Part of the Problem

For those of you who subscribe or are otherwise out of the daily Dartmouth loop, here are the facts:

A fraternity and a sorority held a closed party several weeks ago with a `ghetto' theme. Nobody much noticed until a girl who had been at the party published a column in The Daily Dartmouth announcing the offense she had taken to the theme (she apparently cultivates some identification with `ghetto'). This led to the predictable uproar, the usual suspects were rounded up, the ghetto party was branded as racist, classist and most likely sexist and anti-immigrant, and students organized two vigils, a rally, and a `panel discussion' — the partridge in the feelings crowd's pear tree. They hung flyers around the campus that said suitably fascist things like `If you're not part of the solution, you ARE the problem.' Funny the tone the diversity crowd takes when it works itself into a feeding frenzy.

So on with the story. The panel discussion, as I suppose I should have expected, was politically cleansed; internal debate non-existent, the podium became a six-voice (four student, two faculty) staging ground for a rhetorical PC blitzkrieg. The students weren't so bad, they mainly related fairly innocuous (if unduly self-righteous: superiority from poverty) personal stories about growing up poor and even made one or two thoughtful points about unconscious racism and the problem of race relations at Dartmouth etcetera etcetera.

The really nasty part came when William Cook, the folksy baritone who trots out to lend local support to nearly every nouveau-PC national cause (yes, even ebonics) but who normally redeems himself by being a terrific Professor of English, leaned to the microphone.

Professor Cook pronounced the decision to throw a party with a ghetto theme indicative of the “shitpile of corruption” endemic to Dartmouth's community — a community, by the way, with little chance of moral redemption. Cook refused to accept the contrition of the ghetto party's sponsors and refused to entertain the explanation that, while the choice of theme might have been stupid, it was not in fact racist — anybody who claimed they hadn't foreseen the consequences, he said, should be laughed at. Cook also voiced an explicit defense of Political Correctness — PC, he intoned, (keep in mind the folksy baritone) is a synonym for `manners;' anybody guilty of bad manners of the sort expressed by those who organized the ghetto party does not deserve the protections free speech affords. Scary stuff.

More scary when you consider the local context. Last week, Sena Ku, a member of the class of 2001 who is only relevant here because of her position as intern to Dean Scott Brown, sent an e-mail out to officers of all recognized student organizations asking them to recount for her incidents of hateful or offensive speech. For what? Scott Brown, it seems, is cooking up a speech code.

Even more scary when you consider the national context. As Steven Menashi reports (page 8), over 300 colleges and universities now have speech codes — bylaws that allow administrations to suspend or expel students for `offensive' speech.

`Offensive,' of course, is entirely subjective, and so these provisions become the legalistic basis for political sanitizing. Dartmouth, with a politically permissive administration and exploratory queries by Sena Ku and Scott Brown, may well be on its way to joining them.

When Professor Cook swung loose with his attack on free speech, the audience went momentarily silent, but Cook, unswayed, kept plugging and finished up with enough rhetorical swagger and political self-righteousness that the assembled, suitably convinced of the nobility of his ends, gave Cook's means the benefit of the doubt and Cook himself a proud ovation.

I don't want to bore you with libertarian moralizing, but the simple fact is there are some things people of all political bents should agree are not only worth keeping around but that essential to the preservation of our civil society, and chief among these is freedom of speech. Colleges across the country, though, have bent to the flood of prevailing political opinion, and, frankly, I have little confidence in official Dartmouth to do otherwise.

-- Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Editor-in-Chief