Let's face it: If there were a higher power capable of silencing everything controversial or provocative that the publication produced, there is no way that The Mirror, much less The Dartmouth, would even exist.
Dartmouth students are lucky we have an administration that supports students finding and using their voices. The College was ranked in the top eight in the nation for schools allowing freedom of expression on their campuses, according to a 2006 study of 330 schools done by the Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education. And as former President James Wright said in his 2004 convocation address, if Dartmouth did attempt to restrain its students in this way, "We would lose something critical to our intellectual purpose and to our core values."
Nonetheless, the College certainly does not have a perfect track record of avoiding censorship. Long before The Mirror provided an outlet for journalistic snarkiness, The Dartmouth published an article on the front page of the May 4, 1876 issue that expressed more than a slight irritation with the College's administration. The article was written in response to an incident that occurred the week prior in which the College, which still had ownership of the newspaper at the time, forbade the publication of an anonymous editorial criticizing the standards of the Agricultural Department.
"No other subject is yet prohibited, but neither we nor our readers can tell when it will be," the article reported. "As we professed in the beginning to discuss freely and fairly questions of the day ... and have endeavored to do so, we should now be required to make a radical change."
Unwilling to take part in restricted journalism, the staff decided to suspend publication of The Dartmouth for the remainder of the school year.
After The Dartmouth became a corporation in 1913, a movement emerged in the early 1940s to put The D under the control of an alumni review board, and the reaction from the student body and the Hanover community was overwhelmingly negative. The paper has since remained an independently-owned organization.
But not all campus publications have been able to avoid controversy. Due to its ownership by the College, The Jack-O-Lantern was threatened with derecognition as a student organization after publishing a "Dartmouth Review Dictionary" of offensive words and some "Eskimo Pick-Up Lines" in 1997.
And its history of sparking controversy did not end there. For the 1930 Winter Carnival issue of The Jack-O-Lantern, Bob Bottome '30, the then editor of The Jack-O, decided to publish articles encouraging the men of Dartmouth to make the most of their big weekend. He suggested that they capitalize on the presence of imported females on campus, as Dartmouth was still all-male at the time.
"Woman is the central heating system of mankind," the article said.
There's no way of knowing if Bottome realized (or even cared) that certain statements printed in the issue would produce some controversy with the administration. But considering the conservative nature of Dartmouth's culture in the 1930s, the content was risque enough to result in Bottome's immediate removal as editor of The Jack-O, effectively silencing his presence in campus media.
Perhaps the most notorious incident of censorship in the College's history requires a less literal interpretation of the term, "student voices." Richard Hovey, Class of 1885, had written a drinking song satirizing Dartmouth's founding. While the College did not exactly endorse Hovey's work, the song did not become especially controversial until the 1930s, when Walter Humphrey, Class of 1914, proposed to glorify this piece of Dartmouth history by painting a mural interpreting the song through depictions of European conquest and sexualized images of females in the basement of Thayer Hall.
In the 1970s, when the College began its Native American program and began admitting women, the murals became a major source of criticism for Dartmouth.
Consequently, around the same time that the Indian mascot was discontinued, the Hovey murals were covered with wood panels that remain intact in Thayer today. Although there was an effort to have the artwork moved to the Hood Museum in the early 1990s, the College chose to leave the murals in their original location.
While the covering of the Hovey Murals could be considered a case of modern censorship, the reality is that such instances are few and far between for the Dartmouth of today. Allowing college students to unrestrictedly speak their minds might occasionally spark dispute, but risking controversy is necessary if students are to learn to challenge conventionality.
And anyway, Dartmouth's many voices have been crying out for nearly two and a half centuries. There's no silencing them now.
