The Dartmouth Review

Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Dartmouth Review

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 right-wing 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 (copies of the Review are delivered to every dorm room and several distribution tables across campus).

The Review gained national attention early on for positions on social issues that its supporters term "politically incorrect" and 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.
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 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 scandals involving the Review, most of them campus-oriented, see [this 2002 article] from Dartmouth's liberal paper, the Dartmouth Free Press.

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.

External links

[Official website of The Dartmouth Review]
[Dartmouth Free Press article on the Review]
[A Once-Bright Star Dims], by Emma Ruby-Sachs & Timothy Waligore (from The Nation, February 17, 2003). Article on the Dartmouth Review and other independent conservative collegiate newspapers in the U.S.
[from the New York Times on the shanty scandal]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.