The Dartmouth Review

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The Dartmouth Review
Nemo me impune lacessit
Type	Biweekly newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	The Hanover Review, Inc.
Editor-in-Chief	Emily Esfahani-Smith
Founded	1980
Political allegiance	Reactionary
Headquarters	Hanover, New Hampshire
Circulation	14,000[1]
Website: dartreview.com

The Dartmouth Review is a reactionary, 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. Apart from contributing to an atmosphere of discord on the Dartmouth campus, it spawned a movement of politically conservative independent U.S. college newspapers such as the Harvard Salient 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, 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, it claims 10,000 off-campus subscribers and distributes a further 5,000 newspapers on campus.

[edit] Controversies and stances

The Review gained national attention early on for positions on social issues regarded as "politically incorrect" which its critics see as examples of racism, sexism, and intolerance. Examples from the newspaper's history:

• The newspaper continues to refer to Dartmouth's sports teams as the "Indians", the traditional school mascot that was officially discarded in the early 1970s, pointing out that a Gallup poll of living Indian chiefs in fact supported keeping the Indian mascot.^[2]
• In 1986, some staffers formed the Committee to Beautify the Green and attacked, with sledgehammers, the shanties that had been erected on the campus quad as part of a successful campaign to protest apartheid by divesting Dartmouth from South Africa. The shanties were 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 moved to remove them, 150 students blocked the workers; ten Review staffers attacked the shanties in a reckless midnight raid and were later punished by the College.
• In 1984, the Review sent a reporter to a public meeting of the Dartmouth Gay Students Association and published excerpts from the meeting; the article also included names of the groups leaders.
• In the fall of 1990, the Review was accused of anti-Semitism for the appearance of a quote from Mein Kampf in its masthead in place of its usual quote from Teddy Roosevelt. The quote was discovered by Review staffers three days after the paper was distributed. The edition of the Review was pulled, and a campus-wide apology was issued by the then editor-in-chief, Kevin Pritchett, who is an African-American. The apology arguably expressed more anger at the perpetrator of the deed than contrition for the deed. 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; others have stated that he was a current staffer. The Anti-Defamation League also found that the paper was not at fault. In 2007, Jeffrey Hart identified the staffer who inserted the quotation from Adolf Hitler as Pang-Chun Chen of the Dartmouth class of 1992.^[3][3]
• 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".^[3] Both the rally and President Freedman were later criticized by Dartmouth alumni and by the national media.^[4] The "Hitler Quote incident," as it came to be known,^[5] came on the heels of several smaller incidents allegedly suggesting anti-Semitism on the part of the Review. Following the episode, Jack Kemp, who would go on to become Bob Dole's running mate in losing the 1996 US Presidential Elections, withdrew support for the paper. The incident led to a satiric response by the Harvard Lampoon, who in April of 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 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;^[6] 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 Review editor-in-chief Dan Linsalata said the paper was in response to "the overdramatic reaction to events this term."^[7] Editors subsequently issued statements expressing "regret" and called the cover, but not the issue's content, a "mistake".^[6][8][9]
• The paper has been a driving force behind the "Lone Pine Revolution." A portion of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees is elected by alumni, and the last four trustees elected have all been critical of the college's stances on free speech, athletics, alumni rights and the college/university dynamic. Many believe their campaigns have been aided by the newspaper's favorable coverage of them.^[10]

The paper has consistently supported a college curriculum based on the so-called Western Canon, criticized Dartmouth College's alcohol policies as too conservative, and resisted "political correctness" on campus. In 2002, Dartmouth's liberal newspaper, the Dartmouth Free Press, documented other issues on which the Review, has taken a stand, most of them campus-oriented.^[11]

[edit] Influence and legacy

Some claim the newspaper's influence with current students may be on the decline. 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.^[12] 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."^[2]

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Ben Hart, Poisoned Ivy (Stein and Day, 1986). ISBN 0812862562.
• (April 2006) in James Panero and Stefan Beck: 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. 

[edit] External links

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