At the Dartmouth Review, we recognized that to confront liberalism fully we could not be content with rebutting liberal arguments. We also had to subvert liberal culture, and this meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism. In other words, we had to become social guerillas. And this we set out to do with a vengeance.
Reading over old issues of the Review, and sharing recollections with my former colleagues, I am sometimes amazed to realize what social and intellectual renegades we were. We were not above using ad hominem attacks. We described one professor as sporting “a polyester tie and a rat’s-hair mustache.” When he wrote to complain, noting that he never wore polyester ties and that his mustache could not reasonably be compared to rat’s hair, we printed an apology. “We Goofed, see p. 6.” In our apology, we said, “We regret our error. In reality Professor Spitzer has a rat’s-hair tie and a polyester mustache.”
Feminists and homosexuals were a regular target of Review satire. One of our columnists, Keeney Jones, observed a decade after Dartmouth went coed, “The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth. The question is whether women should be educated at all.” The Review also printed an alumnus’s Solomonic observation that “any man who thinks a woman is his intellectual equal is probably right.” And the Last Word—a series of quips and quotations on the last page of the newspaper—featured the observation: “Homosexuality is fine,” said Bill, half in Ernest.
Sometimes items from the bad-taste file at National Review made their way into the Dartmouth Review. You see, the editors of National Review sometimes make jokes that are too inflammatory for a respectable national magazine to print. But we found them entirely appropriate for a college weekly. Thus the Dartmouth Review’s obituary for actress Natalie Wood ended thus, “We deplore the foul rumor. Ted Kennedy was not on Catalina Island when Natalie Wood drowned.” When the new Miss America, Vanessa Williams, was forced to give up her title following news reports that she had posed nude for Penthouse, the Dartmouth Review noted, “Jesse Jackson may pull out of the presidential race this season. It has been revealed that his grandmother has been posing nude in National Geographic.”
That some of these quips are in bad taste goes without saying. But is this scorched-earth approach effective? Let’s consider a couple of examples. When Dartmouth refused to stop funding the Gay Students Association, despite numerous Review editorials questioning why funds should be awarded based on sexual orientation, we decided to test the consistency of the administration’s policy. We founded the Dartmouth Bestiality Society. We appointed a president, a vice president, a treasurer, and a zookeeper. We wrote up an application and developed a budget. Then we went before the college committee on funding and made our case.
The administrators were appalled, of course. “There is no interest in, ahem, bestiality at Dartmouth,” one said. To which the president of the Bestiality Society gamely replied, “That may be true, Dean Hanson, but it is because of centuries of discrimination! Those of us who are inclined toward animals have been systematically excluded and ostracized. Our organization will provide a supportive atmosphere in which people of our particular sexual orientation are treated with respect. At Dartmouth, if not in society, let us put an end to beastophobia.”
No, we didn’t get recognition or funding. But we did make our point, and the point was well covered in the local media. One newspaper printed a hilarious feature titled, “Students Go to the Dogs.”
Another of our escapades involved the Indian symbol. Dartmouth had banned the Indian symbol as offensive to Indians. We sent out a survey to more than a hundred Indian tribes across the country and included a picture of the Indian symbol. The tribes were asked to decide whether they found the symbol offensive. When the results came back, we found that most tribes loved the symbol. The vast majority wanted Dartmouth to retain it, and some tribes had even voted on the issue. When we published the results of our poll, a long silence ensued in Hanover. The administration had grown so used to trotting out the head of the Native American Studies department that it trusted his views could be taken as representative of the Indian population. But we had demonstrated pretty conclusively that it was not so. When Fortune magazine published an article on our exposé, we were emboldened to try other stunts. One of them was to pay a local company to fly a plane over the playing fields during Dartmouth’s football games. The plane dragged a huge banner that said GO DARTMOUTH INDIANS. The students cheered, and the administration was furious; but there was little the deans could do.
Our greatest success was undoubtedly the Cole incident. Professor William Cole was a black music professor who seemed to have been hired to fulfill affirmative action requirements. He was given tenure despite his virtually nonexistent publication record. His specialty was racial and political diatribes laced with obscenities, which he delivered in class in a kind of street dialect. In short, Professor Cole was a God-given opportunity for the Dartmouth Review.
We sent a reporter to Cole’s class during the first two weeks of the semester, when students are allowed to audit courses and no attendance is taken. Our reporter taped Cole’s diatribes, which appeared in the paper under the title, “Bill Cole’s Song-and-Dance Routine.” Cole described white students as “honkies,” women as “pussies,” and he praised a man who had tried to blow up the Washington Monument as an enlightened opponent of a racist society. These statements were direct quotations, and they were on tape. The article produced a sensation on campus.
The Dartmouth faculty rushed to Cole’s defense. They passed a resolution denouncing the Dartmouth Review, the first of many, I might add. In the resolution, the faculty pointed out that they had full academic freedom to teach as they wished, and they accused us of trampling on that freedom. The officers of the Dartmouth Review responded by passing a resolution denouncing the Dartmouth faculty. We noted in our resolution that while they had the academic freedom to teach, we had the First Amendment right to criticize their teaching.
Incensed by our article, Cole sued the Dartmouth Review. He claimed that his reputation had been trashed, which of course it had. He wanted several million dollars.
The only problem with Cole’s suit was that truth is an incontrovertible defense against libel. Cole never alleged that our article was inaccurate, only that it had shown him to be a fool. Our position was that he was, in fact, a fool. And the court apparently agreed, because it dismissed his lawsuit. Cole then turned to the Dartmouth administration for help. But what could they do? Disgusted, Cole resigned his tenured position at the college. The last I heard, he had opened a drum store somewhere in Vermont.
The Cole story, however, was not quite at an end. Cole’s wife, Sarah Sully, who is white, was a tenured professor of French at Dartmouth. She assigned her class a paper in which students were asked to give their assessment of the Dartmouth Review. Because most of the students knew that Sully was married to Cole, they submitted papers very critical of the conservative newspaper. But one student who didn’t know who Sarah Sully was, wrote in French that he enjoyed reading the Dartmouth Review and often agreed with it. When this student got his paper back, his grade was a C. He showed it to a few friends, and they suggested he go to the head of the department. The head of the department, a fair man, convened a committee of three professors, who gave the paper a B. Sarah Sully was then ordered to change the student’s grade. She refused, and resigned her tenured position at the college.
As a consequence of such escapades, the Dartmouth Review became nationally famous. Of course, we were regularly denounced by the New York Times and other publications. But our editors did appear in Newsweek and on ABC’s Nightline. Our exploits were praised by conservative magazines and by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Many Dartmouth alumni found out about the administration’s misdoings through these national channels, and Dartmouth’s president was the chagrined recipient of numerous phone calls that began, “What the hell is going on up there?” Eventually, the Dartmouth Review’s influence spread
to other campuses: Inspired by our example, conservative students at some fifty other colleges started alternative newspapers, many of which are still around. The spark we kindled has become an enduring flame.
Now that I can look back at the Dartmouth Review with some perspective, I see that it accomplished four major objectives. First, it trained a whole group of young conservatives in journalism and activism. Some of these have gone on to distinguished careers in politics. One of our editors, Peter Robinson, wrote Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Another, Laura Ingraham, is a regular pundit on radio and television. Ben Hart published a successful book about his Dartmouth exploits and now runs a large direct-mail company that raises funds for political candidates. Greg Fossedal wrote editorials for the Wall Street Journal before joining a money market research firm and settling down to father six kids. Keeney Jones wrote speeches for Bill Bennett and is now a Catholic priest. None of these people would have taken these pathways if they had not worked for the Dartmouth Review.
Second, the Review was, and remains, a valuable check on the excesses of the Dartmouth faculty and administration. Over the years, the newspaper’s exposés have forced the administration to abandon many a cherished liberal program. Who knows what other outrages the administration might have perpetrated had the Review not been around? As Professor Hart has said, thanks to the Review, “Dartmouth is no longer a place where the liberal sheep can graze unmolested.”
Third, the newspaper generated lively discussion at Dartmouth about a whole slate of issues that would not otherwise have been talked about. Even the paper’s critics admitted this. As the New Republic editorialized, “The Dartmouth Review has succeeded where countless tenured professors have failed” in fostering ongoing debates on campus about free speech, affirmative action, the liberal arts, and politics.
Finally, the Review moved the political center at Dartmouth decisively to the right. When I return to Dartmouth now and ask a typical student, “What are your politics?” the reply is, “Well, I’m a moderate conservative. I voted for Bush, but I am not as right-wing as those guys on the Dartmouth Review.” What this student does not recognize is that it is the influence of the Dartmouth Review over the years that has enabled him to say that. Moderate conservatism was totally outside the pale when the newspaper was founded. But by staking out a kind of far-right position, the Review has legitimized a wide range of positions in the middle.
I learned a lot at Dartmouth, and I consider my tenure at the Dartmouth Review to be central to my learning experience. In fact, the last time I got a call from my class agent reminding me of how much my Dartmouth education had benefited my career and asking me to contribute to my alma mater, I told him, “Mike, I already have. I sent a check last week to the Dartmouth Review.”
5
Fighting Political Correctness
Dear Chris,
In your reaction to my Dartmouth stories, I detect a hint of envy. You complain that the conservatives on your campus are a sorry bunch: Many don’t want to be publicly identified as conservative, some are too busy with academic work, others shy away from controversy. We had these same problems, but we overcame them by developing a guerilla strategy that was as effective as it was fun. Do the same, Chris, and you, too, will have people tracking you down to find out how they can get involved.
Where to start? I don’t know. Conduct a survey to find out how many professors in the religion department believe in God. Distribute a pamphlet titled “Feminist Thought” that is made up of blank pages. Establish a Society for Creative Homophobia. Prepare a freshmen course guide that lists your college’s best, and worst, professors. Publish Maya Angelou’s poems alongside a bunch of meaningless doggerel and see whether anyone can tell the difference. Put a picture of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal on your Web site and instruct people who think he deserves capital punishment to click a button and execute him online. Whew, I better stop with these suggestions before I get too carried away.
In a more serious tone, let me address your question about how the current situation on campus differs from what I experienced as an undergraduate. “Is political correctness alive and well?” you ask. “And if so, have your efforts to fight this monster been in vain? How do we fight it more effectively?”
The first assault against political correctness came in the early 1990s. My book Illiberal Education was, as you note, the first book-length expose. Actually, I began that study quite by chance. I had just finished two years with the Reagan administration and had come to the American Enterprise Institute as a young scholar. Soon after I arrived, in January 1989, I had lunch with Morton Kondracke, a Dartmouth alumnus. I was telling Kondracke about some of the outrages being perpetrated at Dartmouth, but he was skeptical. “It’s hard to believe that this stuff is really going on,” he said.
“I know,” I told him. “We’re having a hard time convincing some of our alumni supporters. They refuse to believe that the left is that crazy.”
“Are these things unique to Dartmouth,” Kondracke asked, “or are they typical of what is happening at campuses across the country?”
I confessed that I did not know.
“Well, there’s your book idea,” Kondracke said. “Go and find out.”
I did, and the result was Illiberal Education. My research for that book was helped immeasurably by two things: I was young and could masquerade as a student; and I was a “person of color” and could masquerade as a radical. No sooner did I walk into radical meetings at campuses such as Berkeley and Harvard than the minority activists drew me into their confidence. Their attitude was, “Welcome, brother. Let us show you the blueprints of our revolution.”
Illiberal Education was published in 1991. The argument of the book, perfectly captured by the title, was that universities profess to be “liberal” while acting in grossly “illiberal” ways. Actually, I hesitated until the last minute about the title. The book had already gone through several titles. When I began the project, Professor Hart jokingly suggested that I call it Bend Over, America. And so this became the working title for the duration of my research.
Although I am often credited with inventing the term political correctness, I did nothing more than to help publicize it. It is an old Marxist term, once used between Stalinists and Trotskyites to determine who was “politically correct” from the Marxist point of view. The term had been revived during the 1980s to describe policies and attitudes that were congruent with liberal orthodoxy. When I first heard it, I thought the campus activists who bandied the phrase around were being ironic. But when I saw that these ideologues were deadly serious, I realized that a new form of repression was being advocated in the name of liberation.
Illiberal Education employed a strategy that had been used to great effect by the Dartmouth Review: that of embarrassing people by quoting them. Ridicule is a powerful political weapon, and it is all the more deadly if it can be deployed by using the target’s own words. The effectiveness of that book was largely a result of its irrefutable documented incidents and tabulated quotations. So no matter how much the leftists and the multiculturalists claimed that I had wrongly described the situation on campus, they could not deny that the things described in my book took place. This, by itself, was crushing. Thus the countless “refutations” of Illiberal Education bounced off me lightly. When the Village Voice put me on its cover along with the title WANTED: FOR INTELLECTUAL FRAUD, I was greatly flattered and, to this day, I have that cover on the wall in my office.
The conservative critique of political correctness, which I articulated along with Bill Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Roger Kimball, and others, had the beneficial effect of splitting the classical or old-line liberals from the left. The difference between the two groups may be illustrated by their attitudes toward free speech. Classical liberals believe in free speech because they are confident that, in a clash between truth and error, truth will prevail. The left does not believe in free speech. Of course, th
e leftists are happy to invoke the principle of free speech when one of their own guys is being threatened. Once they are in power, however, leftists are perfectly comfortable with suppressing the views of those they abhor. The leftist principle was stated by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s: No free speech for fascists!
In the name of this doctrine, the left had for years been shouting down its opponents. During the 1980s, left-wing activists prevented national security adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick, Nicaraguan contra leader Adolfo Calero, and several others from speaking on campus. Many colleges even had “speech codes”; these had the effect of outlawing candid debate on sensitive topics such as affirmative action. One such code even outlawed “inappropriately directed laughter.” These codes were necessary, the champions of political correctness argued, to protect the self-image of minority students. Ironically, censorship was being practiced in the name of “diversity.”
As a result of the conservative expose of political correctness, many old-line liberals began to criticize speech codes, and soon the courts began to intervene and strike those codes down as inconsistent with the First Amendment. Now, as far as I am aware, no college actually enforces its speech code, although several still have one on the books. This is one area in which the critique of political correctness has been successful. I don’t just mean that the official codes have been suspended; I also mean that the parameters of acceptable debate have been greatly widened. Topics that could scarcely have been brought up a decade ago can now be addressed, and I address them all the time during my frequent lectures on campus.
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 3
