More Tumult In the Ivy Halls

In the early 80s, when my dad’s politics began its rightward swing, he subscribed to the Dartmouth Review. The Dartmouth Review was a fledgling paper for new, young conservatives who have aged into middle aged conservatives. Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza were among its founders. It was actually quite well written and entertaining (an enraged Black Studies professor once bit Laura Ingraham), so my whole family got embroiled in Dartmouth politics even though none of us ever attended classes there.

But that was a long time ago, and I haven’t thought about Dartmouth in ages until one of my readers, Dave, started sending me links to a recent controversy. Two alums and bloggers, Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki, staged a coup and were elected onto the Board of Trustees. They campaigned for more funding for faculty and less on administration, a greater emphasis on classroom teaching, the removal of speech codes, less restrictions of the fraternities, and more support of sports. Their win was aided by positive press from Powerline, Roger L. Simon, and the Volokh Conspiracy (Zywicki blogs there).

This story is interesting on several levels. First, there’s the blogger angle. Bloggers are getting involved and making political changes at the university level.

Second, a lot of commentary sees this as a conservative victory. However, I don’t see a clear cut right-left angle on this one. I’ve read many leftie commentary on the need to give more attention to classroom teaching and less to fattening administration. Free speech crosses both ways. Perhaps there’s a subcontext to this fight that I missed in my quick skim of articles tonight.

Probably most importantly, this tumult at Darmouth is just part of the on-going debate of what universities are supposed to look like. Are faculty too liberal or too white and male? (Digging himself out of his hole, Larry Summers just announced that Harvard would spend $50 million in an effort to make Harvard more diverse.) Where is all that tuition money going? How are they molding the next generation?

Is all this debate new? I would love to do some content analysis of major newspapers to see if news articles on the topic have increased in recent years. I think it has. Hubby thinks that 9/11 stirred up a lot of this, because guys like Said created a lot of animosity. It could be the rising cost of tuition and state support of universities are forcing people to ask questions. It could be that a university degree is more critical that ever for middle class life.