Along with racism and controversy, two perennially intimate bedfellows, Dartmouth College has found itself party to a less than holy trinity in the eyes of other minority communities in recent decades.
Take, for example, the infamous 1986 shanty affair. In the midst of worldwide demonstration against apartheid, a student group called the Dartmouth Community for Divestment built four plywood shanties on the Green to protest Dartmouth College investment in companies that conducted business in South Africa. But that was just the beginning.
At 3:35 a.m. on January 21, one morning after the College Martin Luther King day celebration and two months after the structures had been erected, a group of 12 students, acting under the moniker of The Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, destroyed the shanties and unwittingly projected the College into the national media spotlight.
The Village Voice would later call the destruction of the shanties "the college event of the year." Newsweek magazine ran the headline, "Shanties on the Green, The Dartmouth family is embarrassed again." An image depicting a DCD banner hung across the wreckage reading "Racists Did This" appeared beside stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time Magazine. All the major television networks covered the incident.
The Dartmouth ran a house editorial that echoed the sentiments expressed by many students. "Whether Tuesday's attack was specifically an act of 'racism,' as many students believed, is debatable. What is important is that [some students] viewed it that way. Numerous others saw the attack as another in a long line of insensitive actions that the administration has allowed to go unpunished," The Dartmouth Editorial Staff wrote.
College President David McLaughlin and Dean of Students Edward Shanahan refused to take immediate executive action against the attackers, or even to publicly condemn their act of violence.
Frustrated at the vanity of their diplomatic efforts up to that point, 100 students and several professors occupied Parkhurst administration building. Thirty hours later, classes were cancelled and more than 1,000 students, faculty and administrators convened at the old Webster Hall to discuss racism, violence and diversity at Dartmouth.
The dialogue was productive, as disaffected faculty and students advanced more than 50 proposals asking for more input in College administrative decisions, and seriously calling into question the ability of McLaughlin to lead the College. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences even debated a vote of no confidence in the president, which did not pass.
On Feb. 12, 1986, the administration bowed to overwhelming student and faculty sentiment, suspending four of the attackers indefinitely, seven for two terms and one for a single term.
Meanwhile, the administration dealt with another serious threat from the opposite corner. Ten of the 12 shanty attackers were staff members of the independent off-campus conservative paper, The Dartmouth Review.
The Review's first cover after the incident read, "Two months too late." The Review jokingly advertised the sale of limited edition commemorative sledge hammers. The protesters were called "Preppie Pinkos."
The Review attackers appealed their punishments. On April 14, former New Hampshire Governor Walter Peterson, to whom McLaughlin appealed for mediation, recommended that the sentences be commuted.
Lifting all but four of the suspensions, which he reduced from indefinite duration to one term, McLaughlin justified his act of clemency by asserting that the attackers had "experienced significant hardship" as a result of national publicity.
A DCD occupation of the bell tower commenced unnoticed, scattered and lackluster demonstrations continued throughout the remainder of the academic term and the final page of the most sensational chapter in Dartmouth history turned by spring. The Trustees did not divest until 1989.
For better or for worse, the shanty affair and the issues it dredged to the fore still resonate at Dartmouth one and a half decades later, as the College undergoes a Student Life Initiative, which, in the words of College President James Wright, "must strengthen that special feeling" of "community that draws in and touches those of us who are privileged to study, to teach, and to work here."
But after a short respite, more racism and controversy followed. The Review was at the center of the brouhaha in September 1990, when, two days before Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday of the year, and two weeks after matriculation of the Class of 1994, the paper's masthead had an excerpt from Mein Kampf: "Therefore, I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord's work."
The editors of The Review claimed internal sabotage, writing in a statement that "the human filth that placed this trash in our newspaper made a mockery ... and cast a calamity upon all those who are Jewish."
The College community was furious, and more than 2,000 people attended a Dartmouth United Against Hate rally on the Green in condemnation of the publication.
The controversies surrounding The Review attracted much media attention. The publicity portrayed Dartmouth as a bastion of reactionary ultraconservatism, a reputation which has proven a bane to an Admissions Office bent upon transmitting the image of a progressive institution to prospective students during the past decade, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg.
In March 1982, the paper printed a column entitled "Dis sho' ain't no jive, bro." The column, written nearly a decade before Ebonics, in what the editors called "Black English," contained passages such as, "Dese boys be sayin' dat we becomin' here to Dartmut' and not takin' the classics."
The column enraged the College African American community and prompted former United States Congressman Jack Kemp to resign from the Review advisory board.
In his letter of resignation Kemp wrote, "I am concerned that the association of my name with The Dartmouth Review is interpreted as an endorsement, and I emphatically do not endorse the kind of antics displayed in your article."
In November 1997, for example, The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern Humor Magazine came under scrutiny for its allegedly racist content, a piece entitled "Eskimo Pickup Lines," and another called "The Dartmouth Review Dictionary."
The latter, which included definitions of terms such as "faggot" and "spics" was designed to parody the "subtle racism" of the Review, Jack-O-Lantern President Dan Powell '00 asserted. The writers of the pieces in question apologized to the community at large, and after considering derecognition of the humor magazine, the Committee on Student Organizations decided not to take action.
Dartmouth fraternities and sororities also come under fire for alleged intolerance. Party themes such as Luau, Miss Saigon, South of the Border, and Miami, the latter of which invited guests to come dressed "like Cubans," have roused various levels of offense in recent years. In 1998 the now infamous Ghetto Party vaulted the College into the public eye once again as Dartmouth Greeks served for discussion fodder on the late night talk show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.
This past February the Dartmouth Greek system once again found itself accused of intolerance and misogyny during the notorious Psi Upsilon incident, in which a female student reported having been the target of four brothers chanting "Wah hoo wah, scalp 'em, scalp 'em," and, "Wah hoo wah, scalp those bitches" as she walked past the fraternity on her way home one evening.
After a hearing in early March, the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council Judicial Committee found Psi U guilty of violating Standards of Conduct relating to harassment and College standards of behavior and leadership. The Office of Residential Life placed the house under two terms of social probation, which prohibits alcohol on fraternity property, and Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman rejected a subsequent appeal for clemency from the house.
In February 1998, a Star of David and the words "Death to You" were discovered on the door of an apartment housing three female Jewish students. After a fruitless investigation, Safety and Security and the Hanover Police left the hate crime unsolved.
More successful, however, was the investigation which ensued in November 1999, after Topliff undergraduate advisor Charles Gussow '01 found his message board emblazoned with the words "KKK, Kill Kosher Kykes," "Jews suck," and "Hitler was a great man."
Authorities did not need to look far for the culprit. Earlier in the day former Freshman Class President Peter Cataldo '00 had entered Gussow's room, said only "I hate the Jews," and then left. Cataldo was evicted from Topliff and banned from College property. When The Dartmouth reached him at The Hanover Inn, he refused to comment, saying only "Praise Jesus Christ, the only son of the only God."
Cataldo was later arrested by Hanover Police for criminal trespassing on Fayerweather Hill. A previous trespass warning had been issued when he attended a party at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house on the night before. Charges against Cataldo were eventually dropped, according to Hanover Police Chief Nick Giaccone. As of January 2000, Cataldo was not enrolled at Dartmouth, but would not specify as to whether he would return.
April 1999 saw the most recent instance of hate crime on campus, when a round of anonymous mailings consisting of offensive cartoon books and bearing the return address of the Campus Crusade for Christ targeted homosexual, Jewish and other minority student leaders. The Christian group denied all involvement, and the College later discovered the identity of the perpetrator but refused to release a name.
