The Dartmouth Review

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dartmouth Review is a conservative, independent, bi-weekly newspaper at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (U.S.). Founded in 1980 by disenchanted staffers from the college's daily newspaper —The Dartmouth— it spawned a movement of similar politically conservative independent newspapers on college campuses, and has been at the center of several lawsuits. Past staffers include author Dinesh D'Souza, talk show host Laura Ingraham, The Wall Street Journal's Hugo Restall, and The New Criterion's James Panero. As of 2006, it claims 10,000 off-campus subscribers and distributes a further 5,000 newspapers on campus.

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. Among the newspaper's exploits:

  • 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.[1]
  • In 1986, its staffers took sledgehammers to shanties that had been erected on the campus quad as part of a 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 midnight raid and were later punished by the College.
  • In 1984, the Review snuck a reporter into a meeting of a gay student organization and later published a transcript of the meeting, including a list of those present at the supposedly secure meeting place.
  • While on the Review staff, Laura Ingraham frequently referred to gays as "sodomites".
  • Early in the 1990s, the Review was accused of anti-Semitism for the appearance of a quote from Mein Kampf in its masthead in place of the usual quote from Teddy Roosevelt. (According to Review backer William F. Buckley's book In Search of Anti Semitism, this last incident was the work of a disgruntled former staff member.) The Mein Kampf scandal came on the heels of several smaller incidents also suggesting anti-Semitism on the part of the Review, though the paper did apologize for some of them.
  • The November 28, 2006, issue of the Review featured a cover image of a Native American man brandishing a scalp, with the headline: "The Natives are Getting Restless!" The illustration is widely used by national anti-Indian coalitions;[1] the paper itself included multiple pieces criticizing both 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, similar to the "Rally Against Hate" that followed the Mein Kampf incident. In an interview with the Associated Press, Review editor-in-chief Dan Linsalata said the paper was in response to "the overdramatic reaction to events this term" and said the Native American students were "out for blood".[2][3] Editors subsequently issued statements expressing "regret" and called the cover, but not the "editorial content", a "mistake".[1][4][5]

The paper has taken stances on Dartmouth College's alcohol policies, the controversial departure of several well-known faculty members between 2002 and the present, support for a stronger role for religion and Christianity in campus life, and support for the Western classics in the College's curriculum. For other issues involving the Review, most of them campus-oriented, see this 2002 article from Dartmouth's liberal paper, the Dartmouth Free Press.

Some claim the newspaper's influence with current students may be on the decline. A February 17, 2003 article in The Nation, penned by the founders 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.

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

  1. ^ a b Gale Courey Toensing. "Dartmouth College rocked by racist controversies", Indian Country Today, 2006-12-15. Retrieved on 2006-12-15.
  2. ^ Wang, Beverly. "Dartmouth rallies for minority students", Boston Globe, Associated Press, 2006-11-29. Retrieved on 2006-11-30.
  3. ^ Solidarity Against Hatred Rally. Trustees of Dartmouth College. Retrieved on 2006-11-30.
  4. ^ "The Cover Was a Mistake", Dartmouth Review, 2006-12-06. Retrieved on 2006-12-15.
  5. ^ Daniel F. Linsalata. "The Cover Story", Dartmouth Review, 2006-12-02. Retrieved on 2006-12-15.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/h/e/The_Dartmouth_Review_21bd.html"