The Dartmouth Review and Archimedes Plutonium (The Hanover Inn Dishwasher and campus personality)have many common characteristics and two common afflictions. Before I begin, I would like to apologize to Plutonium up front. With respect, this comparison will not be a degrading trip through the mud -- as it might otherwise appear -- but rather a discussion that exposes specific faults of both the individual and the publication that appear in public here at Dartmouth and elsewhere, and therefore have warranted my attention and our criticism.
A comparison of any sort could only hope to extend, in representation, one image to the other -- to turn one image towards the other to see each more clearly. I do not, therefore, wish to project one enterprise -- Plutonium's science, The Review's ideology -- upon the other, but instead expose a new perspective through which we can envision ourselves the victims of their very same faults: namely deafness and blindness.
The Review, for some time now as I am aware of it, has taken up President James O. Freedman's address to the Dartmouth student body -- as a place where "creative loners and daring dreamers" may aspire -- as an issue of propaganda. This is an interesting approach, but not as fruitful an approach as we could perhaps achieve with greater intellectual determination. I imagine this lack of rigor in the minds of those students who publish The Review to be a problem akin to deafness.
Perhaps A.J. Monaco, Editor-in-Chief of The Review, is well aware that his editorial "Freedman's Lonely Myth" (October 1, 1997) addresses Freedman as an instigator of propaganda in the Dartmouth community. Noam Chomsky, in his work on propaganda in the pamphlet Media Control (Seven Stories Press, 1991), cites propaganda's purpose and defines its form in a modern democracy. And with respect to Chomsky, however Freedman's words may be taken, propaganda seems to be another thing entirely: a message without substance.
While Monaco accepts Freedman's words at face value, it seems he does not take them to heart. Freedman's "creative loner" has invited The Review's usual "tour-de-force" against liberal idealism, but only after The Review has discredited Freedman on ideological grounds. Does this reflect poorly on Freedman's "creative loners" or on Monaco's ability to invest himself -- indeed, investigate himself -- as the creative loner of which Freedman speaks?
If we consider the issue of the creative loner as President Freedman's desire to actively shape the student body at Dartmouth, perhaps we too will come to the same conclusions that The Dartmouth Review has settled upon. But this is, after all, an academic institution and we cannot be so narrow-minded in our approach on any topic -- let alone the stake in our own image. And certainly Freedman's concern is there: in speaking for our institution.
If we listen carefully to his words, perhaps we will hear more than veiled threats to our own narcissistic pleasures -- perhaps we will endeavor to learn about ourselves as well as others. President Freedman is an accomplished scholar by any standards, and in his book Idealism and Liberal Education he speaks directly of the image he projects onto liberal education and the scholar. His words are not empty as Chomsky would show us the very nature of propaganda to be.
The creative loner -- a description I will not address here because the model is elsewhere -- which Freedman speaks of is perhaps a challenge to us and a direction to consider, and not so much the description of a place and the characteristics of its peoples. Mr. Monaco, the space Freedman has ensured for creative loners is surely not an issue that qualifies the topic of masturbation.
Clearly The Review has failed to listen carefully to President Freedman.
By comparison, I am afraid Archimedes Plutonium is affected by deafness as well, but perhaps to a lesser degree than The Review. To be sure, his more apparent affliction is of a different sort -- and again, an affliction not entirely unknown to the students who comprise The Review. The inability to see, perhaps the mistake of not looking, and in any respect a blindness that cripples rigorous thinking -- a blindness we have all been known to possess -- affects Plutonium perhaps more acutely than others.
Our vision enables us to use tools to construct the world and make it a more habitable place. These tools are given to us or we make them ourselves, but in either case we choose which tools to use and which to leave behind. A particularly practical tool that the human race perhaps picked up many millenia ago is science. With all its shortcomings, science has proved to be an incredibly powerful tool. I am sure Plutonium would agree.
A hero of mine, Carl Sagan, believed in the transformative power of science and education. He made it his life's work to put science into anyone's hand who would be so daring as to attempt to exceed their own reach in the pursuit of knowledge. Unfortunately, in Plutonium's hands science has been used haphazardly. Anyone who would chance to see his work on the internet would be likely to observe a casual use of the scientific method.
Plutonium supports the "Totality Universe" theory. If this theory were a dish at Panda, it would be titled something like "Psuedoscience Delight" with a description that follows "tender sub-atomic particles in a spicy light-brown sauce." The presentation of his work in cyberspace is at best the product of a unique misreading of modern science -- but probably more like a lack of reading. Plutonium has failed to be a rigorous observer of the world around him and rejected without reason the meticulous work of this and any other academic community.
To compare The Dartmouth Review to Plutonium in this manner presupposes that each might tend towards the other by some fault of their own. And I would imagine that all the parties I have implicated with the aforementioned afflictions would like to think the best of themselves and their intellectual abilities. Perhaps if we look closely enough and listen carefully, we can come to understand how these spokesman for the Dartmouth community reflect on the rest of us, and remind us we are all susceptible to deafness and blindness when facing ideology and science -- by no means disparate subjects.
