The Campus/Fast Times at Dartmouth High
Gladwell, Malcolm
THE CAMPUS ........................................................................................................................................................................... FAST TIMES AT...
...Two-hundred Seattleites led by Donahue engaged via satellite for over two hours in a "Citizens' Summit" with 200 Soviets from Leningrad ("ordinary citizens," we were assured by Marilyn O'Reilly, the Donahue consultant who hand-picked both audiences...
...Later in November they announced that they would turn off the floodlights they had set up on the green to illuminate the shacks...
...The students rolled up the green in a flat-bed truck, planning to dismantle-the shacks leisurely and distribute the wood to area charities as heating fuel for the needy...
...On the European front, the citizenry sends "peace choirs" and plans for a "peace park" to the Soviet Union...
...Perhaps because the place displays a certain savvy for what's called a "person to person" approach to foreign affairs...
...Monday, but half an hour before that deadline he reversed himself...
...Our beef," says Joe Leake, chairman of the Dartmouth Afro-American Society, "is with the administration...
...With little prompting from Posner the Lenin-graders counterattacked with their own familiar hit list of capitalist sins, producing a staccato, in-your-face sort of exchange that was mostly boring, never edifying, and ultimately, for both audiences, terribly frustrating...
...THE PHIL AND VLAD SHOW by Tory Stempf Seattle"The Phil Donahue Show" gave a new twist to international relations here on December 29...
...A few days later President David McLaughlin returned from a business trip...
...Even as the Anti-Shanties were rounding up sledgehammers for their night on the college green, in fact, DCD members were meeting to decide whether to dismantle the shanties themselves...
...The American complaint of "disappointment" is more problematic...
...well, modern...
...But the fact remains that throughout the three-month controversy the ad-ministration was distinguished by its weakness, and this made neither right nor left happy...
...The Alliance wanted to score points off Shanahan and McLaughlin for the rest of its agenda—an annual Martin Luther King Day teach-in, increasing recruitment of Hispanics, the handicapped, "and other traditionally oppressed groups other than blacks and Native Americans," and "adjudicable" Principles of Community—whatever that means...
...The problem, it seems, was politics...
...DCD activist Eric Ness was always certain that the shanties were illegal, even when the president and the dean were not so sure "It was a protest," he says simply, and a protest needs rules to break...
...This one lasted thirty hours...
...What is really needed in dealing with campus disobedience is a firm hand...
...Left alone, the shanties would most likely have died of natural causes...
...My major concern," says Stone, "was making it back for my 10 o'clock class...
...Friendship delegations" blessed by the city's ecumenical Church Council traipse back and forth regularly between here and our "sister city" Managua, and the city council recently proclaimed Seattle an official "sanctuary city" for Central American refugees...
...The students built two in the middle...
...At that point Shanahan instructed the campus police to remove the shantytown at 7 a.m...
...Fifteen minutes after a group of protesters gathered outside his window singing "We Shall Overcome," Shanahan buckled again...
...The day after the raid the DCD joined with the Afro-American Society, gay and lesbian groups, and other student organizations to form the "Dartmouth Alliance against Racism and Oppression" and staged another illegal sit-in at Parkhurst Hall...
...We weren't hanging out there much anyway," a DCD spokesman said...
...At the root of the controversy, say both students and faculty, is a lack of leadership from the dean and the president which has created an _anything-goes atmosphere at Dartmouth...
...In November, when they were erected by the Dartmouth Community for Divestment, they had been the center of attention...
...It's winter time and we were worried about our health...
...It's not their decision...
...The spirit that surrounded the construction of the shanties has faded and support of the DCD has dwindled," editorialized the daily Dartmouth, the college's other paper, on the day before the attack...
...The DCD erected the shanties over a November weekend to provide a symbol of the consequences of the college's investment policies for visiting trustees...
...Leo Rosten observed years ago that so far as he could see student radicals were really looking for adults—adults to confront, to oppose, and to emulate...
...Shanahan and McLaughlin didn't stop trying to remove the shanties...
...anything else...
...Says history professor Charles Wood, "The attack united the whole community regardless of where they stood on divestment before...
...it's certain that they didn't meet whom they expected—not, that is, someone like themselves, "just another human being...
...And although leaders of the group later claimed their timing was sheer coincidence, the symbolism was in-escapable...
...Statements from KING general manager and v.p...
...Granted, few personal views were ex-changed about abortion, careers, child-rearing, or marriage...
...It's like Soviet expansionism," she says of the protest on the Dartmouth Green...
...It means that anyone can go in and occupy Parkhurst and get away with it...
...I'm not . f i 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 sure the administration is in a position to dictate to us what to do," anti-apartheid activist George Bourozikas told Insight magazine...
...At a teach-in later in the week, students struggled to come to terms with the broader moral implications of the five-minute morning assault...
...A Party apparatchik must also have been relieved to find that so many Americans despise politics for being a barrier to "mutual understanding...
...Dean Edward Shanahan okayed the construction of a single structure so long as it was built on a corner of the college green...
...Everything pointed to a whitewash in the making...
...We demanded amnesty," one student leader said...
...and surely bewildered, maybe appalled, by American eagerness to ex-coriate our own country's behavior, usually in the guise of neutrality and evenhandedness...
...They defied him again...
...To begin with, the Soviet audience was struck by what Donahue called our "preoccupation with restrictions on the Soviet citizens...
...It was brown-shirt bullying on the order of Kristallnacht," the night in 1938 when the Nazis burned down Jewish shops and synagogues...
...But the problem was that Shanahan didn't understand the college's sit-in regulations, and in the resulting confusion the committee was forced to the ridiculous verdict that the protesters were guilty as charged but blameless by reason of their moral conviction...
...This was a vile, destructive act," Dartmouth professor Thomas Roos told the Washington Post the next day...
...And where does that leave civil disobedience...
...FAST TIMES AT DARTMOUTH HIGH by Malcolm Gladwell Sometimes even the Dartmouth Re-view outdoes itself...
...Even when he actually was tough, he ended up looking incompetent...
...Applause in both camps...
...Populism, progressivism, and internationalism run strong here...
...Not a chance...
...Instead they met Otherness, in the form of Homo sovieticus...
...Excluded from the audience by O'Reilly in order to maintain "balance" and eliminate "propaganda," they were (to put it mildly) concerned that the audience wouldn't ask the "tough" questions...
...At least one member of the Committee to Beautify the Green has resigned from the Review out of remorse, and all twelve members of the squad have been suspended from the college...
...We had to take over because the job that had to be done was not being done...
...Another participant said, "I think the time would have been better spent getting to know what the Russian people are really like and having them get to know what we're really like, too...
...The lack of Soviet "candor," Donahue was to reflect later, was his only disappointment in the summit venture...
...Iivo years ago, for instance, the electorate passed Initiative 28, which pledged the city to lobby against American military aid to Central America and amounted to an endorsement of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua...
...I wouldn't do it again because I see how many people took it," says Les Grant, who calls himself the first black ever to write for the Review...
...Today the shanties are gone, removed when McLaughlin and Shanahan dispatched a fork-lift, pneumatic drills, and police to the green in a belated authoritarian spasm...
...Of course, other unsettling aspects of "Soviet man" emerged as well: dogmatic, a bit paranoid, imbued with a sense of the wartime past that armors him against outside criticism...
...Since then, Central American "scholars" in the employ of the revolutionary left have been invited into private and public schools to give history lessons to our children...
...It's ours...
...From the beginning he had been providing the shantytown with round-the-clock police protection...
...He said he'd "prefer" if the shanties came down, but didn't set a particular time limit, muttering incoherently about "honest dialogue" and that the college, "if not encouraging" the protesters, should "at least be participating in the spirit of their activities...
...Tory Stempf is a writer living in Seattle...
...Shanahan decided to get serious...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...To begin with, the raid was carried out on the night of Martin Luther King Day...
...Peter Arnold, who re-signed as executive editor of the Review last year, says simply: "The Review can no longer look to any significant sec-tor of the college for support...
...badly misinformed (though he accused the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 29...
...We shouldn't be punished, we should be paid...
...Why was Seattle chosen for this goodwill mission...
...By mid-January they were not...
...With college sympathies fully behind DCD, Shanahan was walking softly and carrying a small stick...
...Given these predilections, it was no surprise that some local human rights groups like the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the World Without War Council, and the Polish Home Association picketed KING TV's studio and passed out "fact sheets" to arriving summiteers...
...Now he cut that to hourly spot checks...
...If you don't stop it immediately, it just keeps growing...
...The Russian end was handled by Soviet commentator Vladimir Posner, the dapper Americanist with the Brooklynese ac-cent who frequently appears in this country on television news shows like "Nightline...
...No one on the Committee to Beautify the Green ever thought things would get so out of control...
...Sean O'Hearn, '87, asked his fellow class-mates: "Are you, my friends, willing to deal with the racism in your hearts, the sexism, the classism, and oops, here's the tough one, homophobia, okay...
...If the Seattle summiteers failed to meet a "real" Russian, then surely reality was at fault...
...The dean then demanded that the DCD dismantle the shacks by Sunday...
...Sturges Dorrance, who wanted to "put human faces behind the superpowers" and "stick to human issues," didn't help...
...For her part, Debbie Stone says her group acted only because the ad-ministration was "paralyzed with fear...
...When members of the DCD occupied his offices at Parkhurst Hall for almost four hours in January, he brought them before the college disciplinary commit-tee...
...The administration proved so malleable that they, not the sledgehammer squad, became the focus of the controversy...
...Yes, one earnest young Seattleite conceded, both super-powers do perpetrate atrocities upon an innocent world, and he "opposes" both...
...The paper's advertising revenue has suffered...
...And that put everybody on the defensive...
...Everyone had wanted "more one-to-one human interaction...
...Indeed, the only Soviet gesture in this direction was some mention or other of a polluted lake...
...The discipline committee ruling that left his group guilty but blameless, Ness says, "set a dangerous precedent...
...It was directed too much toward political issues that we can't solve," complained a Boeing mechanic...
...Did the administration press charges against the protesters this time...
...At the same time it was a failure of leadership on the part of the college that made the shanties an issue in the first place...
...But this is not to say that nothing was revealed...
...The truth is, however, that the group—which dubbed itself the Dart-mouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival—was silly at precisely the wrong moment...
...Managing editor Debbie Stone says she "can't walk across campus without people screaming obscenities at me...
...The Alliance did not picket the offices of the Dartmouth Review and made only brief mention of the paper in its manifesto...
...But what was conceived as a morning-long operation lasted just five minutes, and what began as "trashremoval" soon took on the dimensions of a war crime...
...In sum we are, as a local reporter crowed with typical imprecision, "the only local jurisdiction in the U.S...
...A week after ten of its staffers were involved in a bizarre 3 a.m...
...with its own foreign policy...
...The administration's failure to punish acts of vandalism in the past may have led the Reviewers to believe that they could vandalize the shanties and get away with it...
...For example, there was the matter of that instinctive Russian patriotism that made our yen for self-flagellation look so...
...At Dartmouth College, it seems, the problem is that there are no adults to be found...
...sledgehammer attack on a shanty-town erected by Dartmouth anti-apartheid demonstrators, the controversial conservative student newspaper quoted Horace: "Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans: It's lovely to be silly at the right moment...
...So it was quite a shock when the Seattle delegation came out swinging,demanding explanations for Soviet policy on Jewish emigration, Afghanistan, SS-20s in Europe, Sakharov, human rights...
...For Dartmouth's vocal minority student groups, which had staged a candlelight march to the shantytown hours before, this was racism...
...Thus the demolition team ended up doing more damage to itself than Malcolm Gladwell is assistant editor at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...By making a victim out of the DCD, the Review gave it new life...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
