah, scalp those bitches.”

Months later, the Review published a short piece revealing who she was. When asked why, Review editor Andrew Grossman (who, I should disclose, was once my roommate) would only say at the time, “It’s news.” The event had long passed and revealing her name at that point seemed to serve no purpose, other than leaving the previously anonymous woman vulnerable to harassment.

By then, the Psi U incident had long been eclipsed by the Zeta Psi incident, in which the fraternity printed a newsletter bragging about the brothers’ various (real and imagined) sexual exploits with named Dartmouth women. When an activist had been angry and kicked in a small panel on the door of Zete (an action she apologized for), the Review ran a piece on her entitled “scalp her,” echoing the Psi U shout from the rooftops.

Review defenders will claim the publication is not racist; however, they certainly treat claims to accommodate difference in a grossly offensive manner, suggesting outright hostility to reasonable arguments from minority groups and others whom they clearly do not like.

An August 2002 entry on the Review’s weblog, authored by the previous year’s editor-in-chief Andrew Grossman ’02, echoed a long tradition of mindless racist rhetoric. Without making a single argument, he dismissed as ridiculous recent efforts by the Student Assembly to bring to Hanover hairstylists who can cut African American students’ hair:

Grossman wrote: “Future programs in a similar vein include bringing to campus a small troupe of number-runners and, in the fall, several New York based crack dealers. The Student Assembly is now in the process of creating a committee of New Black Panthers to replace the ‘Committee on Student Life.’ Expect an authentic ‘Ghetto Party’ no later then by the end of the fall term.”

Don’t expect the Review to always be this edgy; more often than not it simply repeats its same old diatribes and arguments, which sometimes express themselves in virulent ways. The Review may have been a powerful force on this campus during the reactionary Reagan years, but today their uninformed and dull rhetoric is both unappealing to most Dartmouth students and largely irrelevant. Know what the Review stands for, and realize that their time has passed.

IM WALIGORE ‘01

There’s nothing like misplaced confidence to give you the incentive to pursue an unlikely objective. While I was interning for The New Republic, I came to realize that I enjoyed opinion journalism and I wanted to fight the battles of campus politics. That summer, Dan Pollock ’01, Michelle Chui ’01 and I hatched our plans while drinking in an Adams-Morgan dive called “The Common Share.” I suggested we name the paper The Dartmouth Free Press.

Once back in Hanover our task seemed daunting. We almost quit, but at the last moment we were convinced that student support would be forthcoming if we pressed on. So we did.

We were a small group of people working late nights. I’d stay up for two days without sleep to put the issue to rest, completely exhausted. We often had difficulty finding writers and always struggled to find cover art. The paper was eight black and white thin pulpy pages.

We published on late-breaking fraternity incidents, campus protests, and concluded with an issue that considered the virtues and complications of Greek de-recognition. We wanted to shift the campus discourse leftward, and did: The debate on our pages was not Gore v. Bush, but Gore v. Nader. People began to speak of three campus papers, with The Review on the right, The Free Press on the left, and The Dartmouth in the mushy mediocre middle.

Had I realized the difficulties and long nights, I’m not sure I would have done it. But after the year had ended, I knew it had been worth it. As the years since have proven, I thought the paper would continue to grow and thrive. The DFP has grown in staff, page count, and quality. Many people used to complain that Dartmouth had no institutionalized voice on the left. I was, and am, immensely proud to have helped build a forum for such voices.

JEFF VARDARO ‘02

It was easy to tell things had changed by the time The Dartmouth Free Press started its second year. For instance, I would list my most important contributions to the DFP’s first volume as lobbying strongly for making the cover white instead of pink (seriously), lending our photographers my digital camera from time to time, and convincing a friend to draw a cartoon of an elephant sitting on the White House.

By then we had a full-sized staff, complete with ideological differences (this was new for us, as we had long since alienated the faction that lost the white-or-pink argument). There were differences over free trade, differences over war in Afghanistan, differences over how best to respond to The Review’s jabs. The issues we faced in our second year were not necessarily more important than the issues we faced in founding The DFP, but they were certainly different. By the time we started up for the fall, thanks to the summer staff’s issue introducing us to the Class of 2005, the questions we were dealing with were everyday questions. The ‘05s saw us as an established feature of the Dartmouth political landscape. And to our surprise, they were right. We had enough funding and staff to keep us publishing, so all we had to do was learn how to function when our most important job wasn’t staying afloat—it was how to make our work not just permanent, but relevant. It was difficult, but it became easier the more room we gave the ‘05s to express their own visions for The DFP and Dartmouth’s progressive community.

The fact that The DFP has published its 50th issue may be a testament to the work we did in the beginning, but the fact that you’re reading it is a testament to the pool of talent and ideas The DFP has found in each new Dartmouth class. So for those of you who don’t remember what The Free Press was back then, thanks for making it what it is today.

KUMAR GARG ‘03

The beginning of the third year of The DFP had all the makings of a disaster. The elections the year before had caused some internal feuding, and some top editors had left. Others editors felt burnt out, and most of the top staff were ‘03 seniors that were looking ahead to a bleak job market and a world of thesis pain. Worst of all, the editor-in-chief, yours truly, no longer wanted the job.

At the first unofficial meeting I held in Homeplate, I eagerly looked for a successor. The meeting however was a disaster, and no one seemed willing to even put in their share of time. As a COSO member, I see student groups die all the time and I could see the impending death of The Free Press before me.

Using one of its nine lives though, The Free Press survived this moment of senior staff weakness. New, unsolicited and hard-working ‘05 talent began to arrive at early meetings. They took the work with eagerness and I was buoyed by their can-do attitude.

And this staff was decidedly different than early pioneers who started the paper: much more focused on the national liberal-conservative divide than the left-right campus one. Rather than rage over the Greek system, anger and frustration with President’s Bush’s march to war found a voice in the pages of the paper. Instead of worrying about The Review, they focused instead on The Dartmouth and its inability to accurately report student protests.

By the time I stepped down in the spring of my senior year, The Free Press was a different place. Far from being in danger of dissolution, The Free Press was flush with a hard-working and young staff that vigorously vied for top positions in the senior staff elections. Accolades rolled in: The Nation rated us one of the top ten alternative campus publications in the country, and COSO awarded us Best Publication of the Year prize.

Having known how close to demise The Free Press was only fills me with pride about what The Free Press is today. As a former editor in chief, I wish all future holders of the position luck and tell them that they only have to look to my tenure as evidence that sticking with it pays off.

ou have to hand it to the G.O.P. after their victory in the midterm

elections. They were successful at lying, exploiting 9-11, and obscuring their differences from the Democrats. While those tactics were perhaps to be expected, the Democrats were at fault for failing to fight back. They clearly underestimated the Republicans’ ability to use demagoguery and spin to reach victory. If they hope to win in 2004 and after, the Democrats needs to look at what went wrong.

Backhanded Politics Down South

Republican Saxby Chambliss won a Senate seat in Georgia because of last minute ads attacking the patriotism of Senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran. Cleland had voted against Bush’s version of a bill to create a Homeland Security Department, originally a Democratic idea.

The secrecy-obsessed Bush administration had resisted the creation of a Homeland Security Department because it did not want congressional oversight, and only changed its position when FBI whistle-blower Colleen Rowley revealed that the administration had overlooked crucial warning signs provided by its own intelligence. To distract from their failure, members of the Bush administration proposed a GOP bill creating a Homeland Security Department, except the department’s employees would lack labor rights, including any whistle- blower protections.

Thus, Bush was able to blame Democrats for holding up the bill when it was the Republicans who attempted the filibuster. Shameful. But surely one cannot attribute Cleland’s loss to merely this one ridiculous attack. Chambliss was probably also helped by rural voters upset with Democratic Governor Roy Barnes’ decision to redesign the large confederate emblem on Georgia’s state flag. So, local factors also played a role in a state where the GOP is chaired by the crazy former-Christian-Coalition-Director Ralph Reed. Lyndon Johnson was prescient in stating that by signing the Civil Rights Bill of ’64 he was giving the South to the Republicans, who still win today in part through racialized appeals.

In MN & MO: The Politics of Death

The races in Minnesota and Missouri were affected by the politics of death. In Missouri, Jean Carnahan was ill-prepared to beat back a challenge from Jim Talent; she was only a Senator because her husband had died a few weeks before the election in 2000. Even though Carnahan had voted with Bush on the war on Iraq and the tax cuts, the President traveled to Missouri to stump on behalf of the Republican.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, who had gone up in the polls and was on his way to victory after voting against the war in Iraq, died tragically in a plane accident. Of the speeches at his memorial, 80% were low key and somber, but two partisan speeches allowed the Republicans to spin the story to the media that the rally had been a purely partisan affair instead of a mourner’s reaction attempting to channel grief into something productive.

More Death (and Taxes)

Speaking of exploiting death for political purpose: what do you call Bush wrapping himself in the mantle of 9-11 and scheduling a vote on Iraq in the month before the midterm elections? Or how about Bush trying to use his wartime popularity to make the estate tax permanent?

Which brings us to the tax cuts. I will never understand why Jim Jeffords waited until after the vote on Bush’s 2001 tax cut to defect from the Republicans. The Democrats will not be able to afford to fund prescription drugs, a universal health care program, and balance the budget if they allow Bush’s fiscally irresponsible tax cut to be made permanent. I wish that calling for the repeal of the tax cut would have helped Shaheen in New Hampshire or Carnahan in Missouri, but they would probably have lost by larger margins had they done that.

We cannot forget that Bush has been utterly dishonest about the tax cut, claiming long-term tax breaks for the rich would help us recover from a current recession. The Democrats were successful in amending Bush’s tax cut to provide immediate rebates to tax payers, but somehow Bush managed to claim credit for that idea as well!

According to Bush’s fictional story, he promised to balance the budget in 2001 except in cases of war, recession, or national emergency. Now, he says he has hit this trifecta. The problem is, as The New Republic has repeatedly noted, there is no evidence he ever said this. No reporter remembers him saying it, and the White House will not produce any evidence that he said it. Bush’s Chief of Staff repeated this ‘trifecta’ lie last week.

If Democrats were not going to stand on principle and call for the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, they could at least have united behind a program that would have redirected the tax cuts away from the rich to the middle classes. That’s not the fiscally responsible thing to do, but if the Republicans are going to demagogue, perhaps the Democrats don’t have much choice.

Minority Leader Dick Gephardt did propose a short-term economic stimulus in the form of a payroll tax rebate, but this was lost in the news between D.C. area sniper attacks and the debate on Iraq.

Banking on the Corporate Scandal:

A Bad Idea

Perhaps the most fatal mistake Democrats made was assuming that the bad economy and corporate corruption would carry them through the elections. The facts seemed to warrant it but Democrats underestimated the ability of Republicans to claim that they, too, were corporate busters.

With Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe having benefited from the stock inflation of Global Crossing and senators like Joe Lieberman having received a great deal of money from Enron, they did not make very credible spokespeople. They were also determined to get all foreign policy issues off the table, not realizing that that was going to be the main issue motivating independent voters.

Minor Victories

So where did the Democrats succeed? They picked up Governors’ seats, but not as many as had been expected. In Arkansas, Democrat Mark Pryor won by running ads of himself praying with his family, a none-too-subtle contrast with incumbent Senator Tim Hutchinson, who divorced his wife to marry a younger staffer.

I doubt, however, that the Democrats can count on family values to carry the next election. Tim Johnson also held his seat in South Dakota by 524 votes. This campaign had been marred by extremely dirty politics, with Republican John Thune running ads juxtaposing Johnson with Saddam Hussein. Additionally, Thune’s campaign tried to turn one lone Democrat’s criminal misdeeds into ‘massive voter fraud’ which even the Republican Attorney General said were unwarranted.

It turned out the television station that promoted these charges interviewed someone named E. Johnson on why they had requested an absentee ballot. In a follow-up interview, they contacted an entirely different person who happened to share the same surname. Not surprisingly, the second E. Johnson then denied having requested the ballot leading to a scathing story on Democrats creating voter fraud. As it turns out, the reporter lived with a GOP campaign chair.

An Uncertain Future

Aside from these two notable victories in South Dakota and Arkansas, the Democrats lost in basically every race that was considered a toss-up. The party can take comfort in the fact that the nation remains pretty much evenly divided, a 51-48 country. What they cannot be confident about is winning those crucial extra votes needed to actually regain power.

In this election, Democrats learned that the risks of calculated silence are greater than the risks of doing nothing.

n Friday, a simple blitz arrived from a conservative friend saying only: “Oh my God! Paul Wellstone is dead!” I did not understand, as it was unthinkable that these words were meant literally. It only hit me when I turned on CNN, and saw that Wellstone had died in a plane crash earlier that day, along with his wife Shiela, his daughter, three staff members and two pilots.

I was shocked and cried. Learning the reality and cause of Wellstone’s death did not explain to me any better why this tragedy had happened. When my roommate blithely noted that the control of the Senate was in jeopardy, I felt mad at him for not having a more personal reaction and talking crass politics. But I recognized that part of my own shock and anger was due to the closeness of this terrible tragedy to the election. My sorrow was certainly compounded by the unfortunate timing. But no other politician’s death would have led me to tears.

Wellstone is one of the few politicians whom I personally liked and admired for his principled stands. When Wellstone was visiting Dartmouth in ’98 to explore a run for the presidency, I was impressed by how he was a candid, honest, down-to-earth guy. When I asked him how to introduce him for his speech, he was unconcerned with the pretensions and honorific acclaims most Senators expect. He was clearly engaged in thinking about issues. When questioned about why he was willing to support some church-based approaches to welfare, he said he believed they could work and stopping poverty was an important priority for him. Wellstone had his flaws from my point of view, and I don’t think you could say he never compromised. Unlike fellow dissenter Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, Wellstone did not vote against the USA Patriot Act, which restricted civil liberties in the wake of 9-11. I don’t know whether he thought that vote was truly the best course for the country, but I did not sense a cynicism and fakeness about Wellstone. No one is entirely consistent and removed from political calculations, but Wellstone is one of the few candidates I could point out who came near to the ideal of being clearly and passionately committed to one’s beliefs and letting the voters decide.

Wellstone’s underdog entry into the Senate is well known. A community organizer and political science professor at Carleton before coming to the Senate, Wellstone won his seat in ’90 running as an unabashed liberal, and earning votes from all over the political spectrum because of his courage and integrity. In ’96, facing another tough election, he nonetheless stuck to his ideals and voted against the welfare reform bill of ’96; although many other Senators believed that the bill was wrong, not one other Senator up for reelection voted against it. In a time when many Democrats were adopting Clintonian centrism, Wellstone liked to say he belonged to the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.

Senators from both sides of the aisle genuinely admired Wellstone as a person and how he conducted himself. Republican Senator Pete Domenici walked away in tears from an interview about Wellstone’s death. Even Jesse Helms stated that, “Though feisty and determined to fight for what he [Wellstone] believed, he was respectful and could get along personally with people with whom he disagreed vehemently.”

I do not doubt the sincere grief of Senators of all political persuasions: theirs was a death in the family. Though death brings people together, politics always remain. Minutes after learning about Wellstone’s death, I turned to MSNBC to see Pat Buchanan and Bill Press speculating about the political implications for the control of the Senate. In their mourning and shock, Democrats knew the stakes were high. Wellstone’s family has asked former Vice President Walter Mondale to run in Wellstone’s place.

For citizens who did not know Wellstone, what is the nature of our grief? For some, it is the recognition of the simple tragedy of death. For some Democrats, there is also grief and anger over what might happen if the Republicans win back the Senate. This is grief over the possible loss of Wellstone’s seat, not simply over Wellstone. For conservatives and many others, I imagine there is also sadness over the passing of a rare principled man who survived in politics. I shared these feelings, but my grief is a deeper combination of the personal and political.

Rightly or wrongly, I cannot see how I would feel this way over the death of a principled conservative Senator, nor over another liberal Senator like Ted Kennedy. Many other politicians accomplish a great deal, and I would be sad over their passing. However, I felt that Wellstone’s commitment to politics sprung from a personal dedication to helping working families, the disabled, and those who did not have a voice. How deeply can we feel for the death of someone we knew only through the arena of politics? Perhaps Wellstone’s death affects many of us so personally because our dedication to politics is also very personal. I admired Wellstone for his commitment to progressive politics, for how he conducted himself personally, and for how he stood fast in his principles while managing to be elected twice to the Senate. It was this combination that made Paul Wellstone unique.

o say that The Dartmouth Review is notorious is an understatement: it is impossible to attend Dartmouth and not hear about it. In its illustrious history of 22 years, the conservative paper has repeatedly attacked “sodomites,” printed the names of officers of the Gay Straight Alliance outing several students, and printed a transcript of a covertly recorded GSA meeting, illustrating the article with a man peering over a toilet stall. The Review’s articles have been laced with racial references such as the ’83 article “Bill Cole’s Song and Dance” which described a black professor, whom the Review claimed was incompetent, as looking like a “used Brillo pad.” In a midnight raid, Review staffers used sledgehammers to knock down shanties erected on the Green in protest of the College’s investments in apartheid South Africa. In ’90, a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in the Review’s credo.

The Review has survived these numerous controversies through the strong support of alumni and national conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, William F. Buckley and Dinesh D’Souza. When Review founder Greg Fossedal accepted a post in the Reagan administration, he received a letter with this praise from the President: “I must say, it’s an impressive paper. You should be proud to have started this important movement; let’s hope that your fine efforts will be imitated elsewhere.”

You will hear many explanations and versions of events from people about what happened at the Review, and many of the excuses offered by past and present Review staffers and defenders only serve to obscure the issues further. Unfortunately, most first-year students are misinformed or uninformed about the role the Review has played on this campus in the past twenty years. Understanding this history will be key in helping to instigate meaningful change.

Early Beginnings

The Dartmouth Review was founded in ’80 to harken back to a past that its founders saw as threatened by a Dartmouth administration working to change the College. The spark for the paper’s creation came when Greg Fossedal, then editor of The Dartmouth, wrote an editorial in support of John Steele, a tradition-minded candidate for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. Feeling that the Dartmouth administration was composed of a Stalinist politboro and wanting to start an anti-Establishment conservative paper, Fossedal left The Dartmouth and took several members of the staff with him.

The Dartmouth Review demanded a return of the Indian symbol, an end to year round schooling (now known as the D-Plan), advocated a curriculum based on western civilization, opposed affirmative action, claimed that the “administration has given in to every minority demand,” complained that professors were punishing students with pro-American and pro-Christian beliefs, and proclaimed the need to protect “traditional values.” The Review eventually blossomed as it found funding from wealthy conservative alumni whose agenda it hoped to promote (one early fund raising letter said that the Review is “designed to publish Alumni opinions, which coincide with the opinions of many undergraduates.”)

The Dartmouth Review probably could not have survived without the national publicity it received by claiming Dartmouth was trying to silence its conservative voice. The first big controversy erupted when the College threatened to sue over the use of the name ‘Dartmouth’ in the paper. The Dartmouth administration and faculty were incensed by the Review’s frequent name-calling and inneundo such as calling one visiting pro-choice speaker “allegedly syphilitic.” The College blocked the incorporation of The Dartmouth Review Inc., but when Fossedal said he would change the name of the company to the Hanover Review, Inc., the College immediately phoned the New Hampshire secretary of state to drop its objections. But, as Greg Fossedel told me: “I never promised them the Hanover Review, Inc. wouldn’t publish [a paper ] called the Dartmouth Review!” And the relationship between the Review and the College only went downhill from there.

Homophobia and the Review

In ’81, The Dartmouth Review printed the names of the officers of the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) along with material that had been taken from the GSA’s confidential files. The grandfather of one of these closeted students found out his grandson was gay when he read his copy of the Review. Another of these outed students contemplated suicide. When I asked him about this, founding editor Greg Fossedal says: “I felt terrible about it.” When students held a protest over the printing of the names, however, Review staffers played croquet on the other side of the Green.

Editor Dinesh D’Souza said they had not known the GSA had an exemption from making its officers’ name public. The Review was attacking the secrecy of the funding of the GSA, which was supposed to be funding “intellectual activities,” D’Souza told me, while its members were writing about how great it was to get money for “gay parties, gay orgies or whatever.”

In ’84, the Review printed a splashy tabloid cover screaming “Exclusive Report on the G.S.A.” Printed inside was a portion of a transcript of a Gay Straight Alliance meeting, secretly taped by Review staffer Teresa Polenz, with an accompanying picture of a man peering over a bathroom stall. The state of New Hampshire opened an investigation into whether the Review reporter has violated wire tapping laws. A former attorney general of the United States came to defend the Review, but the state dropped the investigation after a New Hampshire Supreme Court handed down a ruling in an unrelated taping case. As a result, Dartmouth decided not to bring disciplinary charges against any students, but Dean Shanahan sent a letter encouraging members of the Dartmouth community calling on them to “censure” the Review for its “insensitivity.”

Whatever the ethics of its actions, the Review has often been able to claim victory through not losing lawquits. However, in ’85, Associate Chaplain Richard Hyde filed a libel and invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the Review, claiming that the publication’s articles over the past two years incorrectly said that Hyde defended the views of the North American Man Boy Love Association. One April ’84 article is a terrific example of the Review’s reporting: “Unequivocally the most out-landish comments on the topics discussed came from none other than the young Mr. Hyde… Still operating under the guise of associate chaplain of Dartmouth, he plainly states that his goal here is ‘to decriminalize homosexuality and premarital sex’… Some members of the faculty and administration say Hyde was married sometime last year in a civil ceremony. Others aren’t quite sure. Hyde, himself, says he still looks forward to the day when he can enjoy the happiness which marriage can offer. Figure it out for yourselves.” The Review eventually settled the case and ran an apology, but neither side would say if Hyde had received any money.

In the mid-1980s, the Review constantly referred to gays as “sodomites” and joked about how great it would be if we established an identification system so they would not be able to spread their diseases. If the Review’s cause was political, its language was virulently hateful. Review covers, from as recently as the mid-1990s, featured tiny fruits like an apple, a pear, a banana, each with faces, holding various signs as “HOMO POWER.”

While insisting the Review was not racist or anti-Semitic, former editor Dinesh D’Souza told me that “this antigay thing is a little bit tricky.” While there were times when the Review said things about gays he wish it hadn’t, D
’Souza says, “[i]t’s not clear the Review’s target was homosexuals per se.” Of course not.

Talkin’ Jive? Racism and the Review

According to Nutshell magazine, one Review editor wrote an article calling for the return of the Indian symbol and called modern day Indians “drunken, ignorant, and culturally lost.” The Review printed an interview with a former Ku Klux Klan leader, illustrated with a dummy of black person in a noose tied to a tree. The paper also claimed in an open letter on parents’ weekend that affirmative action at Dartmouth “explains your son’s stupid friends.”

The Review’s attacks on affirmative action and on those they felt did not belong at Dartmouth were often extremely crude. On March 15, ’82, the Review ran a piece called ‘Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro.’ bylined by former Review Chairman Keeney Jones. It was the third of a series of pieces, the first in which Keeney said he wished he could have a medical operation to change his skin color so he could more easily get into graduate school. In the second piece Keeney said he was taking speech lessons to learn black manners of speech. The third piece contained the following “satire,” in which Keeney seems to have perfected what he thinks is black dialect:

“Dese boys be sayin’ dat we be comin’ to Dartmut’ and not takin’ the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hes’ dey all be co’d in da gound, six feet unda, and whatcha be askin’ us to learn from dem? We culturally ‘lightened, too. We be takin’ hard courses in many subjects, like Afro-Am Studies, Women’s Studies and Policy Studies. And who be mouthin’ ‘bout us not bein’ good road? I be practicly knowin’ ‘Roots’ cova to cova, ‘til my mine be boogying to da words! And I be watchin’ the Jeffersons on TV ‘til I be blue in da face.”

After receiving a copy of the ‘Jive’ article, Congressman Jack Kemp resigned from the Review’s advisory board saying Keeney’s article was not in good taste. “Instead, it relied on racial stereotypes. I am sure that many of your readers were offended by it. I am even more concerned that others found in it some support for racist viewpoints,” Kemp said. “I do not want my name to appear in your paper. I am concerned that the association of my name with The Dartmouth Review is interpreted as an endorsement and I emphatically do not endorse the kind of antics displayed in your article.”

The Review took Kemp’s resignation in stride, saying they were looking to add Jerry Falwell to their board. Editor Dinesh D’Souza sought to shift responsibility away from the paper, then telling the Manchester Union Leader: “It is not The Dartmouth Review but the Afro-American Society which is the primary cause of racial tension on campus.”

Soon after the “Jive” article was published, an associate director at Dartmouth’s alumni fund, Sam Smith attacked and bit a Review founder, Ben Hart, as he was distributing issues of the Review at Blunt Alumni Center. Smith was suspended by the College and received a minor fine. The undergraduate council and the faculty voted to condemn the Review for creating a racially divisive atmosphere. Dartmouth’s President McLaughlin wrote a letter in which he said that the Review performed “offensive practices” but that the issue could not be solved by “violence or intolerance.”

Mein Kampf and The Review

In ’82, after druken vandals destroyed a a sukkah, a temporary construction erected on the Green to celebrate a Jewish holiday, the College Rabbi blamed the Review for serving as inspiration. The Review had pictured the sukkah in an article titled “Grin and Beirut” and compared it to an Israeli settlement “on the West Bank of College Hall.” Even the Manchester Union Leader, an ultraconservative paper usually very supportive of the Review, ran an editorial scolding the paper. One of the article’s coauthors, both of whom were Jewish, said he had regrets about writing it. The Review reluctantly ran an apology, insisting it is “committed to fighting not only vandalism but also the psychological bigotry that can precipitate it.” For a rare moment, the Review seemed especially sensative to the consequences of its actions and words, something not in evidence in later acts, such as its staffers actually destroying the anti-apartheid shanties in ’86 and the paper’s many offensive printed comments.

In ’88, the newspaper published a front cover which depicted President James Freedman, who is Jewish, as Hitler, and also ran an article saying Freedman was looking for the “final solution” to the conservative problem at Dartmouth. The Review later apologized not to Freedman personally but to those who might have been offended. The Review continued attacking professors, warning that one had classes full of “sodomites and liberal scum who probably carry something communicable.”

In July ’90, the Review said that the deaths of 1400 Muslim pilgrims and 7000 Australian penguins were “equally tragic.” Three months later, the Review offered “a heartfelt apology… to all the penguins of the world.”

In ’90, the shit really hit the fan when, printed in the credo on the Review’s masthead, was a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “I therefore believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” The Hitler quote in the Review’s masthead caused Dartmouth President James Freedman to strongly condemn the paper: “The Dartmouth Review has consistently attacked blacks because they are black, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews.”

The editor-in-chief, Kevin Pritchett, had all the issues collected and he and three other senior staffers sent out an open letter disassociating the paper from the quote, saying they were investigating whether the quote had been inserted by an insider on staff. Supporters of the Review in D.C. and New York repeatedly insisted that someone from outside the paper had inserted the Hitler quote and called for an investigation by the Anti-Defamation League to find the ‘sabateur.’

Review advisor Jeffrey Hart atttacked Friedman’s language: “That statement has no truth in it whatsoever. The Review indeed has opposed racial quotas. But not attacked skin color. It has a black editor-in-chief. It has had three women editors, and two from India. It has not attacked homosexuals as such, but opposed Dartmouth’s funding of gay groups.” President Freedman said the quote was “consistent with the level of hatred that has filled the Review. It’s hard to believe it was an accident.”

Unlike previous Review controversies, the center did not hold. “I cannot allow the Review to ruin my life any further,” C. Tyler White declared soon after he resigned as President of the Review, “The official Review response, which I co-signed and helped distribute, avoids the main thrust of the issue. It does not emphasize our sorrow in this dreadful act of malice, nor does it claim responsibility for letting it reach newsprint…. The editor-in-chief has failed in his job, and now we must wear the albatross of anti-Semitism because he won’t take responsibility for the issue’s contents.” Review contributors David Budd and Pang-Chun Chen also resigned saying, “We are conservatives, but we are not Nazis…” Budd noted that the paper’s apology implied “let’s put the blame on someone else.”

While alumni on the Review’s board had said there was evidence that an outsider was at fa
ult, the Anti-Defamation League’s investigation found that the Hitler quote matched one from a frequently used quote book in the Review’s office and concluded that someone on the Review staff had definitely inserted the quote. The Review is staunchly pro-Israel, but the ADL commission concluded that the insertion of the quotation was “obviously an anti-Semitic act.” The head of the ADL commission said: “Prior acts of the Review and the past conduct of its members have contributed, the commission believes, to the creation of an environment which condoned and even encouraged a member of the Review to include the offensive Hitler quote.”

Defenders of the Review still insist a senior editor would not have inserted the Hitler quote, but the Review has a history of printing inflammatory quotes such as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and “genocide means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Slipping Into Obscurity

After such scathing attention from the Hitler quote, the Review finally lost steam. The Review would still print offensive images, obsessively printing and re-printing images of the Dartmouth Indian “mascot”. But in the ’90s, the Review produced few antics the national press felt worthy of attention.

Yet the Review still continues its silly sexist and racially insensitive campaigns: last year during first-year orientation, the Review passed out Indian stickers and music sheets with the lyrics to “Men of Dartmouth,” the gender-specific version of the Alma Mater that the College changed in the ’80s, when it finally realized that women also attended Dartmouth.

The Review still shows a vehement hatred for campus protesters. In 2001, one student anonymously complained that when a bunch of brothers on the rooftop porch of Psi Upsilon fraternity saw her walking by, they added a sexist element to an old “Indian” cheer by shouting, “Wah-hoo-wah, scalp those bitches.”

Months later, the Review published a short piece revealing who she was. When asked why, Review editor Andrew Grossman (who, I should disclose, was once my roommate) would only say at the time, “It’s news.” The event had long passed and revealing her name at that point seemed to serve no purpose, other than leaving the previously anonymous woman vulnerable to harassment.

By then, the Psi U incident had long been eclipsed by the Zeta Psi incident, in which the fraternity printed a newsletter bragging about the brothers’ various (real and imagined) sexual exploits with named Dartmouth women. When an activist had been angry and kicked in a small panel on the door of Zete (an action she apologized for), the Review ran a piece on her entitled “scalp her,” echoing the Psi U shout from the rooftops.

Review defenders will claim the publication is not racist; however, they certainly treat claims to accommodate difference in a grossly offensive manner, suggesting outright hostility to reasonable arguments from minority groups and others they clearly do not like.

Last month, an entry of the Review’s webblog, authored by last year’s editor-in-chief Andrew Grossman ’02, echoed a long tradition of mindless racist rhetoric at the Review. Without making a single argument, he dismissed as ridiculous recent efforts by the Student Assembly to bring to Hanover hairstylists who can cut African American students’ hair:

Grossman wrote: “Future programs in a similar vein include bringing to campus a small troupe of number-runners and, in the fall, several New York based crack dealers. The Student Assembly is now in the process of creating a committee of New Black Panthers to replace the ‘Committee on Student Life.’ Expect an authentic ‘Ghetto Party’ no later then by the end of the fall term.”

Don’t expect the Review to always be this edgy; more often than not it simply repeats its same old diatribes and arguments, which sometimes express themselves in virulent ways. The Review may have been a powerful force on this campus during the reactionary Reagan years, but today their uninformed and dull rhetoric is both unappealing to most Dartmouth students and largely irrelevant. Know what the Review stands for, and realize that their time has passed.w

hat does it mean to have a liberal arts education? Is it important that students earning a Dartmouth diploma learn about issues surrounding diversity? Although a smaller part of the newly released Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity Report, the recommendation to incorporate diversity into the curriculum of Dartmouth College is crucial. I support this goal because a liberal arts education fundamentally requires that students have interactions in the classroom that force them to confront and think critically about diversity in the modern world.

Thomas Jefferson said that a democracy requires an educated citizenry. As citizens of a multicultural democracy, Americans must be able to discuss and debate issues in a way that incorporates and gives due consideration to all perspectives. True democratic governance requires, at a minimum, that decision-making processes be grounded in rational public discussion.

A liberal arts education is intended to teach students critical thinking skills that they can apply to any subject. As issues of diversity at home and abroad increasingly confront us, institutions of higher education can and should play an important part in teaching future leaders how to reason and critically reflect on issues of diversity. The CIDE Report makes an important point that diversity on campus is not some passive concept whereby if a “diverse” student body is admitted to the College, we can be confident that interactions and learning about diversity will take place. For a student body to be diverse is not enough: students also need to interact with each other and learn from these interactions. For a diversity initiative at a college to be truly successful, and stimulate campus dialogue, it must begin in the classroom.

The Report makes several recommendations, that although small, are a step in the right direction. These are: investigating reforms of the distributive system, giving more resources to interdisciplinary academic programs (e.g. Women’s Studies, Native American Studies, African and African American Studies, etc.), and utilizing the proposed Center for Teaching and Learning to focus on supporting and providing incentives for faculty to incorporate diversity into the classroom.

The reason Dartmouth has distributive requirements is to ensure that a student does not only study one narrow area, but branches out, gains a wide base of knowledge, and learns how to think critically about many issues. What areas of study are deemed important enough by the College that every student must learn about them before receiving a diploma? One of the most pressing issues today is how to deal with diversity within the United States- as well as globally.

The future leaders of our society will come from institutions like Dartmouth and they should have learned about diverse cultures and perspectives during their course of study. In crass economic terms, a more diverse Dartmouth increases the employment opportunities of its graduates. In a globalizing economy, businesses value employees can interact with people of diverse backgrounds.

Typical arguments against a new distributive requirement often seem to go against the basic goals of a liberal education. Distributive requirements exist to encourage students to take classes they might not otherwise take. A new distributive requirement would serve two purposes: encourage (or require) students to take advantage of pre-existing courses that focus on issues of diversity and also spur the creation of new courses.

Part of a university’s functions should be to incorporate critical thinking about diversity into every student’s education. Knowledge about other cultures and issues of identity should be a part of the education of a citizen in a multicultural democracy.

Implementation, on the other hand, is a tricky problem, and one not addressed in excessive detail by the Report. Past proposals for reforming distributive requirements have involved the creation of an Identity, Race and Ethnicity requirement, possibly replacing the Non-Western requirement. Diversity can be incorporated into the curriculum; it is a question of will and resources. The Report itself argues that studies and surveys show that students and faculty want to enrich their intellectual lives; the burden is on the College to provide the institutional support for diversity.

The Report also encourages the funding of interdisciplinary programs, which will address issues of diversity directly. This, however, is not a substitute for incorporating these issues into traditional classes and departments. The two should go hand in hand.

Professors wanting to work on issues of diversity find themselves stymied by a lack of funding and a lack of time. A junior minority faculty member can feel pressured to concentrate on publishing in order to be granted tenure, while at the same time trying to serve as a resource and role model.

The Report recognizes that diversity is not something that can only be taught outside of the classroom – it is not a separate issue from learning English or History. Diversity is instead, a critical and fundamental element of any classroom experience. We must learn about diversity in the classroom if we ever hope to truly find it elsewhere.w

ast fall, we began publishing The Dartmouth Free Press in order to initiate and support reform and activism at Dartmouth. Naturally, we were excited and pleased when we witnessed the “Speak-Out” rally two weeks ago outside Parkhurst Hall. Since the rally, there has been a great deal of speculation about the future of the movement to implement the protestors’ demands, and we have watched attentively. It would be easy, at this point, for this loosely constructed band of juniors and seniors to pack in the cardboard and markers and call it a career. This would be a tremendous mistake. The issues raised at the rally are important, they are pressing, and they demand progressive solutions.

In the weeks since the rally, we have heard and read a great deal about its weaknesses and failures, and almost as much about its successes and its significance to the community. These are important concerns. After all, Dartmouth has not seen substantial activism for some time, and if these efforts create a sustained movement, analysis of the activists’ methods will make that movement more effective in the long run. But if we focus only on its methods without addressing the central issues, its efforts will have been meaningless.

With that in mind, the editors of The Free Press have begun to solicit articles from the organizers of the rally. We hope that by publishing fully developed arguments, we will convey to the community that the demands of the protestors arose not from misdirected frustration, but from serious consideration of social problems at Dartmouth. The first two of these articles, one by Gary Weissman providing insight into the motivation of the organizers, and one by Charles White detailing the need for socially responsible investment of the College’s endowment, appear in this issue. We hope this is only the beginning of our collaboration with the students behind the Speak-Out.

Please do not confuse our excitement over and support for the rally with blind acceptance of the protestors’ positions and methods. The editors of The Free Press have discussed and debated the merits of each of the demands individually, as we hope other students will, and we have not come to many definite conclusions. It is important for students to feel pressure only to consider the activists’ positions, not to agree with them. The organizers and supporters of the protest and future protests must become accustomed to resistance not only from the administration, but also from their fellow students. Many of these individuals disagree not out of malice or apathy, but out of sincere convictions of their own. If the movement is to survive this resistance, it must do so through superior effort, superior numbers, and superior arguments, not through the suppression of free speech. The April 6 protestors made too much use of this language of suppression and too little of the language of tolerance and constructive dialogue. The counter-protesters and their allies are hardly the downtrodden victims they make themselves out to be, but they have rights that progressive activists cannot ignore. Recognizing this fact, we have therefore also included several articles addressing the issue of free speech.

We must also question the determination and commitment of the activists, not to discourage them from continuing their campaign, but to challenge them to maintain their efforts over the long term. Problems such as those raised two weeks ago are solved through a complex, difficult process. Gathering outside Parkhurst and bringing one-line demands to the Trustees will not solve anything; students concerned over these issues must organize, gather support, set goals, and create an environment of consistent activity both inside committee rooms and out on the sidewalks. This will take energy, perseverance, and sacrifice to accomplish. Protests must take place regardless of whether the Trustees happen to be visiting or the alumni are around.

This process must begin with those involved in the April 6 rally, but it must not end with them. Regardless of their level of organization, they must reach out, individually and as a group, to the entire community, especially underclassmen and the faculty. The classes of 2003 and 2004 were almost entirely excluded from the April 6 event, not because of apathy or lack of support, but because they were not as actively approached. Similarly, many members of Dartmouth’s faculty have a wealth of experience with activism in general and the issues at hand in particular, but they have not been offered any role thus far.

That having been said, The Dartmouth Free Press and its staff would like to publicly applaud the organizers of the April 6 rally, and we look forward to working with Dartmouth’s agents of change in the coming weeks. We believe that progressive activism is a necessity in our community, and we will continue to support it whenever we have the opportunity.

I am not defending political correctness as we commonly see it. I have never met anyone who openly advocates that we should all be "politically correct." Rather, "political correctness" is a derogatory term used to cast doubt upon the idea that we should be sensitive about offending cultural minorities and other oppressed groups in our society.

How sensitive the larger community should be to minority concerns is and should be a matter of debate. But it is just that, a debate: a dialogue and not an ideology. We should be sensitive, not through enforcement of rigid rules, but through a spirit that allows us to approach issues in an even-handed and attentive manner.

"Political correctness" is not, nor need it be, about speech codes or enforceable rules. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to outline a set of clear rules that would lay out what speech is acceptable and what is not.

Precisely because it is not always known ahead of time what would offend a person or group (nor could it be known), definitive rules will either be too narrow or too broad. They would either attack only the most egregious racial slurs or they would consist of loose and vague definitions that would likely chill free speech.

Crying "free speech" is often the last refuge of scoundrels, and it can be no other way. Free speech exists to protect both the saints and the scoundrels. You may disagree with what people say, but establishing rules that restrict speech is very problematic. At the same time, however, as community members, we each have a responsibility to recognize when someone is acting in a manner that alienates other community members.

When racist and sexist comments are shouted from fraternity rooftops and porches at innocent people, they should be condemned. Just because certain speech is allowed does not mean it is acceptable. One may have a right to say something, in the sense that no government or college authority should be able to silence that speech, but this right does not mean that all speech is something we should applaud.

What conservatives like to label "political correctness" is, in reality, simply an attempt to foster respect between human beings from diverse backgrounds, including race, ethnicity and nationality.

At its base, this effort to create and encourage cultural sensitivity is very admirable. While it is true that these attempts are sometimes misguided, the motivation behind them is worthy of our praise, not our censure.

Free speech, something that liberals and conservatives alike claim to defend, is an unrelated issue in this context. Instead, cultural sensitivity makes communication between different social and racial groups easier, thus encouraging free speech and meaningful discourse.

A specific and controversial example of a lack of cultural sensitivity at Dartmouth is that of theme parties. Do fraternities and other social organizations have an absolute right to hold any type of party, no matter how offensive? Should a fraternity be allowed to hold a slavery party or a party in which everyone dresses in Ku Klux Klan garb?

Staunch civil libertarians would respond, yes, groups should be able to make any statement they want. If the theme was based on trivializing rape (such as a ‘lie back and enjoy it’ party), I suppose one could and might have to argue that free speech would protect these groups absolutely. But I suspect that most of us would blink before accepting that conclusion so easily.

In any case, one should certainly not see as utterly ridiculous those people who would say that the College should not associate itself with such organizations by continuing to recognize them. At the very least, I would hope that Dartmouth community members could agree that, whether or not these parties should be allowed to happen, they should not happen.

Yet offensive theme parties do happen at Dartmouth, and beyond the question of free speech, many students feel these parties are harmless in themselves. While actual parties such as the ghetto party and the Hawaiian party are not as patently offensive, as, say, a Holocaust party, does that mean they are not offensive?

Whatever conclusion is reached about these two parties, we have to admit that there are bounds of social acceptability to what types of speech we as a community condone.

In the case of the ghetto party, where people were encouraged to dress in gangsta style, the majority of the campus saw how people could be offended. Yet a sizeable group of people thought that not only did African Americans not have a right to be offended, but that they had no reason to be offended.

Whether or not one agrees with the justifications for saying that the ghetto party was offensive, reasons for its offensiveness were given. The fact that people did not immediately understand its offensiveness does not excuse the action.

There is a dominant discourse on campus, and minority voices often cannot be heard. I take for example the Hawaiian Luau party, where people were encouraged to dress in "Hawaiian" style and enjoy pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris. Is this insulting to Hawaiians?

The fact is, as a white male, I am not in the best position to evaluate whether something is offensive to Native Hawaiians. It is notable how many students simply assumed that there was no possible reason for Native Hawaiians to be offended. The continual demanding of reasons required that a very small group attempt to explain to a much larger campus why they saw the party as offensive.

Too often, conservatives conflate the argument that all speech should be protected with the argument that minority groups have no right to be offended.

I am not making an argument that the College should make the principle of community enforceable. However, sometimes a community needs to take a stand when its members are being attacked. Even if we do not ban something, that does not mean something is acceptable.

Of course, a minority group merely claiming offense cannot be enough. The claim has to be evaluated, but groups should be given a certain presumption that they are sincere in being offended and at least, at least, have their voice heard by the larger community.

It may not be that racism or sexism motivates offensive theme parties, but we can still recognize that minorities are offended by certain parties, and with justification.

People who complain that they have to watch every word they say lest they "offend" someone miss the point. Cultural sensitivity is not about regulating speech. It is about respecting other peoples’ feelings and listening to their concerns. Boorish conservatives often act as if they want to go back to good ol’ times of civility of mannersÓunless it means being polite to minorities.