Editor’s Note: This piece is in response to a recent petition addressed to the Dartmouth administration aimed at silencing The Dartmouth Review.
An Overdue Response to the College Jacobins
AUGUST 7, 2020
America is in the midst of a dire illiberal moment. It was only a matter of time before the crosshairs would be set on The Review, and in the typical fashion, it manifested in an attempt to stifle rational discourse by appealing to a higher power. It’s unfortunate that this type of intellectual cowardice has come about on campus, and I would argue that it is antithetical to the pursuits of liberal institutions such as our own wherein debate ought to be a fundamental in the search for higher truth. I guess in the post-modern age, truth no longer matters much. Go figure.
Luckily, in this case, the petitioners forgot to do their homework. In fact, one of the demands that they enumerate in their letter isn’t even applicable, the second has already been tried and adjudicated in court, and the third has been twice abandoned by the College as the case was deemed untenable. Nor is this history any sort of secret; former Review staffers James Panero, Executive Editor of The New Criterion, and Stefan Beck quite literally compiled and edited an entire book about it. Regardless, the petitioners’ listed their demands as follows: “to decisively and publicly dissociate [the College] from the Dartmouth Review,†“to hold student staffers accountable for their bigotry,†and to “compel this publication to cease and desist from using the Dartmouth name as part of its brand.†In each of these cases, precedent offers clarity on a number of misconceptions about The Review, its history, and its controversies, and as such, I aim to address each individually:
http://dartreview.com/an-overdue-response-to-the-college-jacobins/