Dartmouth's liberal contingent has a dirty little secret: many of them read The Dartmouth Review. I know you're aghast; it's a travesty, a sure sign of the coming Apocalypse.
I remember walking through the West Wheelock apartment of my best bohemian friend: enviro-mugs and drug legalization pamphlets lined the shelves; triangular pink stickers speckled the walls; various well-worn titles by Emma Goldman and Andrea Dworkin were strewn about her desk. Yet, strangely enough, shoved into the corner of the room, barely visible save for the bright green and purple mastheads, was a stack of The Dartmouth Reviews.
"You read the Review?" I wondered aloud.
"That?!" she said, reeling on me. "That's just for ... insulation."
"Oh ... right."
I also remember Freshman Orientation Week, all of us sitting around somebody's Zimmerman common room -- a finer collection of cliched campus bleeding hearts you'll seldom see. We'd all heard the Review legend: "sexist and racist and homophobic, etc." Nevertheless, when that first issue arrived at the doorstep, we all jumped at it like Pavlov's dogs drooling at the first jingle of a bell. We read that issue cover-to-cover, all the while commenting on how disgusted we were. Yet we couldn't take our eyes off the page.
The Review was the first thing I ever heard about Dartmouth. I saw Oron Strauss' assailing political correctness on the since-canceled Jane Pratt Show (shocking stance for him to take, I know.) The Review had this mythic status; according to whatever cookie-cutter college guide I used to select schools for application, the Review had rent Dartmouth in two, catalyzed a war of the far-right and the far-left, leaving ideological wreckage everywhere.
Friends and teachers warned me off Dartmouth -- "Haven't you heard about The Dartmouth Review? Nazis, every one of 'em! Fascists with a printing press!"
Whatever.
So why are there so many closeted liberal Review readers? Well, for one thing, it's a fairly well-written paper. The articles are researched and coherent, even stylish, sometimes. The Spare Rib has all of these qualities, too, but that comes out, what, every third lunar cycle? I'm a bit of a reading junkie myself; I'll read anything that's intelligently constructed, and, like it or not, the Review more than fits this qualification. I'll admit, I've even laughed at something they've written from time to time. I suppose my Bleeding Heart membership will be revoked for this admission, but so be it. It's not all bad.
On the other hand, The Review is at least as predictable as the response it engenders. So you think they'll mock James Freedman this week? I hear Jeffrey Hart wrote something controversial. And, apparently, the latest issue attacks P.C. Go figure.
And what's with those Hillary Clinton ads? What, did she snub them at Commencement or something? And as for the vendetta against poor Earl Plante -- nice to see you've finally let that one go, boys.
Of course The Review can be mean-spirited, but I have trouble thinking of it as the uber-enemy of Dartmouth liberalism. If The Review was once the leviathan of Dartmouth's conservative voice, it's now more of a paper tiger than anything else. There are no more staged shanties on the Green, Mein Kampf quotations in the masthead, targeted efforts to break the will of music professors. These days they're just another voice contributing to the ongoing (and often soporific) Dartmouth political debate, of which even this smarmy column is a part.
In conclusion, to paraphrase Frank O'Hara, Liberals of Dartmouth, let your kids read The Dartmouth Review!
(By the way, should The Review care to quote from this column, let me save you some trouble now: [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] sic] -- there's half-a-dozen for you. Knock yourselves out.)
