Letters to a Young Conservative Read Online Free PDF Page A

company to fly a plane over the playing fields during Dartmouth’s football games. The plane dragged a huge banner that said GO DARTMOUTH INDIANS. The students cheered, and the administration was furious; but there was little the deans could do.
    Our greatest success was undoubtedly the Cole incident. Professor William Cole was a black music professor who seemed to have been hired to fulfill affirmative action requirements. He was given tenure despite his virtually nonexistent publication record. His specialty
was racial and political diatribes laced with obscenities, which he delivered in class in a kind of street dialect. In short, Professor Cole was a God-given opportunity for the Dartmouth Review.
    We sent a reporter to Cole’s class during the first two weeks of the semester, when students are allowed to audit courses and no attendance is taken. Our reporter taped Cole’s diatribes, which appeared in the paper under the title, “Bill Cole’s Song-and-Dance Routine.” Cole described white students as “honkies,” women as “pussies,” and he praised a man who had tried to blow up the Washington Monument as an enlightened opponent of a racist society. These statements were direct quotations, and they were on tape. The article produced a sensation on campus.
    The Dartmouth faculty rushed to Cole’s defense. They passed a resolution denouncing the Dartmouth Review, the first of many, I might add. In the resolution, the faculty pointed out that they had full academic freedom to teach as they wished, and they accused us of trampling on that freedom. The officers of the Dartmouth Review responded by passing a resolution denouncing the Dartmouth faculty. We noted in our resolution that while they had the academic freedom to teach, we had the First Amendment right to criticize their teaching.
    Incensed by our article, Cole sued the Dartmouth Review. He claimed that his reputation had been trashed, which of course it had. He wanted several million dollars.

    The only problem with Cole’s suit was that truth is an incontrovertible defense against libel. Cole never alleged that our article was inaccurate, only that it had shown him to be a fool. Our position was that he was, in fact, a fool. And the court apparently agreed, because it dismissed his lawsuit. Cole then turned to the Dartmouth administration for help. But what could they do? Disgusted, Cole resigned his tenured position at the college. The last I heard, he had opened a drum store somewhere in Vermont.
    The Cole story, however, was not quite at an end. Cole’s wife, Sarah Sully, who is white, was a tenured professor of French at Dartmouth. She assigned her class a paper in which students were asked to give their assessment of the Dartmouth Review. Because most of the students knew that Sully was married to Cole, they submitted papers very critical of the conservative newspaper. But one student who didn’t know who Sarah Sully was, wrote in French that he enjoyed reading the Dartmouth Review and often agreed with it. When this student got his paper back, his grade was a C. He showed it to a few friends, and they suggested he go to the head of the department. The head of the department, a fair man, convened a committee of three professors, who gave the paper a B. Sarah Sully was then ordered to change the student’s grade. She refused, and resigned her tenured position at the college.
    As a consequence of such escapades, the Dartmouth Review became nationally famous. Of course, we were
regularly denounced by the New York Times and other publications. But our editors did appear in Newsweek and on ABC’s Nightline. Our exploits were praised by conservative magazines and by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Many Dartmouth alumni found out about the administration’s misdoings through these national channels, and Dartmouth’s president was the chagrined recipient of numerous phone calls that began, “What the hell is going on up there?”