Poisoned Ivy

...What Poisoned Ivy does do, however, and do very well, is illuminate that most peculiar of American phenomena-the Ivy League college...

...At a gathering of faculty, Hart's analysis is scathing: "Some wore leather jackets or ponchos...

...Of a class 87 percent white, almost 60 percent of the total were 'B' students in high school, and almost 20 percent were 'C and below...

...And this notion of good citizenship also explains the Dartmouth faculty's current and unshakable allegiance to so virulent a strain of liberalism...

...Could the new Dartmouth man play football...

...Consider, for example, Hart's views on affirmative action...

...Hart makes a hilarious if inadequate defense of a fraternity under fire for its annual snow sculpture of female breasts: "Clearly Sigma Nu never considered making a snow sculpture of a woman's personality...

...Teevens was a legend," he writes of a classmate, "partly because of his exploits in athletics, but also because of what he represented off the playing field...

...Why not let a ghetto kid benefit from going to school with the son of the president of Exxon...

...Ideological disfiguration...

...The case for letting blacks in on this game comes down, in the absence of traditional objections, to charity...

...The old English schools always had the sense of noblesse oblige...

...It is not clear what Ben Hart would like to do with all the liberals at Dartmouth, or even if he thinks there is no leftism fifty pushups and a can of beer can't fix...

...Throughout the bitter and now-famous struggle between Hart's outspokenly conservative Dartmouth Review and the faculty of Dartmouth College, this is how the battle lines were drawn in Hart's mind...

...It won't do her any good...

...This is why these arguments are made most effectively about law and medical schools...

...That being said, I wonder whether the social philosophy of Dartmouth put forth by Hart lives up to that of the school's past...

...POISONED IVY Benjamin Hart/Stein and Day/$16.95 Malcolm Gladwell The most stunning moment of Poisoned Ivy, the collegiate memoir of Dartmouth Review co-founder Ben Hart, occurs when Hart accuses the liberals running Dartmouth of being wimps...

...True, that may have only been a figure of speech, but Hart wants to take it literally...

...What one alumnus recalls about the Dartmouth of the thirties-'President Hopkins was like a father to me...

...But when those hopes were shattered, and the Dartmouth presidency became as much a forum for liberalism as before, Hart alone read the signs: "This was the new David McLaughlin, no longer the bronzed image of masculinity he once was...

...She had a gifted mind as well...

...At first he saw hope in the new appointment: "McLaughlin, on the other hand, was virile...

...Speaking of left-leaning Dartmouth President John Kemeny, for example, Hart is devastating, quoting a friend-"The man hates everything with a hint of macho'- before finishing off the indictment himself: "Kemeny was not in good physical shape...

...Athletics," he writes, "highlight a truth about life that people often do not like to face, a truth that is not readily apparent in the classroom...

...It is a condescending gesture, but nevertheless a real one...

...I found her to be more than good to look at...

...Others at the Dartmouth Review have grasped the nature of the struggle much better than he has, and have realized that there is in the old notion of the Ivy League a certain nobility...

...But what is arresting is the air of extraordinary moral authority Hart assumes...

...He was a chain smoker with a chronic cough...

...Maturity, if you want to call it that, comes by the end of the book: "I really liked this girl...

...If they couldn't dress, how could they think...

...It is precisely this strain of altruism, however, that Hart mocks in the new Dartmouth mentality, derisively quoting one Dartmouth student- "The purpose of this college is to instill an ethos into its students, so that no matter what they do, they will have some idea that an education is a means to serving society, instead of just a ticket to a fat salary...

...If Dartmouth has so clearly departed from the standards of an "elite" school, then the suspension of academic qualifications for minority students is hardly egregious...

...On the subject of Kemeny's successor, David McLaughlin, Hart's reasoning is more rigorous...

...To him, liberals Malcolm Gladwell is assistant editor at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C had adopted Dartmouth's original injunction to take the sons of the "gentlemen of Virginia" and "make Men of them" and, by adhering to an effete anti-traditional agenda, entirely perverted it...

...The premise behind the Ivies, of course, was originally very English: that in educating the children of the upper classes the imparting of values and the shaping of character was as important as academic preparation...

...Physical deterioration had set in...

...Even Hart's attitude toward what he calls the "apposite sex" has less to do with Daniel Webster and Robert Frost than with Nelson Rockefeller...

...Hart is rightly disgruntled with the extent to which the Dartmouth conscience is being put to left-leaning political purposes, but that should not obscure the principle that a school based as Dartmouth appears to be upon lines of class needs a charitable impulse to give it legitimacy...

...In fact, the so-called social benefits of Dartmouth would seem to be just as easily applied to upper-class whites as lower-class blacks...

...Dartmouth's purpose is to produce not scholars but citizens...

...And consider the adolescent sentiment in: "An ugly girl can smile and blink all she wants...

...Or spend an evening of drinking in a fraternity basement...

...Ben Hart was educated at Dartmouth and is manifestly displeased with the results...

...While other Ivies, Harvard for instance, have in some sense departed from this mold by a greater emphasis on academic achievement, Dartmouth is still very conscious of its social role...

...Or quaff ten beers without batting an eyelash...

...This is, one assumes, what Ben Hart is driving at in his descriptions of the thrills of male camaraderie and tackle football...

...The old Dartmouth knew that...

...When Ben Hart does that he will, no doubt, write a better book, but until then we can agree only with the plaintive premise of Poisoned Ivy...

...The endless descriptions of fraternity drinking games and breathless accounts of friends' outfits-"Jones was wearing a blue-and-white-striped seersucker jacket, white flannel trousers rolled up at the cuffs, loafers and white socks . . ."-make that abundantly clear...

...To find that notion, though, it is necessary to go beyond collegiate high-jinks and leave the fraternity behind...

...He once said that if I wasn't an asset to my family, my community, and my country when I left Dartmouth, Dartmouth had failed'-is still largely true today...

...At their best, the Tom Browns and the men of Rudyard Kipling were adherents to "muscular Christianity," not just athletes but also men of conscience...

...Feminism, atheism, Marxism, liberalism, and unattractive-ness...

...It has not been and is not an academically "elite" college in any sense of the word...

...Hart's conclusion is sober: "Buddy Teevens represented the old Dartmouth...

...There, in a man's world, Hart finds nobility...

...These are not particularly edifying attitudes, and it is difficult to see what made them so worthy of Hart's ministrations...

...But can they be made about Dartmouth College...

...Giants in their time, he constantly reminds himself, like "Daniel Webster, Robert Frost, and Nelson Rockefeller [!] walked these same paths...

...Hart seems, in the end, to have less of an affinity with the old educational ethos than simply with an upper-class summer-camp hedonism...

...These are key themes for Hart, who sees in them the true Dartmouth experience...

...But now...

...Or Hart's sudden pang of frat-boy angst: "What if I married someone who looked great and she turned out to be a bitch...

...It's all somehow connected," Hart later insists...

...Or enjoy a football game...

...He could always be found in the Beta basement playing William Tell with a plastic cup and a keg of beer, or wrestling on the floor with his younger brother...

...And something those who have a definite idea of their obligations to society would willingly do...

...Without impugning quotas that are in and of themselves compelling, it is important to note that the case against them is most applicable to an elite situation, a situation where the targeted group is harmed because it cannot compete with other entrants, and where those excluded are harmed because they are arbitrarily denied a place they otherwise deserve...

...His complexion was pasty, as if he had not ventured out of doors since taking office...

...Indeed, it is not even clear whether Hart would like us to consider these questions at all, since, at the margin, he does not pretend this is a particularly thoughtful book...

...This Hart's vision does not have...

...Didn't the British once say that their Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton...

...Burlap bags, funny looking shoes, blue jeans, and beards seemed to be the uniform...

...Girlfriends are "acquired...

...Further, 22 percent were in the second 20 percent of their high school class, and over 30 percent were between the 40th and 60th percentile...

...He had suffered a recent heart attack...

...The reputation it has had, and maintained, of a "party" college for the rich-the USC of the east, as some have called it-is largely accurate...

...Statistics from the class of '87, for example, show that a great percentage of Dartmouth's regular-admission, non-affirmative action students are academically mediocre...

...It's not so much that the charge is surprising, especially since one of the principal accomplishments of Poisoned Ivy is to place manhood and virility squarely to the right of the political spectrum...

...He had been tremendous as a tight-end for Dartmouth in the early 50s, and, in fact, went on to play pro football for the Philadelphia Eagles...

...The old boy network that Dartmouth is a part of has long advanced graduates not so much on their merit as on their connections...

...This was moral collapse...