Alumni support today continues in earnest and, by outside estimates, accounts for most of the Review’s budget. (Editors won’t say how much money they have to spend, but an annual budget of $125,000 is most observers’ best guess.) The paper brags that 4700 alumni — about a 10th of Dartmouth’s living graduates — pay $25 each for a year’s subscription to the Review, and some “contribute above that,” Whitman says. Among those is George Champion, a 1926 graduate and retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and an ardent Review fan who now chairs the Ernest Martin Hopkins Institute (EMHI.) Named after a former Dartmouth president, that group is a coalition of alumni who want to bring back the Dartmouth of 30 years ago—a college that was almost exclusively white, male, and devoted to traditional Western culture. Through ads in the Review, the institute rails against minority studies, women’s studies, gay student groups, affirmative-action programs, and Dartmouth’s lack of a Western-civilization core curriculum—positions mirrored by the Review. As Champion puts it, Dartmouth is plagued by “an unfortunate minority…who are trying to disrupt all the old Judeo-Christian traditions and ethics that made this country great.”
From its earliest days, the paper moved to tap conservative foundations for greenbacks, says Review founder Gregory Fossedal, who is now with the ultra-conservative Hoover Institute, in Palo Alto, California. The New York-based John M. Olin Foundation, which supports the “institutions that America was built on,” according to executive director James Pierson, pitched in $10,000 during the first two years and $25,000 in 1986. And the Institute for Educational Affairs, a conservative money pool that spends about $250,000 on 34 like-minded campus papers and offers training seminars and support services for collegiate right-wingers, reportedly gave $10,000 in the early years and $2500 last year. Fossedal, however, estimates that foundation support never accounted for more than 15 percent of the Review’s budget.
Spiritually, however, professional right-wing support for the Review runs much deeper. Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth English professor and senior editor for the National Review, serves as the paper’s informal adviser and writes an occasional column (on the order of “Goetz: A People’s Hero.”) The National Review frequently uses its pages to shill for the campus tabloid, and the Dartmouth Review lists an advisory board that includes such prominent right-wing journalists as Patrick Buchanan, William Rusher, and R. Emmett Tyrrell. William F. Buckley Jr. gets a “special thanks” mention every week.
To say, however, that professional conservative activists are pulling the strings at the Dartmouth Review would be not only inaccurate, but also a bit of an insult to the Review staff. By all accounts, the students who work for the paper are exceptionally intelligent and talented. In fact, says Alex Huppe, “if these students weren’t so bright and attractive, they’d be easier to dismiss.” But there is also little doubt that their activities at Dartmouth are not only encouraged but rewarded by the conservative powers outside the Ivy League. In addition to Fossedal at the Hoover Institute, the list of Review alumni includes a senior policy adviser at the White House; speech writers for Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Secretary of Transportation James Burnley; a press secretary for Republican Senator William Armstrong of Colorado; and, according to a Review tongue-in-cheek recruitment ad, “various capitalists who trample the poor and rape the environment.” Even the recently suspended Review editors weren’t idle for long. Christopher Baldwin will spend three months at the National Review (managing editor Linda Bridges says he was picked for the job before the Cole incident), and former executive editor John Sutter was snatched up by the Leadership Institute, a think tank that specializes in training young conservatives.
