“My experience is that people who go through that cauldron of left-wing fascism [Dartmouth] are much better prepared for a career in public policy,” says Leadership president Morton Blackwell. “People get purified in the fire. These people aren’t being hurt. I offered John Sutter a job. He had five other job offers to choose from. His career is made.”
Regardless of the bright futures Review staffers might face, detractors still argue the staff is made up of racist, sexist, homophobic bullies — charges Review writers say are the vicious rantings of minorities and special-interest groups. (In fact, at least one campus group was not above cynically exploiting the paper’s ideology to further its own political agenda. Dartmouth’s Afro American Society helped fuel the racial overtones of the Cole incident, and wasted little time in issuing “demands” to the college administration after the initial ruckus, including a call for the immediate suspension of all four Review staffers — due process be damned.) But the Review staff could more accurately be described as a collection of repugnantly elitist snobs who, in their fervor to protect a blueblooded heritage, denounce anything that threatens their vision of what’s right, and white, in this world. Given the staffers’ grotesque insensitivity, those denunciations are inevitably tinged with racism, sexism, and homophobia. And that same editorial clumsiness makes what the Review tries to pass off as humor emerge more often as cruel ridicule rather than thoughtful satire
In a November 4, 1987 column John Sutter declared, “The majority of homosexuals are libido-crazed deviants whose promiscuous antics make rabbits look like monks.” The paper regularly calls feminists “wombats” and routinely tacks the suffix “-ette” onto the titles of female faculty members. Last year, the paper turned Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” line into “I have a tan, an awesome tan” to twit campus blacks. And in a February 10, 1988 editorial, the Review claimed Dartmouth’s curriculum was being “vulgarized” because it had no required core of studies built around Western civilization. Despite their intelligence, Review scribes show a crippling lack of forensic skills, not to mention tact and taste. And they’re just plain obnoxious.
The Cole incident is the perfect case in point. For years the Review has taken pot shots at Cole. Six years ago, it blasted one of his courses, prompting a $2.4 million lawsuit Cole later dropped. In February the Review repeated the attack, this time basing it on a tape recording of part of a lecture in Cole’s “American Music in the Oral Tradition,” a class in the historical roots of folk and ethnic music. The Review objected to Cole’s discussing poverty and racism in his attempt to illustrate why certain cultures bred certain forms of music. The staffers’ tender ears were also offended by the phrase “no pussy, no play,” which Cole used in explaining the sexual pressures women face in the music biz. The night before publication, Sutter called Cole’s house three times for comment. Twice Cole hung up. The third time, according to a Review transcript, he said, “You people have known that I don’t talk to you,” before calling the Review staff “white boy racists” and a host of obscene epithets. Sutter taped the call — a violation of New Hampshire law — and printed the transcript. A week later, reportedly on the advice of the Review’s attorney, Baldwin, Sutter, Quilhot, and Nolan went to Cole’s classroom to deliver the memo offering him space to respond. The brouhaha that ensued led to their suspensions.
