Interview with a Former Editor

Bernard Chapin of the conservative Enter Stage Right web magazine has posted an interview with former Dartmouth Review editor James Panero ’98.

Panero describes his political coming-of-age at Dartmouth:

As for my political maturation, liberalism has a remarkable way of turning you off the more you encounter it. At Dartmouth, I was shocked at how liberal, or I should say “illiberal,” the Dartmouth administration could be. As a school with a liberal administration and a moderate to conservative student body, Dartmouth’s attitude towards its students is nothing short of frightening. I believe that you can at once love a school and loathe its administration, and for those of us who loved Dartmouth there was The Dartmouth Review, the famous independent weekly that is still thriving after a quarter of a century. I joined the Review my freshman year, and I found my own education at that paper, becoming editor my Sophomore spring. The Dartmouth Review, my major in Classics, and my fraternity made for a great four years and left me with a strong sense of what you might call identity. So when I encountered the Mandarin culture of Brown as a graduate student, let’s just say that it didn’t put that identity in doubt. Instead I applied for a job at The New Criterion.