But Freedman, described by admirers as a “radical thinker,” neither liberal nor conservative, who carries his convictions like a torch, spoke up. For the first time, the college leadership took an official stand behind professors and administration subordinates. Where former presidents had remained mute while the Review shoved thorns into the college’s side, Freedman — without threatening cessation or censorship of the paper — fired a retaliatory strike against a publication he said was “poisoning the intellectual environment of our campus.” And, though the right decried him as a bully — current Review editor-in-chief Chris Whitman said the speech went “way overboard,” and both the Wall Street Journal and Feder penned scathing attacks — Freedman was actually just evening the sides. For eight years, the Dartmouth Review, brandishing the First Amendment as a cudgel to bash homosexuals, feminists, and minorities, has had the money and moral support of the New Right standing behind it. Now for the first time, it has something — the prestige of the university president — standing in front of it.
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Since the Dartmouth Review debuted in the spring of 1980, its staff has boasted of the paper’s uniqueness, about how it’s a spicy alternative to the Dartmouth, the college’s official student paper. Indeed, Review staffers would like to pass themselves off as a bunch of spunky rebels offering a dose of healthy dissent for the college to reckon with. It’s no surprise that, following Freedman’s bitter condemnation, the paper cast itself in the role of the beleaguered underdog picked upon by Big Brother Dartmouth. But that portrayal is grossly inaccurate. Any newspaper that survives for eight years, even one published by student volunteers, needs someone to pay the bills, someone to depend on for financial, and in the Review’s case, spiritual, support. And since the beginning, the Review, lacking sympathy or cash from the college and with sparse advertising revenues, has turned to a wealthy network of right-wing foundations and alumni to keep it in the journalistic gadfly business. Far from being the conservative heir to the free-wheeling, seat-of-the-pants student publications of two decades ago, the Dartmouth Review is the well-oiled and well-heeled campus arm of a political machine that’s coaching a whole new wave of young Reagan revolutionaries.
Cash for the original issue, published in June 1980, came primarily from conservative alumni who were then in the midst of a drive to reinstate the schools Indian mascot, a symbol dumped six years earlier because some students and alumni felt it was racist and insensitive. Some alumni, however, saw the 1974 decision as a foul coup by the liberal establishment, a sacrilege that discarded more than 200 years of tradition to placate a few malcontents. Saving the Indian became a primary symbolic objective in the conservative traditionalists’ broader battle to save the college from the curse of liberalism. And by dumping money into the Review, they could assure themselves of a campus-based weapon in their campaign. So far, they’ve gotten their money’s worth. The Review distributes free Indian T-shirts to freshmen ever year, and sells a host of Indian paraphernalia, from hats and canes to neckties and underwear. The end of each Review story is punctuated with a tiny Indian head, and in the November 4, 1987 issue editor-in-chief Christopher Baldwin listed the return of the Indian as one of the paper’s four top concerns. Chris Whitman, who replaced Baldwin, says the Indian war is all in the name of tradition — a tradition that ended a decade before he showed up on campus.
