The Dartmouth Review: April 24, 2000

The Dartmouth Review

Profs Fight Censorship in Court
by Matthew Tokson
On March 30, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for a lawsuit by tenured English professor Michael A. Hollister of Portland State University alleging that the university violated his free speech rights when it retaliated against him for comments he made ridiculing feminist literary criticism. The court ruled that Hollister's colleagues “had engaged in ridicule, harassment, and humiliation of him, creating an environment so hostile that his ability to teach his specialty at PSU had been severely impaired,” and therefore Hollister could sue his colleagues and the university. Hollister has previously sued nine department colleagues in 1995, charging them with retaliating against him for comments that he had made about feminist criticism.

A Victory for Truth
by Jeffrey Hart
In a decision last week, a British court rejected a libel suit by American historian David Irving against an American academic critic of his work, Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University. There were many levels of importance in this suit. In its largest sense, it involved the duty of historians to approach as closely as possible to historical fact—to guard “memory” as a vital part of our history of who we are. Into all of this now entered David Irving, whom Professor Lipstadt denounced in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. She called Irving a dangerous manipulator and shoddy historian who manipulated history to downplay the slaughter of European Jews and Hitler’s role in it. Irving sued for libel, alleging that Lipstadt had damaged his career and misrepresented him as an historian.

Jobs Leave Third World, Radicals Cheer
by Noah Hutson-Ellenberg
The Workers Rights Consortium has two full-time employees and operates out of an upstairs utility room of a socially-minded New York City church—a recipe, if history is any guide, for a peculiar brand of political greatness. These two right-minded individuals (and presumably their spiritual advisor) have spent the last year swaggering through the heady political climate of the moment—international trade and labor law—with banners of righteousness duly raised.

The Trustees Rule Against Students
by Matthew Tokson
“This is not a referendum,” promised Dartmouth College President James Wright two winters ago when the Five Principles were first announced, and last week he and the College's Trustees made good on that promise. The April 15, 2000 Statement by the Board of Trustees, released at a Trustee breakfast, supports the major principles of the Student Life Initiative Report despite the overwhelming opposition of Dartmouth's students and alumni to most of its reforms. Many students had hoped that the Student Assembly's response, considered to be both (largely) representative of student opinion and yet moderate and balanced enough to be accepted by the Trustees, would have a significant impact on the Trustee's final decision. The Assembly itself was enthusiastic about the high number (2,211) of students who participated in the SA Response Poll. The overall student support for the SA Response was a whopping 87%.

Congress Needs a Flush by Marc Levin
Development Bankruptcy by Andrew Grossman
Finding Destiny in Ascutney, Vermont by Nilanjan Banerjee
Indian Baseball: Scalping the Ivy League by Curran Stockwell

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt