The Dartmouth has published opinions since 1799. In that time, the section has served as a forum for the defining debates for each generation of students — on war, on civil rights, on the obligations of an elite institution to the world beyond its gates — precisely because we have understood, at our best, that ideas untested by opposition are not ideas at all, but assumptions in fancy clothing. In 1970, when this campus was convulsed by the debate over ROTC and the Vietnam War, these pages published arguments from every corner of the political spectrum, not because the Editorial Board agreed with all of them, but because it understood that the argument itself was the point. We have, at various moments in our history, been that kind of publication. Today, we are no longer at our best.
Of the 20 most recent pieces published in this section, not one leans meaningfully right of center. Approximately 20% of this campus claimed they would vote for Donald Trump in the last presidential election. This gap is not a coincidence, not an oversight and not something that can be explained away. It is, without qualification, a representation of our failure.
As members of this Editorial Board, we are not exempt from that accounting. Our own composition skews left. Our editorial deliberations reflect the assumptions of a group that has not had to seriously defend its priors. We have almost always agreed on the macros.
Look closer, and the problem compounds. It is not merely that perspectives from the right are absent from these pages, but that the conversation itself has stopped. Opinion sections derive their value not from the quality of any single piece but from the friction between pieces: the response that sharpens an argument, the rebuttal that exposes its weaknesses and the letter that forces a writer to defend, in public and on the record, exactly what was intended. That friction is almost entirely missing. We publish, we move on and almost no one pushes back.
We are also not naive about what fills the vacuum. The Dartmouth Review has existed in explicit opposition to The Dartmouth since 1980. We will say plainly what is often left unsaid: Its writing does not meet the journalistic standards we hold ourselves to, its relationship to editorial rigor is casual at best and its brand of conservatism is performative enough that it routinely alienates the very students it purports to represent. The right-leaning intellectual on this campus has been handed a false choice: Write for a publication that does not take its own craft seriously, or assume that The Dartmouth is not for them. Neither option is acceptable, and the fact that this binary has calcified over decades, leaving the space between our two mastheads entirely vacant, is a failure that belongs to both of us and serves no one. That space, where serious arguments from across the spectrum actually meet, ought to be among the most intellectually alive spaces on this campus. It is instead one of the emptiest. We intend to change that, beginning with the acknowledgment that a student should not have to choose between good writing and honest right-of-center thought. They can, and should, find both here.
This is not an argument for false balance. We will not publish bad ideas for the sake of symmetry, we will not manufacture controversy where none exists and we will not treat ideological representation as a quota to be filled rather than a standard to be met. That said, we will say plainly that a publication which is never seriously challenged from the right is not a forum, but a consensus document, and consensus documents, however well-crafted, do not test ideas so much as ratify them — a function this section has never been designed to serve and will not settle for serving now.
We recognize that many right-leaning students on Dartmouth’s campus self censor their speech for fear of backlash or retribution, and that this makes students on the right more reticent to publish their views on issues under their names. We encourage you, however, to have the courage of your convictions. Many of us have faced backlash for what we have published in The Dartmouth. It is not easy to be outspoken, but it is deeply necessary.
America is amidst a crisis of political polarization of a kind that college newspapers are neither insulated from nor helpless against. We have something that most of the institutions failing at this task do not: an educated readership that is still, by and large, persuadable; institutional credibility that has not been fully captured by any one faction; and proximity to the people who will shape journalism, policy and public life in the decades ahead. If we do not make use of that position now, if we continue to let this section function as a mirror rather than a window, we will produce graduates who have spent four years arguing with people who already agreed with them, and who will be insufficiently equipped to enter public life. That is not a hypothetical cost. It is the cost we are already paying, compounding quietly with every issue we publish.
So let us be direct. The Dartmouth is a space for political expression, and we mean that without qualification and without the hedging that usually follows such declarations. If you are a right-leaning student, a libertarian, a heterodox thinker of any stripe who has assumed, reasonably, that these pages are not for you, we are telling you now that you have assumed wrong, and that the assumption itself is part of what we are asking you to help us dismantle. Submit a guest column. Write a letter. Better yet, try out for staff — not as a token, not as a gesture toward balance, but because we are not looking for writers who agree with us. We are looking for writers who can argue, and the ability to argue well does not belong to any one side of the political spectrum. The opinion section of this paper is not a closed shop, has never been intended as one, and if it has felt that way, that is on us. Which is why we are asking you to hold us to a higher standard by showing up anyway.
The Dartmouth is not the newsletter of any faction of this campus. It is, or ought to be, a place where the whole of it can speak, where what one person says compels another to respond, where the response compels a rejoinder and where the cumulative friction of that exchange produces something closer to the truth than any of us arrived with. We intend to make that true.
The Editorial Board consists of opinion staff columnists and the opinion editors. It is separate from The Dartmouth’s newsroom. Views expressed represent those of the Editorial Board members, not The Dartmouth.
