Joe Rago Memorial Issue (8.14.2017)

Hanover Review Inc. P.O. Box 343 Hanover NH, 03755

Volu m e 3 7 , Is su e 6

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IN MEMORIAM: JOE RAGO ‘05 (1983-2017)

JOE RAGO (CENTER) during his time as Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review

Joe Rago ‘05, Former Editor On President of The Review, Dies at 34 McLaughlin Joseph R. Torsella

Summer Editor-in-Chief Joseph Rago ’05, former Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review and a Pulitzer Prize-winning member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, passed away on Thursday, July 20 at his home in New York City. He was 34.

Rago was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts on January 6, 1983. After graduating Falmouth High School in 2001, he attended Dartmouth College as an undergraduate.

His time at Dartmouth was distinguished by virtue of his impact on two organizations: Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity and The Dartmouth Review. After the temporary derecognition of Phi Delt in 2000, Rago and 18 other Sophomores became the first ‘colonists’ of an eventually successful attempt to return Phi Delt to campus.

Speaking to The Dartmouth Review, members of that fraternity noted Rago’s lasting legacy at the institution.

At The Dartmouth Review, he rose through the ranks to become Editor-in-Chief, and served with great distinction. He was particularly well known for deeply-researched articles, for which he relied on the College Archives at Rauner Library, and for the wit and humor he displayed as early as his first article at the paper.

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment during his time as Editor-in-Chief was the publication, in 2005, of excerpts of confidential documents from the Student Life Initiative (SLI) of 1999. These documents were an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at a moment of crisis for Dartmouth’s administration, which would reverse key rec-

ommendations – namely, to make the Greek system at Dartmouth “substantially coeducational” – in response to immediate student backlash.

Rago also spearheaded much original reporting on Dartmouth architecture and history. He graduated with a degree in History, and served on the board of the Review after graduation.

Rago went on to become a Bradley Fellow intern at The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2005. There he was noticed by Editor Paul Gigot for his impressive ability to write and think, and he was hired as a copyeditor upon completion of the internship. In 2007, he began writing editorials for the Editorial Board of the paper, and quickly made himself known for his policy expertise and writing ability. He was described by his colleagues as a

“reporter’s opinion writer” in recognition of these qualities.

He particularly distinguished himself in the health care debate of 2009-2010, which ended in the successful passing into law of the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, at the age of 28, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Barack Obama.” Rago wrote a total of 1,353 editorials for The Wall Street Journal, all of which were anonymous and were considered to “speak for the paper.” His final editorial, “The Obamacare Republicans,” was published the day before his death.

We at the Review are deeply saddened by the news of Joe Rago’s death. He will forever remain in our memory as a shining example of a journalist, writer, and friend.

THE REVIEW HONORS JOE RAGO Editor’s Note: Joe Rago’s contribution to our pages was memorable and essential. He elevated campus dialogue, raised serious issues with a smile, and never stopped going all out. In honor of his memory, we have chosen to dedicate this issue to celebrating his life and his work here at The Review. In these pages you will hear from Joe’s friends and colleagues, who remember him as a spirited, thoughtful man - always on his game, but never too serious. You will see the same qualities in his writing. We have also chosen to republish a selection of Joe’s work for The Review in his honor. Written between 2003 and 2005, these pieces illustrate the depth and value of his contribution to this paper. Joe, we are forever in your debt.

Joe Rago

Former Editor-in-Chief Published Oct. 18, 2004 David Thomas McLaughlin passed away in August. He was a member of the Class of 1954, a 1955 graduate of the Amos Tuck School, a member of the Board of Trustees from 1971 to 1981, and from 1981 to 1987 the fourteenth president of Dartmouth College. When he died, he was seventy-two years old and fifty-four of those years – from the day he became an undergraduate in 1950 to the moment of his final summons – were both distinguished and haunted by a kind of fanaticism for this College.

I don’t mean to characterize President McLaughlin as phrenetic or lunatic, and I hope no one would

deem me disrespectful of his memory. Rather, for those who care deeply for Dartmouth his fanaticism is vindicated: it confirms the extraordinary power of this institution in the lives of young men and women.

But it is difficult to consider his life and times without sadness, too. The years he superintended Dartmouth were almost certainly the most brutal in College history, and his self-styled and self-absorbed opponents denounced him with ferocity that bordered on cruelty – he was condemned not for his positions or for what he believed or even for his character but for what he ineffably was. The more one lingers over his Presidency, the more elegiac it becomes.

> ARTICLES PAGE 8 ‘OLD SCHOOL’ DARTMOUTH The late Joe Rago writes about Dartmouth, the moral ambiguity of the past, and ‘Old School’ living.

> ARTICLES PAGE 9

2 Monday – August 14, 2017

The Dartmouth Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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For thirty-five years, The Dartmouth Review has been the College’s only independent newspaper and the only student opinion journal that matters. It is the oldest and most renowned campus commentary publication in the nation and spawned a national movement at the likes of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and countless others. Our staff members and alumni have won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and have been published in the Boston Globe, New York Times, National Review, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, Village Voice, New Criterion, and many others.

The Review aims to provide a voice for any student who enjoys challenging brittle and orthodox thinking. We stand for free speech, student rights, and the liberating arts. Whatever your political leanings, we invite you to come steep yourself in campus culture and politics, Dartmouth lore, keen witticisms, and the fun that comes with writing for an audience of thousands. We’re looking for writers, photographers, cartoonists, aspiring business managers, graphic designers, web maestros, and anyone else who wants to learn from Dartmouth’s unofficial school of journalism.

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– Inge-Lise Ameer, Vice Provost for Student Affairs

Meetings held Mondays at 6:30 PM at our offices at 32 S. Main Street (next to Lou’s in the lower level office space)

INSIDE THE ISSUE An Obituary for Joe Rago

Two Editorials From Joe Rago

Reconsidering David McLaughlin

Joe Rago’s Humor and Wisdom

Remembering Joe Rago

Threnody for Old School Dartmouth

Joe Rago, the legendary former Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review, has died at the age of 34. Read our account of his remarkable life............................................... PAGE 1

Joe Rago’s beautiful obituary of David McLaughlin ‘54, the underappreciated and muchmaligned former President of Dartmouth College................................. ................... PAGE 1

The Review reached out to Joe’s friends and colleagues for their thoughts on him. They responded with touching anecdotes of a beloved friend, writer, and colleague. ... PAGE 4

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The Review republishes two editorials that Joe wrote during his time at the paper, each of which displays his signature wit and thoughtfulness.................................................. PAGE 6

We publish the best excerpts from Joe’s articles and reports throught the years. Topics include “Sex,” “Metrosexuals,” and “Dartmouth’s Administration.”.............................. PAGE 7

We republish Joe’s 2005 exploration of the deep history of Dartmouth College, the moral ambiguity of the past, and the beauty of living brightly............................................. PAGE 9

NIGEL FARAGE READS THE REVIEW.

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3

MASTHEAD & EDITORIAL EST. 1980

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

EDITORIAL BOARD

EDITORIAL

Summer Editor-in-Chief

What Things Remain

Joseph R. Torsella

Editor-in-Chief Jack Mourouzis

Executive Editors Joshua L. Kauderer

Managing Editors Jack S. Hutensky Devon M. Kurtz Rushil Shukla Zachary P. Port

Associate Editors Shawn E. Honaryar Elliott A. Lancry B. Webb Harrington Brandon E. Teixeira

Senior Correspondents

Brian Chen & Marcus J. Thompson

BUSINESS STAFF Summer President Joshua L. Kauderer

President

Robert Y. Sayegh

Vice Presidents Jason B. Ceto & Noah J. Sofio

ADVISORY Founders

Greg Fossedal, Gordon Haff, Benjamin Hart, Keeney Jones

Legal Counsel

Mean-Spirited, Cruel, and Ugly

Board of Trustees

Martin Anderson, Patrick Buchanan, Theodore Cooperstein, Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Ellis, Robert Flanigan, John Fund, Kevin Robbins, Gordon Haff, Jeffrey Hart, Laura Ingraham, Mildred Fay Jefferson, William Lind, Steven Menashi, James Panero, Hugo Restall, Roland Reynolds, William Rusher, Weston Sager, Emily Esfahani-Smith, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Sidney Zion

NOTES Special thanks to William F. Buckley, Jr. “Europe is growing more and more lost every day. I alone can fix!”

The Editors of The Dartmouth Review welcome correspondence from readers concerning any subject, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material published previously in The Review. We reserve the right to edit all letters for clarity and length. Please submit letters to the editor by mail or email: editor@dartreview.com Or by mail at:

The Dartmouth Review P.O. Box 343 Hanover, NH 03755 (603) 643-4370

Please direct all complaints to: editor@thedartmouth.com

Not too long ago, on one of those cool el, then we should take joy in that brilsummer evenings, I walked my parents liance. Joe wrote at a time when, as now, around Dartmouth’s campus. Meander- Dartmouth was losing traditions, when, ing down the Green, up past the Sphinx as now, ‘Old Dartmouth’ was passing and the Observatory, we found our- away, when, as now, institutional decline selves near the BEMA, the sun setting. was pervasive and apparent. But there is I told them of matriculation, of the can- no sadness in Joe’s writing, no “cloying dles, of singing the alma mater, of old self-pity.” Joe’s writing is full of vigorous traditions. They nodded and smiled and humor, love of life, and spirit. For “The their eyes wandered. “And there’s a pine world will always lack. That’s no reason up there too,” I said, “Or the stump of to wallow in night thoughts.” one anyway. It’s been here since The world lacks a great deal the beginning.” We left. for losing Joe. It lacks a sharp I recently went to visit the mind, a son of Dartmouth, Old Pine. Even as a stump, and a lot of humor. And it it has seen better days. A will forever so lack. But it restoration job in the 50s, had it, once. Once, Joe Rago whatever the result then, went to a sexual awareness has now left the pine with festival and described a “cora sheen that reminds you of nucopia” of condoms. He plastic and chemicals. The mocked social climbing bark is smooth and slipby promoting “all things pery. Perched on a bed Joe Rago.” He once, afof gravel, it seems as if ter discussing P. Diddy, it might at any moment began riffing “James be carted off for display Wright, – President elsewhere.

Wright, – P. Wright.” In Joseph R. Torsella But I did not know this a response to Earth Day at when I first touched the stump, when, Dartmouth, he took a trash bag filled in freshman year, I was taken there at with sloshing beer and Keystone Light midnight by some upperclassmen. And cans marching around the Green to raise standing around it we sang – first with “awareness.” Of a bad, fat comedian, he hands on the wood, then with arms said “The only time I laughed during his around each other. Then I did not see act was when I imagined him unhinging the sheen but the Old Pine and my fel- his jaw and eating his weight in pie.” Joe lows around it. And the Pine was there believed that “those who miss the joy for us, as it has been for a thousand oth- miss all.” Let’s not miss it, then. ers.

Near the stump of the Old Pine, a There’s a gravity to old and ancient plaque reads “This tablet marks the Old things. It is a gravity that Joe Rago knew Pine/ contemporary with the life of the well. He wrote, of course, on the Old College/ and guardian of its traditions.”

Pine (he called it “at once preserved and But the plaque is not only a marker. It is preservative” of Dartmouth culture), but also a cenotaph. Below, it reads: “Having also of encountering the old in general been struck by lightning in 1887/ and a (“it’s like a galvanic battery has gone off whirlwind in 1892 it was/ cut down in in your brain”). Joe recognized what too 1895. Replaced in 1912.” The Old Pine few do today – that in the old we find fell in 1895. But it guards us yet. It those things which bore meaning, aid, lives on in college life. Students gather and comfort to our predecessors. What around it to sing in the darkness. endures is valuable and significant.

Joe Rago has passed away. But he enBut what is it to endure? If, before your dures still. He endures in the pages of time, the stump of the Old Pine were cut old copies of The Review, where he can down further to a single, unrecogniz- still make a reader laugh. He endures able piece, would you be worse for it? in the rooms of Phi Delta Alpha, whose Feeling the wood, and knowing it to be liveliness is due in part to his bravery in that of the Pine, you would still imagine their years as a colony. He endures as a the thousands of students for whom the lover of Dartmouth, who will continue tree stood firm, and the thousands more to inspire others to do the same. And for whom its stump persisted. And the he endures before the Old Pine, where, gravity would be there still. No, it is not standing there, I knew he once stood. in the thing, not in the stump itself, but At the end of his obituary of David in its memory, in the legacy, in the long McLaughlin, Joe quotes a poem read at chain of generations linked together by the memorial service: “You can rememthe Old Pine and by stories of it. The ber him only that his is gone/ Or you can Old Pine may fall, and its stump may be cherish his memory and let it live on.” covered in chemical resin and petrified, Legacy, history, and memory are powerbut as a bearer of memory and history it ful in a place like Dartmouth. They bind lives still. us to the past, bring us together, and call Grief attends the passing of any good us to “exhilarating, extravagant” things. man – and rightly so. Joe’s is a great loss, For those of us who care for such things, made greater by the youth of his passing Joe Rago will endure by the Old Pine and the brilliance of the life he led. But along with the joyful spirit of the Colif his philosophy is to serve as a mod- lege he loved.

4 Monday – August 14, 2017

The Dartmouth Review

REMEMBERING JOE RAGO Thoughts on a Friend and Colleague: Editor’s Note: After Joe Rago’s death, we reached out to his closest colleagues and friends for thoughts on him, his life, and his contribution to our world. Below, we present these memories of Joe from those who knew him best.

A Loyal Son of the College As editor of the Dartmouth Review, Joe Rago ’05 prevented the newspaper from becoming a mere outlet for outrage and provocation—a risk to the publication at that stage—demonstrating in its pages not just what conservatives denounced but what they appreciated. And what Joe appreciated was the College. He wrote pieces on Dartmouth history as fine as any ever composed. For wry wit, deep research, gorgeous prose, and sheer enjoyability, turn to Joe’s account of the origins of “Dartmouth night.” He wrote extensively about Dartmouth architecture, disparaging certain new buildings not because he wanted the campus to remain forever unchanged but because they proved unworthy of the institution. Ungainly blocks, they failed to live up to the clean, honest, classical lines of Dartmouth Row, that echo of the Parthenon in the New England forest.

A few years ago Joe sent me a collection of speeches. They had been delivered at the 1904 dedication of the new Dartmouth Hall—the original structure, as you’ll recall, had burned to the ground. “Peter,” Joe wrote inside, “I tracked down a copy of a useful book. See page 53.” When I learned of Joe’s death, I pulled the book down from the shelf and turned once again to that page.

“As for us, whose debt to the College is so deep,” Professor Francis Brown declared, it is surely not for us to question the wise and sagacious orderings of Providence in her behalf and ours.

No man can tie the hands of God, or prescribe the lines for his working. Each decade…has been a new demonstration that Wheelock’s

service was greater than he knew.

We raise the new Dartmouth Hall in the assured faith that it reaches back over the ruins of the old one, and makes connection with the same past. It is a good past, full of the lives of good and earnest men, who lived beyond themselves. It puts us under bonds.

Magnificent journalist; warm, funny, generous, and devoted friend; intensely loyal son of the College. Joe Rago lived beyond himself. He puts us under bonds.

-Peter Robinson ‘79 Humble and Hopeful By the time I joined The Dartmouth Review as a staffer in the fall of 2005, just a few months after Joe graduated from the college, he was already a legend within the paper’s ranks. I remember hearing stories about this mysterious editor of the past who stayed up all night to painstakingly put together each issue of the paper. I remember listening to tales of his expeditions to Rauner Library to research one of his richly sourced articles. And I remember rummaging through the paper archive in our office, in search of Joe’s old articles, to see for myself what everyone was talking about.

I spent a few hours one day reading through his witty editorials and epic histories of Dartmouth Homecoming and Winter Carnival—and was immediately in awe of the quality of his writing. How, I wondered, could someone write so well at such a young age? Now, I understand a little bit better. Joe was naturally talented, of course—but there was more than that.

Writing and editing were a real labor of love for him and he aspired, I think, to perfection. “What’s the point,” I heard him once say, “If you’re not going all out?” At the time, I wanted to be a writer, too, but I had silly, romantic ideals about what that meant.

The writerly life, I thought, was journals in cafes, gloomy moods, creative

inspiration—that sort of thing. But Joe taught me a different way. He went out into the world and did the hard work of journalism. He researched and reported his pieces, interviewed people.

He spent hours refining them. He clearly found joy—a hard-earned joy, I imagine—in putting words together beautifully on the page. That was the real writer’s life.

I met Joe in person at the end of my freshman year—at The Dartmouth Review’s 25th anniversary gala. As I got to know him better over the years, he became for me the model of what a writer should be: humble and hard working, but also hopeful. As editor of The Review, his editorial vision was never regressive or reactionary. He celebrated Dartmouth at its best. He wanted his readers to love the place as much as he did—and, with many of them, he succeeded.

-Emily Esfahani Smith ‘09 A Generous and Loving Friend Strange as it may sound, I never knew, until I met Joe, that articles on important subjects didn’t have to be earnest, plodding, and pious; that erudition and fun were not only not enemies but were even long lost brothers; or even that it was possible to thumb your nose at authority and simply prevail through sheer quality, and do it all cheerfully with a packed Skoal lip. But all these truths, which I had to learn from Joe’s example, Joe knew already by instinct, because Joe had inborn genius.

Watching him work was uncanny, a Glenn Gould experience. After some nicotine-enhanced journey to the end of the night that would have robbed other mortals of their literacy, he’d produce squeaky-clean copy that left you reaching for your Italian phrasebook: virtuoso, sprezzatura, bellissimo. That within months of graduation he would assume the position of one-man prose provider for one of the leading newspapers in the world seemed entirely natural. Yet the man was barely out of his teens,

a long-limbed youth twinkling at you through little glasses.

Less celebrated in public but just as admired in private was the Rago who could make Falstaff look like Malvolio. “Convivial” doesn’t cut it—try “Stakhanovite.” But he went all out (a favorite mot) not from some repulsion from the world but, on the contrary, out of love for his friends and for his College. His life and prose were of a piece because both were marked by an easy largesse that was never sentimental. Around him, it was always carnival, always quintessentially college, and nobody displayed more devotion to the spiritual, Platonic, old Dartmouth than Joe Rago, a generous and brilliant friend I’ll always remember and pray for.

-Nicholas Desai ‘08 Kangaroo Joe In February 2011, the Wall Street Journal editorial board curated a list of their all-time favorite films. One editor chose Ben-Hur. Others, On the Waterfront and The Lives of Others.

All told, the films on the Journal’s list garnered 85 Academy Award nominations and won 48. Joe Rago’s selection won only one prize. The film was Kangaroo Jack, its prize a Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Fart in a Movie. The online Journal displayed a picture of the coy, bespectacled kangaroo, his red sweater bulging with $20 bills. Beneath it was a write-up in unmistakable Rago prose: “An allegory about the obsessive pursuit, through the Australian Outback, of an elusive marsupial with a fortune hidden in its pouch. You might call it the thinking man’s ‘Moby Dick.’”

Six weeks later, Joe won the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing. The prize board wrote plainly that his work on healthcare reform was impossible to ignore. Many remembrances will focus on this accomplishment—as they should, it was a bright star in his spangled career—but I smile widest when I recall Joe’s jokes.

They aren’t hard to find. A film re-

view of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is too jam-packed to pull any single quote. A 2008 op-ed savages a professor-cum-madwoman with reference to Mad Libs and “Pimp My Ride.” Another article written in the same year tracks the political history of the mustache, and calls a recent uptick in D.C. facial hair “conspicuous, if not bristling.”

In a 2016 fiction chronicle for the New Criterion, Joe cited 19 examples of the word “girl” in recent titles to demonstrate the word’s vogue in pop fiction. Two weeks after he shared that chronicle, I read an article in FiveThirtyEight that asked, “Why are there so many books with ‘girl’ in the title?”

That’s the thing about Joe’s writing: even his tiny absurdisms were constantly being proven and reaffirmed.

He wrote on February 1, 2017 about a profusion of wrongheaded think pieces tying dystopian novels to the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

Joe focused on 1984, with nods to It Can’t Happen Here and The Plot Against America. Joe made the point that drawing such parallels was foolish and, in the case of 1984, reflected a poor understanding of the text.

On February 20th, the New York Times ran “A Different Kind of Dystopian Novel.” Its author begins by making a point similar to Joe’s, focusing on The Plot Against America. He then spends seven paragraphs drawing such parallels anyway. When I sent Joe a picture of the headline, he responded via text message: “BOOOOORRRRRRINNNNGGG.” So many articles deserve mention and examination (some are collected in the online Journal as “Joseph Rago’s Wit and Wisdom”). In “Dartmouth Psycho,” a rare Rago fiction, Joe sent up fraternity pledge term as thus: “In order to become a brother, I was forced to drop a quick six from goblets made of human skulls. The pledges were commanded to swim in a kiddie pool filled with organs and disarticulated limbs. Alongside the vomit-omelets—a playful but mysterious

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The Dartmouth Review

Monday – August 14, 2017

Joseph Rago ‘05 (1983-2017) little dish—we were served, well, the Bloodiest Mary I’ve ever had.”

Joe Rago was not just funny, he was a laugh riot. His writing was not just good, it was the best. He would never say this, would never mention his Pulitzer Prize or any other awards. But if you stood vigil until the not-so-early hours of the morning, he might crack a lopsided smile and tell you about Kangaroo Jack.

-Adam Schwartzman ‘13

New-Englandisms I doubt that I ever mentioned this to him but on one stifling summer day in Hanover, two years after he’d left for bigger things, I decided to tread from my dorm to an auxiliary library to withdraw the senior thesis of Joe Rago ‘05. Is there ever an honorable reason to pull someone’s senior thesis?

I wanted to examine how Joe could be so good. Was his way of turning a phrase limited to rich quarry like food court and a now-defunct Dartmouth PR platform called “the BuzzFlood.” (“At first, I was bowled over by the chowder-headed nonsense they were serving, but lately, I’ve started to come around. Inspired by their hard work, I realized that I, too, must shore up my brand.”)

Or was he good with serious stuff, too?

When Peter Robinson ‘79 informed me on Friday morning that Joe had died suddenly, I was in an

instant recalled to that summer, to the Berry annex, and to Joe’s senior thesis, whose odd title was still graven in memory: “New-Englandisms & Fanaticisms in Proper Boston.” A rich survey of Boston ghost stories. I can’t think of an undergraduate work remembered more than ten minutes after its consummation; here was one whose evocative title lurked in my mind for twelve years. As it turns out, Joe was good with serious stuff, too.

After Dartmouth Joe went to The Wall Street Journal with, I think it is fair to say, a reservation that it would require too many pairs of crisp trousers while offering too few ice-cold beers–––not quite, that is to say, the genuine writerly experience. But I was able to witness Paul Gigot ‘77 became a mentor who seemed, to me, ennobling of Joe; and Joe speedily shaped himself into one of the great journalists of the young century.

In a political age in which buzzflood P.R. hazes over reality, creating parallel realities of preferred fact patterns, it actually takes an opinion journalist to get to something true. This is why (you may be realizing) you have not read a worthwhile straight-news article in a year or more. It’s why Joe’s series on the Affordable Care Act deserved, and won, a Pulitzer; and were, more to the point, true.

In my time as a Robert L. Bartley Fellow on the Editorial Page of The Journal, I saw Joe cut through com-

plex policy like greased lightning through butter, to borrow another phrasing of his. “What should I say when I meet with Melanie Kirkpatrick and Paul Gigot,” I asked Joe one late night before my interview. “Mumble something from Burke; that’s what I did.”

Joe, I found, preferred in his editorials to show rather than to state, and never shied from mustering facts where they were needed. These were culled from Washington sources astonished to receive an actual phone call from an actual intelligence searching for actual facts. Yet he avoided extraneous information where it had a tendency to cloud. This was Burkean indeed, because Joe, I learned as I observed him, tried to reduce until a problem was irreducible. In modern American politics, problems are reducible quite a bit. They are mostly invented.

A funny story of Burke is that he almost published a gargantuan history of England from Caesar to Queen Anne but abandoned the entire thing because Hume had already come out with his. Lord Acton said “it is ever to be regretted that the reverse did not occur.”

And this is where I am left after Joe’s passing. I fully expected to instruct children and then grandchildren to read Rago at the breakfast table, later on holidays home from college, and then in the thicket of some thorny life

question. It would have been convenient to allow the style and genius of Rago to suffuse them generally, yet damning it, at edges of disagreement, with snapshot memories: Rago taking on board beers at Ryan’s Daughter on East 85th Street, Rago hunched on an unfortunate sofa in the office of the Review, Rago on the floor of The Journal at evening, reviewing the day’s work on a broad, white, flaxen sheet, erasing solecisms and applying a touch of style, in a mood approaching joy.

-Joe Malchow ‘08 The Importance of Being Rago Professor Jeffrey Hart is fond of calling The Dartmouth Review “Dartmouth’s Unofficial School of Journalism.” This summer we lost one of our most distinguished graduates in Joe Rago.

Undergraduates who have not had the pleasure of reading his prodigious output in the pages of The Wall Street Journal may hear this news, shrug their shoulders, and revert to staring at their talismanic smartphones. Aside from the consanguinity of the granite in their veins, current Dartmouth students should care about Joe and feel his loss as deeply as those of us who knew him well for at least three reasons: First of all, in a world poisoned by social media bloviating and claims of “fake news,” Joe Rago’s writing stood

An Interview with Paul Gigot Jack Mourouzis

Editor-in-Chief

Editor’s Note: Paul Gigot ‘77 is the current editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, and worked closely with Joe Rago over their years together at that paper. After Joe’s passing, we spoke to him about Joe’s life and work.

The Dartmouth Review (TDR): Can you tell us a little bit about your first impressions of Joe when he worked as an intern at the Wall Street Journal and what it was like meeting him for the first time?

Paul Gigot (PG): Well my first impression of Joe was reading him!

Jeff Hart sent me a package of his writing in the Review, and I looked at it, read it, and my first impression was “Wow, this guy can write!”. There was also a nuanced mind at work because he didn’t take the standard position on some of the Dartmouth disputes of the day involving President McLaughlin, for example. So I was impressed by that even before I met him. And that’s when I invited him to be a Bartley Fellow summer intern. My first impression of him when he came to the Journal was that he was just another college kid. But as soon as he went to work, he was most impressive right from the start in his ability to write, and to think, and as an editor. So it was clear very

soon that I needed to hire Joe, and I did right away. And that was, I think without question, the best decision I ever made in this job.

TDR: Can you describe what distinguished Joe’s work from that of others? What did he bring that was unique in his writing?

PG: There are three things, just in general. One, the quality of his writing. Two, the quality of his thinking.

Three, the diligence with which he worked to gather facts and data and to understand the subject.

He cared about prose. He cared about each sentence – structuring it and getting the right word. And there was a real playfulness about him, I mean he loved to have fun with his writing. He loved the ironic line or the sardonic line. He wrote a piece on Newt Gingrich that I asked him to write when Gingrich had attacked us in the 2012 campaign in Iowa for our opposition to corn ethanol. And Joe entitled the piece “Professor Cornpone” because Newt always liked to call himself a professor, a history professor, and Joe liked to mock that. He had a playfulness about him like that.

In his last editorial, “The Obamacare Republicans” he stitched together sentences like “what cargo cult have Mike Lee and Rand Paul joined?” and that’s the kind of writer he was,

he had a lot of wit and style and he enjoyed it, I mean he loved writing.

And that’s not universal.

The second thing is that he was he really was a careful thinker, and he thought through issues. He whittled down arguments to their logical best to make them hold together and be persuasive, and, as part of that, he didn’t just assault the opposition’s weakest arguments, he assaulted their strongest arguments. And that, I think, is not universal.

The third thing is that he just worked very hard, in a good way. I remember, I walked up to him I think at his desk one day in 2007 and said, “how’d you like to write about healthcare,” and he said “sure!”. And the next thing I know, we’ve got copies of Health Affairs magazine arriving, and I don’t know if you’ve read it but it’s not bedtime reading, it’s the academic journal of the health industry. And he just steeped himself in everything he needed to know about a subject. So when he was writing about healthcare he would dig into the science and the process of drug approvals at the FDA. He would peel into the process of clinical trials and understanding how clinical trials work and how new methods of Bayesian statistics were something that could be used to speed up approvals of certain kinds of drugs. And he just was smart as hell - he had enormous range and he just

dove in to these things. I’ll give you another example: when I told him in 2015 that I’d really like him to be our main editorial writer on the presidential campaign and also do a number of features under his byline on the candidates and some of the issues and so on, he read every book that Donald Trump had ever written or had written for him. And I mean that literally.

He read every one. And he read every book about Donald Trump. And he read every book about the Trump family and by former employees.

And you ask yourself “why would a well-adjusted human being do that to himself,” and I think the answer is that that was Joe – he just wanted to understand, and he would reach out to any source which would help him understand.

And the other thing was that he had a bemused sense about the world – he thought that Trump was just funny. The Trump board game came out, and he thought that was the funniest damn thing he ever heard. He quickly got a copy and had it delivered and made all the interns here play it (laughter). He had a poster which he thought was hilarious from the campaign which said, “love trumps hate.” I guess what I’m saying is that he was enormously talented person, but he wore his talent lightly. If you win a Pulizer at 28, a lot of people would have let that go to their

5

out as an oasis of objective journalism.

Joe ruthlessly researched his subjects, weighed all sides of every issue, and then presented a fair and balanced view supported by data. His body of work serves as an example to all of us to always question, respectfully consider other points of view, and only then make the best argument possible.

He was post-political.

Second, Joe lived the Dartmouth Review ethos of being “more Dartmouth than Dartmouth itself.” He was a strident defender of a liberal arts education – in and out of the classroom – and a champion of professor-led instruction of undergraduates. We may not all agree on the debates of the day, but we should all hold our alma mater above the fray. I will miss debating with Joe whether we are moving Dartmouth forward, backward, or sideways.

Third, and most importantly, Joe was a full liver of life. As news of his untimely passing has spread, it is remarkable how every picture posted online (the irony of Joe’s memory being perpetuated in a medium he detested is rich) shows him at the center of the party. He was never “ragey” but he attacked fun with friends with the same tenacity that he pursued editorial subjects. While many around him lived for the future, Joe was fully present in the now. A now that has a conspicuously empty seat at the bar.

-Kevin Robbins ‘98

heads. Joe never did. He was always humble in his success and congenial and collaborative as a colleague. He was a special guy. He was really talented – he leaves a huge hole here, I’ll tell you.

TDR: Other than his Pulitzer-winning work, is there a particular feature that he ever wrote that stands out as particularly excellent or outstanding?

PG: He was especially proud of a recent one he wrote this past spring on how he thought the critics of Trump were misusing the comparison to George Orwell. That ran in February, I think, and he had a particular fondness for that, and it was a smart argument. Joe was a fairly literary guy and fairly well read. He was an admirer of Orwell but he thought that he was being exploited in a false fashion by third-rate never-trumpers, including one of them maybe up in the Dartmouth Government Department. The other thing is that he was proud of his health care work. He really was proud of that. And I think it is signature work. But I think he really enjoyed writing about the presidential campaign of 2016. I think he found that surprising, stimulating and certainly frustrating in many ways. But he loved the comedy of American politics.

6 Monday – August 14, 2017

The Dartmouth Review

HIS EDITORIALS

Shut Up, I Explained Joe Rago

Former Editor-in-Chief Published September 20, 2004 Amid the paraphernalia that’s accumulated in our offices over the past twenty-five years, there’s wheat and there’s chaff. For instance: we claim a mechanical wooden hand that Jeff Hart used to crank when faculty meetings grew tedious, so that its fingers would drum loudly and impatiently against the boardroom mahogany. But “The Dartmouth ReView [sic]” is also guilty of possession, it pains me to note, of a “Student Activist Award” by way of David Horowitz. The distinction, so far as I’m concerned, is mortifying, not least of all for the association with a thing as unsavory as Activism.

Not incidentally, Mr. Horowitz is a conservative Activist himself and, not surprisingly, he’s a controversial figure in contemporary higher education. Some years ago he installed himself as Viceroy of young conservatives and began steeling his soldiers for combat (which probably accounts for the provenance of the ReView’s war medal); now, he’d like to deliver a great coup de main against the leftist regimes he believes are ruining the nation’s colleges and universities.

The central fieldpiece in the

campaign is an ‘Academic Bill of Rights.’ If adopted – several state legislatures are considering it – the Bill would mandate ‘intellectual diversity’ in faculty recruiting and tenure decisions; require ‘viewpoint-neutral’ and ‘politically-balanced’ reading lists, lectures, and assignments; and create bureaucracies to handle accusations of ‘bias,’ ‘unfairness,’ and ‘marginalization.’ It’s only fair, the thinking goes, because conservatives are an ‘underrepresented minority’ on campus these days, and ever so sensitive about it.

That the climate of academia is overwhelmingly left-liberal shouldn’t send anyone rushing for his defibrillator. It’s so blatant that only a fool or a liar could dispute it – leading many professors to acknowledge it themselves, often in the most indulgent of justifications. Last year, Dartmouth English Professor Ivy Schweitzer asked, “Is the general atmosphere here ‘liberal’? Yes, because we are a liberal arts institution, and liberal arts education is supposed to produce ‘liberal’ attitudes that encourage forward-thinking ideas about inclusion, equality, and innovation.” Well, no, but never mind.

But while it might be one

thing to sympathize with the efforts of Mr. Horowitz and his legions, it’s quite another to support them. It’s like drinking at 10 on a Sunday morning – sure, you’ll do it, but it just doesn’t seem right.

The last thing conservatives should be joining is the ranks of the perennially indignant.

The attitude appears to be, I’m unable to marshal a genuine argument and you’re one of those shrinking violets, so you supply the pretensions and I’ll bring the cant words of identity politics. To arms! The whole approach is disheartening. I’d expect the campus conservative to have more fortitude than a shucked oyster.

Come on now. The problem with the Academic Bill of Rights is its disingenuousness: that it is so obviously a MacGuffin, that its lexis and arguments are so obviously sleight-of-hand. Mr. Horowitz is taking higher education to task because he disagrees with its politics, not because of some abstract commitment to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. He doesn’t really want an ‘intellectually diverse’ academy but a more conservative one. If the situation were instead reversed and Mr. Horowitz the head of one of those ruinous regimes, he’d be

ordering cauldrons of hot oil for the Jacobins pounding at his gates, no matter how loudly they screamed for intellectual diversity or for mercy or for anything else.

I don’t have any more patience with the state of academia than Mr. Horowitz does.

But I don’t want to get a more conservative education as a trade-in for my biases – a part of my very constitution, after all – in the name of intellectual or political neutrality and I don’t want anyone else to either. I didn’t come to Hanover for a convalescent education or for people to agree with me all the time – neither of which makes for a keen mind, or, for that matter, a very lively college experience.

Besides, simply because the prevailing winds at Dartmouth are liberal – the administration’s interminable shilly-shallying, the baying of the loudest professors, the gutter patois of the Daily Dartmouth – doesn’t mean all the details are. The Economics Department, to cite one example, is consistently excellent, hardly a bastion of liberal thought, and perpetually oversubscribed, while year after year Education, say, is on the brink of foreclosure.

A few of the most progressive departments (History and En-

glish come to mind) can be very, very good. Dartmouth has some terribly silly professors, but it has some tremendous professors too, and some of them, believe it or not, are liberals.

The real task, then, is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

This is done best not by appropriating the academic liturgy or by wallowing in victim culture or even by Activism but through robust, intelligent criticism – the reasoned exercise of judgment, discrimination, and taste.

Might I suggest a venue?

Consider writing for The Dartmouth Review. What you’ll find is an independent counterweight to all the nonsense at Dartmouth today; that takes the issues seriously but never so itself; whose animadversion is spirited, articulate, sharp-witted, and irreverent of pieties. What you’ll find is a critical voice in a pitched contest of ideas about what the College should and should not be – the sort of conversation that is the only legitimate way to straighten out the politics of higher education. And most importantly, should you be inclined to contribute to our pages, the only oysters you’ll encounter are the ones at our raw bar.

met, never corresponded, and yet behaved as if they’d settled the whole business beforehand.

The ideas were already agreed upon. Something very much like a faculty meeting, I imagine.

These people – and here I mean ideologues and partisans, on the right or on the left, tend to insulate themselves only with people who already share the same mindset. And while I think the conservatives are more often correct than the liberals, mindset is the perfect word: a mind set so obstinately it’s petrified, suited for the bottom of La Brea with the mastodons and the saber-toothed cats. (Of course, the comparison doesn’t work, because what need is there for satire when the objects of it are already happy to make caricatures of themselves?)

At least among the young journalists I spoke to, their politics were so ritualized and shopworn that it seemed more a matter of performing a role than a genuine intellectual exercise. This is not traditionally part of the conservative mind, nor is it part at present. Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer unloaded on each other in the pages of the National Interest this summer.

Bill Kristol just savaged Donald Rumsfeld in the Weekly Standard. In a short profile in the ‘Talk of the Town’ pages of the

New Yorker, William F. Buckley mentioned that the reelection of George Bush would preclude the “consolidation of a thoughtful conservatism that might have happened if he’d lost.”

Further – perhaps because the ideas had congealed, perhaps because those ideas appealed to a certain type – the disposition at the conference seemed set as well, and it was less than congenial. The attendees were indignant. Resentful. Persecuted.

Livid. Grim. Between the puling and the air of discontent, it was enough to scoop out the brainpan and blandly join in the tiresome wheeze of the hand-wringers and the finger-waggers.

Early on at Dartmouth, I inadvertently came across a curt film called Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I’ve advertently viewed it a few times since. It’s based on a work by Ray Bradbury, and the ‘something wicked’ line is cribbed from one of the witches in Macbeth; by comparison, Something Wicked is hack work, but it has a gravelly resonance I can’t quite explain.

The film chronicles the adventures of Will Hollaway and Jim Nightshade, two towheaded boys who go off gamboling in the land of ten-thousand pumpkins and become ensnared in the intrigues of a diabolic circus. They only outsmart Mr. Dark, the carnival’s

proprietor (who also happens to be an evil sorcerer), when they overwhelm him with genuine affection and good cheer. Mr. Dark, after all, is a humorless fellow.

The point, then? Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival should not be part of the conservative mentality. Something wicked will always be coming. But it can be held off.

That’s the basic job of the conservative, after all, to defend what should be preserved (and, when appropriate, to improve what needs improvement). The world will always lack. That’s no reason to wallow in night thoughts.

At Dartmouth, I have tried to present the issues as they are; and while I’m often let down, I try not to get down. Students are getting along fine at our small College; the campus culture remains genial and gregarious; most of the faculty tend to do a professional job, many professors are excellent, and some, very occasionally, can be inspirations; and those sad bureaucrats who have nothing better to do than rut around among good things and ruin them have been relegated – quite properly, I think – to the lesser role of opinionated ne’er-do-wells. I wish official Dartmouth were more dynamic and more assured in its unique historical identity. I wish it were not so frivolous, not so wasteful,

not so pedestrian, not so beholden to the politics of contemporary higher education, – certainly, I could go on. But I’ll cite just two things.

The first comes from Percy Marks’ 1924 novel of college life, The Plastic Age. A Professor Henley is holding forth. “No, colleges are far from perfect, tragically far from it,” he says, “but any institution that commands loyalty and love as colleges do cannot be wholly imperfect. There is a virtue in a college that uninspired administrative officers, stupid professors, and alumni with false ideals cannot kill. At times I tremble for the Sanford College; there are times when I swear at it, but I never cease to love it.”

Marks wrote his book while he was an English professor here, and it is taken for granted that his fictional Sanford is a stand-in for Dartmouth.

The second is the 1945 inaugural of President John Sloan Dickey 1929, where he said, “I especially want to remind you that, above all, the Dartmouth spirit is a joyful spirit.” He was relating words of advice from Ernest Martin Hopkins 1901, who pointed him to a passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Lantern Bearers’: “Those who miss the joy miss all.” That’s a distinguished lineage, and outstanding counsel.

Something Wicked this Way Comes Joe Rago

Former Editor-in-Chief Published January 12, 2005 In December I attended a conference of conservative college journalists, which was square and predictable. You’d expect those at a convention to be conventional but, – great Caesar’s ghost. Apart from a few bright lights…

For those fortunate enough to have been elsewhere, allow me to describe the delegate’s representative traits: (a) an embarrassing, wretched sense of humor; (b) a tendency to articulate (the wrong word, but it will have to do) wild lunacies with the utmost seriousness as matters of fact; (c) a rank partisanship; (d) the morose, leering manifestations of social ostracism; and (e) a quiver of stunningly compulsory political views. This last part was certainly the most depressing. Someone once told me that ‘opinionated’ was one of the most insulting things you could call a woman – how condescending and all – but here, for entirely different reasons, opinionated is just about the most devastating verdict possible.

It was not only that these opinions were ill-disposed and poorly considered. It was that they were so homogenized. Glancing around: young editors from all over the country, who’d never

The Dartmouth Review

Monday – August 14, 2017

7

HIS WIT - EXCERPTS

Joe Rago ‘05 Speaks Out On Administrative Spending The College has sponsored a lot of creative philanthropy over recent weeks: a Run for the Kids, a Relay for Life, a Fiesta for Life, and a Festival for Humanity. The last, held on the Green over Green Key week-end, was designed to raise funds for the Habitat for Humanity service organization. It featured performances by arts and cultural groups, among other amusements, including an inflatable obstacle course, a bungee-jump, a moon-bounce, a sushi-making

On Sex When I heard that the Center for Women and Gender was holding a “Sex Festival” to celebrate “sex, sexual expression, and sexuality in its myriad manifestations and complexities,” my interest was piqued. “People of all genders” were invited to participate, and I heard that it would involve free stuff. I was there.

My heart pounded as I walked into Collis Commonground, festooned with festive colored flags and a swanky rotating discoball, all illuminated in seductive mood

“Next year, they’ll simply feature president James Wright feeding bushels of non-sequential hundreds from the College treasury into an industrial wood chipper.” workshop, and a henna tattoo parlor. If the figures I’ve been given are correct, the event cost $14,000 and only managed to pull in about four grand. I have a feeling the first-ever Festival for Humanity will be the last-ever Festival for Humanity. Next year, they’ll simply feature President James Wright feeding bushels of non-sequential hundreds from the College treasury into an industrial wood chipper.

On Campus Celebrities There’s a simple explanation for the confusion: Kabir Seghal and Brent C. Reidy are campus celebrities because they’re hyped. They’ve created a wellknown image that is winning rave reviews and taking Dartmouth by storm. It’s superficial, but do you know how important brands are these days? Well, they are extraordinarily important.

So like greased lightning through butter, I decided to assemble a committee that would enhance my own brand. At first, I called it the RagoForce, but I had to tread lightly because I was walking on hornets’ nests. The RagoForce, it seems, is already registered by Rago ® Shapeware Incorporated (www. ragoshapeware.com), one of the only companies still manufacturing girdles and corsets for “today’s woman.” Rago ® Shapeware produces such quality products as the Shapette Waist Cincher, outfitted with “flexible boning” to contour the “waist, hips, back, and derriere,” and the Diet-Minded All-In-One Body Briefer, with a “split crotch for convenient opening.”

You can’t make an omelet without grabbing the bull by the horns, damn it. Undaunted, I created The RagoFlood instead.

It’s the swiftly growing student group dedicated to telling my story. On to the specifics: the ‘Flood, which was started less than a week ago, now boasts more members than a baker. Essentially, the ‘Flood is a web of students that celebrates all things Joe Rago. For example, Joe Rago.

lighting. Hearts were a prominent theme. In short, the atmosphere beckoned for some sweet lovin’.

I was greeted by a young woman in a pink wig named “Moby,” who handed me a ticket for raffle prizes and ushered me into the Sex Festival. In seconds, I was approached by an older woman flouncing with a hefty wicker basket of prophylactics. This condom fairy had a wide variety of latex to dole out, offering colors all shades of the rainbow, including glowin-the-dark rainbows. I suggested that she should dump the cornucopia all over the floor and have people roll around seductively in them, but she ignored my request.

At “Ask an Older Woman” table, older – and apparently fatter – women were chatting about a wide variety of subjects. One was instructing a young neophyte in the use of dental dams, repeatedly mentioning “the vulva area.”

Another dispensed free samples of flavored lubricants. Visitors could savor an ample spread of culinary delights, including “pina colada,” passion fruit,” and “seedless watermelon.” There was also a corpulent gentleman wandering about wearing a nametag broadcasting “Ask an Older Woman,” but his services did not seem to be very popular.

There was also a station with information concerning eating disorders. These women were fighting to combat eating disorders and the judgement of people solely on the basis of their physical appearance. There was a sign that read, “Does anorexia make you have better sex?” Does it?

Apparently, it does not.

On Metrosexuals Metrosexuality, apparently, has been a long time coming. It used to be a sense of fashion and style that was the exclusive domain of “pharaohs, kinds, and czars.” The peasant, forced to toil “hopelessly clad in dull, flea-bitten rags,” was always something of a frump.

Not anymore. The “class system” has faded, flamboyance is no longer just for the well-heeled, and it’s the Common Man’s turn

for “style, sophistication, and self-awareness.” The washed masses are finally coming together to usher in the “new era of the modern metrosexual man.”

Well. Calcutta street urchins might be young and urban, but I doubt they’re cribbing culture and style from the gay community. I guess metrosexuality hasn’t made its way up the River Ganges yet: unfortunate but understandable, because it’s the latest hip trend. Or at least it was, before dozens of media publications, from the New York Times to the Dartmouth Review of Books, began writing about it.

I’m not personally acquainted with many metros, as I tend not to associate with men who want to be known as the Leggy Blonde.

But I’m quite prejudiced against

storm Parkhurst’s ramparts. As with most things, if you don’t pay attention, you’ll barely notice any of this. In this case, it is possible to be neutral on a moving train.

What we’ve seen lately are the signs of widespread dissatisfaction with the administrative program. The Greek system, a pretty accurate barometer, is stronger than it’s been in a decade, despite the S.L.I. In the spring, the alumni, another good barometer, elected a new trustee, a C.E.O. named T.J. Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers was only on the ballot by petition, yet he trumped the three handpicked administrative nominations, gathering more than 8,000 votes out of 14,661 cast. And he ran on a very public platform: that Dartmouth was experiencing an acute leadership crisis.

“I don’t have a problem with Mister Rogers that can be explained rationally, other than that I hate whimsy. But, honestly, who’s the better representative of Dartmouth College: the fanciful creator of the Land of Make-Believe or one of the most powerful men in the world?” them nonetheless. I’m metrophobic.

On Kegs To get a keg or two, you must register it with the Student Activities Office, and in itself, that’s fine: the point is to ensure prudent ‘risk-management procedures.’ But Student Activities has started using a new algorithm to determine the number of kegs that a house is allowed to serve at a social event. It has nothing to do with ensuring safety and everything to do with reducing the Greek system to straits.

Here’s a typical example. This past weekend, my fraternity threw a party; we worked through the system and leapt through the hoops; and, for a four-hour event, with a band, on the first weekend of the term, with five houses on probation, with an expected six-hundred guests, Student Activities said: you can have one keg. Even using their own beersper-person-per-hour formula, by simply counting the band and the members of our brotherhood who are of age, we could easily exhaust one keg. Apparently, we were expecting zero guests.

This isn’t the way it’s supposed to work.

Jesus fed the five-thousand on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with only five loaves and two fishes, and all ate and were satisfied.

Unfortunately, such great works can’t be wrought by mortal hands.

One keg simply isn’t going to sate six-hundred guests, even if you’re serving with an eyedropper.

On the Administration The good times aren’t over for good – in fact they’re not even over. There’s no need to mail yourself up like a crusader and

After his election, Dr. Rodgers said that high-level figures told him he would be absorbed.

“They’re going to find out,” he said, “that I am an indigestible character.” Whatever he’s able to accomplish, it’ll be a rough effort.

But there are other people who can do much more than he can, and without really much work at all. Here is a list: You. Me. The remedy is simply this: don’t allow yourself to be bullied. Don’t allow a committee of bureaucrats to drum up what Dartmouth should mean to you. That must be found on your own terms.

Grieving over a lost Dartmouth: that’s pointless, and kind of sad.

We cannot go back, however much we would like. The past is irretrievably gone and while it is vital and profound it can never be recovered. In this case, what is important is what has remained are the qualities that made the College unique and so special to so many people.

I certainly don’t like the way Dartmouth’s administrators have governed. But have they really affected my time here or my abiding fondness for the place?

Not a whit, – not a whit. Right now, you have four or five years at the greatest school on the face of the earth. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. And after a while, whatever your politics, I don’t think you’ll be able to either.

On Mister Rogers Jeffrey R. Immelt, class of ’78 and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, recently visited the Tuck School for the third-annual Greener Ventures conference; the summit examined the inner workings of the entrepre-

neurial spirit. By all accounts, Immelt is a natural leader, known for his geniality, self-confidence, and sharp wit. He’s so likeable that Dartmouth gave him an award for character when he was an undergraduate – an honor that he jokes was given to whomever could drink the most beer. In fact, Immelt’s likeable enough (or at least wealthy enough) to take the starch out of that most inflexible of backbones: Jim Wright’s.

President Wright introduced Immelt with effusive praise and jowl-to-jowl grins. Afterwards, Immelt discussed the reasons he was fond of Dartmouth: the way its culture of conviviality, creativity, and ideas produced practical graduates ideally suited for the world of business. I doubt it was what Wright wanted to hear, but the speech went over well enough that Immelt was invited back to give this year’s Commencement address.

I’m pleased, because it’s hard to imagine a better representative of the best parts of this place and because it’s a welcome change – Dartmouth has tended to promote its least-representative alumni over the past few years. One example comes to the fore: Fred McFeeley Rogers, Dartmouth undergraduate 1946-1948. He’s better known as children’s-television personality Mister Rogers; he was the commencement speaker in 2002. I don’t have a problem with Mister Rogers that can be explained rationally, other than that I hate whimsy. But, honestly, who’s the better representative of Dartmouth College: the fanciful creator of the Land of Make-Believe or one of the most powerful men in the world?

On Student Government The elections for Student Assembly president recently ground to a photo-finish and the results are in. The name of the victor escapes me, but I congratulate the losers. They were in for a thankless task. For a government that manages to be at once self-important and utterly irrelevant, the elections for the most part amounted to an unpopularity contest for Dartmouth’s least-representative representatives.

It was heartening to note that barely half of the student body voted. Elections at Dartmouth are far from the superheated affairs at other schools. Most undergraduates, I think, find better ways to spend their time. Still, the outcome was close – the president-elect won by the knife’s edge of a single vote. In the final tally, nineteen voters cast their ballots for write-in candidates who received only a single vote as well.

Any two of them could have decided the contest, had they not tossed their votes to the winds; so too could have the countless students who chose not to go to the polls. It was a victory for not making a difference.

8 Monday – August 14, 2017

The Dartmouth Review

HIS ARTICLES

Reconsidering David McLaughlin > CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

He was as Prometheus bolted to the face of the Caucasus, where a vulture preyed daily at his liver and he knew that he must face the same agony over and over and over again. But, like Prometheus, McLaughlin harbored an enduring faith that made it all worthwhile, and that faith too came from the classical world. He often cited Pericles’ statement of what the Athenians discovered: that the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is a brave heart. “The spirit of Dartmouth,” he continued, “also comes from a brave heart.” The public life of David McLaughlin, for all its sorrow, was never a pity because he never lost confidence in that most precious of qualities: his fanaticism.

He was in every sense the classic Dartmouth Man, at least as it was memorably defined by English Professor H. H. Horne in the late nineteenth century: “the vigorous liver of life,” “versatile, straightforward, and capable,” “practical, forceful, and efficient,” a man for whom “the College comes first, partial interests of whatever kind second.”

As an undergraduate, McLaughlin won membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society; he was a brother of Beta Theta Pi; he was an Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet; he joined both the Green Key society and the Casque and Gauntlet senior society. McLaughlin was president of his junior class and he was unanimously elected president of the Undergraduate Council his senior year. And he was a three-sport varsity athlete, lettering in football, basketball, and track and field; his senior year he was ranked as the fifth leading wide receiver in the nation and the best in the Ivy League. His gridiron record for yards gained in a single season stood for twenty-three years.

The Class of 1954 awarded him the Barrett Cup, conferred on the senior “giving the greatest promise of becoming a factor in the outside world through his strength of character and the qualities of leadership, record of scholarship, broad achievement, and influence among his fellows.” Few – then or now – could possibly measure up.

He was drafted to play football professionally but turned the offer down to pursue an M.B.A. at Tuck. For two years he flew jets for the U.S. Air Force. Then for two decades he was a highly-successful executive in the corporate world. For all his achievement, he never lost sight of Dartmouth. He was elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and eventually became its Chairman. And when John Kemeny stepped down from the Presidency, McLaughlin was chosen as his successor. Yet, in a cruel irony, it was precisely this post-Dartmouth accomplishment – or for that matter, his accomplishment at Dartmouth – that devastated his presidency.

It was McLaughlin’s lot to assume office under the sour, stolid intellectual and social ferment that characterMr. Rago was a member of the Class of 2005, and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The Dartmouth Review.

ized higher education in those days.

The faculty was increasingly stocked by splenetic radicals and certain restraints had worn away. In this atmosphere, everything about McLaughlin was amiss. He was nothing more than a purse-proud businessman – he didn’t even have a doctorate, for Christ’s sake – and for the stable of faculty ideologues, this amounted to apostasy.

His very presence debauched the College’s intellectual airs.

Tellingly, McLaughlin’s relationship with the faculty was catastrophic. During his inaugural address to the assembled professors, one stood up and shouted, to cheers, “You don’t belong here!” Despite aggressive diplomacy on his part, the situation steadily worsened. McLaughlin quarreled bitterly with the faculty over the R.O.T.C. program (he wanted it, and for the most part they didn’t).

Moreover, he could not escape his own Dartmouth experience, which seemed antique against the new styles.

He joked in public about the freshmen being ‘pea-green’ and mounted a vigorous defense of College athletics (he would never allow sports to be ousted from their “rightful place in the education of future generations of men and women”).

While it often seemed as though some professors were prepared to challenge McLaughlin to draw pistols and mark off twenty paces, the arguments were really about control. Then, as now, the identity of Dartmouth was not entirely fixed. Most of the faculty desired broad change. McLaughlin was more moderate. “It serves us well to remember that the College has never wavered from its original purpose,” he said in his inaugural address.

And as often happens with those fancying themselves sophisticated and progressive, the faculty behaved with haughty disdain. In one instance, they took it upon themselves to vote, overwhelmingly, to abolish the Greek system at the College; McLaughlin said that he valued the opinion and would take it under advisement. He did not abolish the Greek system.

“There are areas of the College, however – fraternities are an example – where the faculty have concerns,” he later said, “but where they have not had the determining voice in terms of where the fraternities go.” They were enraged. In 1985 fifty-two faculty petitioners stirred up tell of a “leadership crisis” at Dartmouth.

In a horrible piece of fortuity, the incident that decisively ended the McLaughlin administration came not from the left, where the McLaughlin critique was more or less centered, but from the right. I’m referencing, of course, the notorious evening in 1986 when a group of aggrieved students, most of them Dartmouth Review staffers, pulled down several plywood shanties that had been erected on the Green to protest Apartheid in South Africa.

With the passage of time, it is now clear that that single incendiary action is really one of the most bizarre events in the history of contemporary higher education, notable mainly for its spectacular mismanagement by everyone involved and the withering criticism it inspired, unique both for its duration

and for its intensity. Had the situation been diffused, or had it not spiraled out of control in the way that it did, the Presidency of David McLaughlin might’ve been wholly different.

The day after the shanties came down, nearly two-hundred students and professors stormed Parkhurst Hall and occupied it. Secretaries fled in panic. Dissidents turned over papers and shouted out impromptu speeches.

Several students were hung in effigy from the rafters. Rushing back from a fundraising trip in Florida, McLaughlin found angry protesters standing on his furniture, tearing memorabilia from the walls, and stamping on his things. One of them wanted to know why he was off-campus on the day before the incident, Martin Luther King Day. “What was so important and precious that you couldn’t be here to share that with me?” he wanted to know.

McLaughlin responded, “My absence wasn’t an attempt to be insensitive to your burning need.”

Even the students involved in “beautifying” the Green admitted that the dismantling was probably ill-advised. But both sides were radicalized by events. McLaughlin’s old leftist foes took the incident as an opportunity: the students involved in the demolition were hauled before the Committee on Standards on trumped-up charges. They were subjected to closed-door proceedings that were transparently used to mollify the ideologues by handing down exceedingly harsh sentences. Four students involved were expelled from the College, and eight were suspended for two terms. (The punishments were later overturned by a court of law.)

Because of his handling of the C.O.S. hearings, conservatives turned on McLaughlin too, and they were unrepentant. The rightward critique had been analogous to Teddy Roosevelt’s verdict on Howard Taft: “feebly well-meaning;” now, it became far more insistent and caviling. Even the Governor of New Hampshire (an ex officio member of the Board of Trustees, as stipulated in the College Charter) criticized McLaughlin for his handling of the situation.

But I don’t want to continue turning over the old issues. What most strikes me about the whole contretemps is how small it was, how petty and mean the issues, how willing were those on both fronts to lapse into sanctimony or mawkish histrionics. It was approached as a parlor game, and third-rate events cut down a first-rate man. They spoiled the ship for a halfpenny’s worth of tar.

Shortly thereafter, the faculty voted 167 to 2 in favor of an ad hoc committee to examine the McLaughlin administration; the eventual report accused him of misprisons, stating that his leadership was “antithetical to effective governance.” In out-oftown appearances, McLaughlin was increasingly crestfallen. A few times he referred to the Presidency in third-person – “whoever is President” or “whether I am President or someone else.” He formally stepped down late in 1986.

Ernest Martin Hopkins had three decades to leave his mark on Dartmouth. John Sloan Dickey had more

than two. David Thomas McLaughlin had six years. Francis Brown’s experience as president (1815 to 1820) is probably closest to McLaughlin’s.

Brown’s tenure spanned the whole of the Dartmouth College case, and the unremitting stress and controversy of it killed him. He died when he was thirty-five.

At the memorial service held for McLaughlin two weeks ago in Rollins Chapel, current President James Wright said that “his legacy as the fourteenth President is clear.” Is it, though?

To be sure, he was responsible for several significant achievements. For one, faculty salaries increased considerably, rising forty-three per cent over a five-year period (though in many ways this was appeasement, an attempt to still the turbulent state of affairs). Under McLaughlin, three dormitories, the Rockefeller Center, the Hood Museum, the Friends of Dartmouth Rowing Boathouse, and Berry Sports center were built. McLaughlin bolstered need-blind admissions. The College endowment also ballooned considerably under McLaughlin’s tenure – who could have deduced that such a corporate businessman would be responsible for such derring-do – and he rationalized its management, which was in a constant state of crisis under the Kemeny administration.

McLaughlin also secured approval – over faculty resistance – to relocate the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital from Maynard Street to a remote location in Lebanon. The move made room to expand the undergraduate campus northward and allowed for the creation of an entirely new campus for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, now recognized as one of the leading hospitals in the nation. It’s fitting that the new student facilities to be built on the old hospital property will be named after McLaughlin; it’s also fitting that President Wright called the relocation McLaughlin’s “most long-lasting accomplishment.”

“It stands only behind co-education,” he said, “in shaping the modern Dartmouth and the future of this College.”

Yet in another cruel irony, especially for a man so often dismissed as philistine, I think David McLaughlin’s real legacy is an idea – an idea about Dartmouth and, as part of that, an idea about the limitations of ideas.

“Education to me,” he said, “is defined more than just in the classroom.”

Dartmouth provided fine schooling, but the Dartmouth experience was far more robust than just that. His believed in “the vital destiny of Dartmouth as a place where the future leaders of this country and of other nations will be developed intellectually, socially, and morally.”

In his valedictory to the Class of 1983, McLaughlin said that education was a “never-ending process,” where one was “always questioning, forever growing, perennially renewing one’s sense of self and extending one’s personal development in a world that cries out for leadership and for understanding.” Most, though, would only be at Dartmouth for four years. The College could not provide a complete education – no school could. This is a sophisticated idea about the intellec-

tual limits of academia. What was far more important, he said, was the idea of the College itself.

When there are no bones, as T. S. Eliot said, anybody can carve a goose.

For McLaughlin, the thing that put the bones into the goose was “the embrace of the sustaining bond that will forever exist between you and your College.”

He had a faith in tradition and history that was nearly atavistic. He consistently emphasized the importance of “all lasting traditions” at the College, which he said allowed his students to be “enlarged and enriched by the act of giving himself… to a greater cause.”

He realized that change was inevitable, but he said that the “challenge before us” was to confront change by preserving the essentials. We must change, he said, “and still, while doing so, to reinforce the constant values that have attended Dartmouth’s passage through other periods in the past.”

At least for the nonce, the situation is usually reversed: Dartmouth has an adequate history, but it must change.

David McLaughlin was the last College President to articulate anything like this. He was an extraordinarily fair and even-handed leader – and this accounts for his fall from grace. He could not satisfy the ideologues, on either the left or the right, because he simply was not an ideologue. The rationale for his Presidency was not his politics but his fanaticism for the College. “We are the envy of almost every college in the land,” he said, again and again. He truly believed that Dartmouth was better, and more valuable, and more important, than just about anything else. He supposed that enough to hold things together. It was not a mentality that would lend itself to hermetic, cauterized orthodoxies.

And against almost universal condemnation, he never soured on Dartmouth. He never mourned or grieved.

In his 1986 resignation report to the general faculty, he wrote, “I share with all of you an immense pride in this institution that we jointly serve. It is a place much greater than the sum of its parts – and greater than any single voice can describe or define. I love it – and I know that you do, too.”

McLaughlin described his relationship with the College (and President Wright pointed this out at the memorial service) as “a kind of love affair at first sight.” As if evidence of this, he passed away while he was on a fishing trip with several of his Dartmouth friends and classmates and his two sons, both of whom attended Dartmouth as well.

David McLaughlin once wrote that Dartmouth was “a very precious (and, I sometimes fear, a rare) form of organization.” And “the greatest danger” to that organization, he said, “is the risk of being taken for granted.” On the program for his memorial service was a poem adapted from ‘Remember Me’

by David Harkins, that read, in part, “You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday/ Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday/ You can remember him only that his is gone/ Or you can cherish his memory and let it live on.” His legacy, then, seems as great a triumph, and just as great a tragedy, as it ever did.

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Threnody for Old School Dartmouth Joe Rago

Former Editor-in-Chief Published January 12, 2005 These days, ‘Old School’ seems to imply something out of time, archaic, like sitting for a daguerreotype, keeping a commonplace book, eating pie for breakfast, clattering away at a Smith & Corona, getting cigarettes from a machine, dashing off a cablegram, filing a prescription for laudanum, practicing phrenology, using a spittoon, or picking up a stenographer at a cocktail bar. But the Old School is also a state of being and a state of mind. It is a life of extremes. It is not a kind life.

I’ll work up to that, though.

The very idea of an ‘Old School,’ I think, has special resonance at Dartmouth today. More and more, I’ve noticed a sort of quiet dissatisfaction with the way things are – not of a political nature, really, but a spiritual one.

There is a growing sense that affairs here, for whatever reason, have been watered down and that this institution has lost a bit of itself in the process. It’s not a movement by any means.

It’s subterranean. It’s those moments when you happen across an attitude or a personality or a tendency that seems like it should have been ground away some time ago – a tweedy, andlet’s-not-have-any-nonsensethen type professor, say – and it’s like a galvanic battery has gone off in your brain. An encounter with the out of time, with the archaic, with the Old School, can be uncanny.

There is a half-forgotten history to Dartmouth College, the weight of which cannot be denied and which is intrinsically a part of who we are today. It is not among the gossamer P.R. in admissions viewbooks, Princeton Reviews, and official speechmaking, but it is fixed like a photograph in a chemical bath. And what many College students are realizing is that in the transition from Old School Dartmouth to New School Dartmouth, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

Study the contrasts. In December, the Dean’s office imported ‘labyrinths’ to help harried students “relax” and “deal with” the stress of finals period.

By Labyrinths, they meant large floor mats painted with a roundabout path, much like the design on a Celtic emblem. By relax, they meant students were to take a “study break” and amble along the path, which, according to one Dean, “winds back and forth and becomes a metaphor for our lives.”

Here is how Edwin J. Bartlett, a member of the class of 1872 and later a professor at the College, described his student days: “Whatever customs elsewhere, here, removing an offending stove from a recitation room and throwing it into the river; firing a

gun so heavily loaded as to break 320 panes of glass, in retaliation for offensive discipline; turning the occupants out of a dilapidated building and razing it to the ground; tarring and feathering a bad man; blowing a horn in recitation; and wrecking a bookstore go beyond the commonplace in college pranks, especially when superposed upon all the familiar college disorders.”

This is drawn from his trim memoir, A Dartmouth Book of Remembrance: Pen-Sketches of Hanover and the College before the Centennial and After. No labyrinths there. No metaphors for our lives, either.

Bartlett wrote that his “stories of turbulence, insubordination,

litical correctness are not Old School. Shortcuts across vacant lots are Old School. Forwarding e-mail is not Old School. Colleges and universities used to be Old School, but they are not anymore; still, “studious people, sometimes called nerds,” remain Old School nonetheless.

This is an exercise in taxonomy. There are organizing principles and natural relationships, – orders and classes, too. The authors are quite sure that this thing here is Old School, while that thing over there just doesn’t make the grade, thank you very much. If nothing else, they’ve got conviction. Whether or not they’re convincing is another matter. Here is chapter two, “Old

“The very idea of an ‘Old School,’ I think, has special resonance at Dartmouth today. More and more, I’ve noticed a quiet dissatisfaction with the way things are - not of a political nature, really, but a spiritual one.” and personal annoyance” would “seem incredible” to contemporary readers. No kidding. That’s more so true today than when he was writing in 1922, and it’s true because what he describes is quite unlike our own experience. To be fair, the past is usually wild and strange when it’s held up against what we’re familiar with. This is one of the primary reasons we look back in the first place: to see how we are different, to see how we have changed over time, and to appreciate the contingency of our own assumptions. There are connexions between past and present too, similarities. Another reason we look back is to see how we have stayed the same, to see what has endured, and to understand why what has endured has endured.

To honestly understand how we are different and how we are the same is to engage the past in an informed way. It clarifies, and it gives us perspective: not only where we’re going but where we should be going. Hotly contested territory, no doubt; but if you’re looking for decided views on what to make of it all, Old School America: 511 Reflections on the Traditional and Patriotic Values that Best Define America is a good place to start. Peter Slovenski, Patrick Vardaro, and Rich Sherman boldly champion the relevance of the past against the fissiparousness of the present.

“With old school America,” they write, “it’s out with the new, and in with the old.”

It doesn’t take long to work through this modest volume.

Essentially, it’s a prompt-book.

The Reflections the title promises aren’t reflections in the sense of contemplations or meditations.

More exactly, they’re declarations. Jukeboxes, Mother Goose, and striving to do your best, the authors assert, are Old School.

Narcissism, gambling, and po-

School Truths & Traditions,” in its entirety – “Queen Elizabeth is old school.

George Washington Carver was old school. King Arthur was old school. Susan B. Anthony was old school. John Glenn is old school. Thomas Edison was old school. The Wright Brothers were old school. Marconi was old school. William Tyndale was old school. Respecting culture from the past and respecting crazy old relatives – even when you don’t agree with them – is old school.

Being honest to others and with yourself is old school. Amelia Earhart was old school. Nikola Tesla was old school. The August 1963 civil rights march on Washington was an old school march.

The Polish Solidarity movement was old school. Religions are old school because they are usually devoted to finding and preserving eternal truths. Harry Truman was old school.”

What the hell are these guys babbling about?

Perhaps aware of the need to distinguish the sense from the sensibility, the authors interlard explanatory remarks between the lists. The Old School “describes a way of life that reached its cultural peak in America between 1900 and 1967.” It emphasized “honor, hard work, romance, loyalty, patriotism, courage, religion” and “required roughly four things: an education, hard work, common sense, and not making babies until you were ready to raise them.” The Old School was “proud of the achievements of Western civilization” and had “a reverence for the past.”

Now we’re just deeper into the mess. That’s not grounds for incorporating Confucius or the Eiffel Tower into the Old School. And if the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China are Old School, as the authors maintain, the rationale is not. While old

and enduring, they best describe nothing about America, and nothing about Western civilization, besides. Perhaps they emphasize hard work.

The precise definition of Old School America is further muddled when Messrs. Slovenski, Vardaro, and Sherman turn to our national flaws. The Old School, they write, “prides itself on retaining traditions and staying the same,” but it is also “forever getting smarter and better by comparing various ways of doing things and eventually uniting behind the best ideas and turning them into traditions.” True, cultures survive not because they are immutable but because they are adaptable. But it beggars belief to argue, “For a while, the old school believed in racism, but in sermons and in classes we learned that all men were created equal. Then, for awhile, the old school believed in segregation.

But in more sermons and more classes we came to understand that the civil rights movement contained the wisdom of the ages, and it was an old school movement.” Nonsense. This is not only flippant, but wrong.

What the authors of Old School America want is for us to look back at the past and have it inform the present. “Here,” they write in the introduction, “are some old school cultur-

cooked up a have-it-all utopia that will appeal to almost everyone. They’ve made the values we value now the values of the past, regardless of how historically exact the declarations may be.

(Perhaps Americans were more patriotic between 1900 and 1967 than they are now. Perhaps not.

They certainly were not more racially progressive. I don’t know how to gauge interest in jukeboxes, though I suspect it’s declined.)

In this sense, the Reflections on Old School America are reflections like mirror images, but they have very little to do with the reality of the past times and are just another reflection of our own. They’re familiar, because we’re looking at ourselves. And in order to do so, we have to give up something else, and it’s something far rarer and unquestionably more precious: to imagine the way another people lived, and to make sense of their way of making sense of the world.

What the authors don’t seem to appreciate is that the past will always be imperfect. It’s not that there is nothing in it to admire or learn from; nor is it that one should be unconditionally satisfied with the present – only a very lucky idiot is that. Rather, it’s that history is a complex process, and its influences are simultaneously many things.

“Somehow, we’ve gotten ourselves a low-carb, self-esteem, casual-Friday culture, and we hardly seem to realize what we’ve lost. And an indelible part of this culture is its snobbery towards its former self.” al standards that were admired in America from 1900 to 1967.

They are standards we can still learn from today.” That is a sharp observation. Somehow we’ve gotten ourselves a low-carb, self-esteem, casual-Friday culture, and we hardly realize what we’ve lost. And an indelible part of this culture is its snobbery towards its former self. We see this all the time: those who go tearing back into the past, pick out its instances of moral travesty, and drag them back into the present, as evidence of just how bad it was back then. Old School America is clearly a reaction to this trend, but it just replaces the agenda: it goes charging back into the past, finds the things it wants to find, and drags them back into the present, as evidence of just how good it was back then.

I’m more sympathetic to the latter approach than to the former. But both get us nowhere.

They bleach out the ambiguities.

For all the trumpeting of history in Old School America, the authors condescend to it. They’ve not given us Reflections in the sense of mirror images, the past as it actually was. They’ve found that it doesn’t live up to our own superior standards and they’ve

Sure, there were good, old days, but the Good Old Days never really were. To give the past a close reading is to find it was just as troubling and just as turbulent and just as checkered as the very much troubling, turbulent, checkered present.

Look at Dartmouth. We like to think of this school as an elite academic institution, as opposed to simply a good one, but it’s a relatively recent development. Dartmouth, the ninth and last of the colonial colleges, got on modestly and was drifting into irrelevancy by the end of the nineteenth century. It functioned as a finishing school for privileged New England school boys; the curriculum mostly consisted of the study of classic texts in Greek and Latin. President William Jewett Tucker 1861 inherited a school that was at best stagnant, while other comparable schools (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and the rest) were gradually drawing away in pursuit of higher educational ideals. It was only the reforms he initiated, continued by his successors, especially Ernest Martin Hopkins 1901, that kept Dartmouth from slipping under.

Continued on page ten.

10 Monday – August 14, 2017

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Tradition and the Spirit of Dartmouth

DARTMOUTH HORNERS expelled by President Tucker.

All Images courtesy of Rauner Library

> CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 After he retired, President Tucker hoped he would live long enough to see three new buildings at Dartmouth – a gym, an administration building, and a library. He only lived long enough to see the first two.

As late as the 1920s, Dartmouth was said to have the largest gymnasium and the smallest library of any school in America, which was probably true. (For years Dartmouth’s books were crammed into the basement of Wilson Hall.) The calumnious reputation so incensed President Hopkins that he personally saw to it that funds were raised to raise Baker Library.

The College was not dismissive of the life of the mind, quite. But it was still imbricated with a fighting frontier mentality in those days, the idea of the errand into the howling wilderness. It was more provincial and isolated, much more so than now.

The surroundings were more spitand-sawdust, less sophisticated, and so were the students. They were all men, and tended to go in heavily for sports. Toughness and fellowship were prized, and so were smarts, but – as we know from the MSS. catalogued in the College Archives – there was a pervasive sense that there was more to life than a monastic existence dedicated to study and academic scribbling.

And all this, combined with lenient, boys-will-be-boys discipline, gave Dartmouth a reputation for misbehavior, the sort of mischief that Ed Bartlett described. At first, it was just those fellows who amused themselves by herding the cattle from the common into the cellar of Dartmouth Hall, or cutting lead weights into the Chapel candles, so they would snuff out all at once during Sunday Vesper Services.

Over time, juvenilia became entrenched resistance to the persistent attempts to subdue, – discipline, – domesticate, – housebreak a student body that on the whole remained unruly, willful, reliably out-of-control, and cheerfully irrepressible.

When President Tucker took over, for instance, he encountered an old custom known as ‘horning,’ an involuntary reckoning for profes-

sors who had for any reason awakened the wrath of the student body.

He was forced to bring the practice to a decisive end in February 1896, when an unruly mob set upon a particularly unpopular instructor in his office in Thornton Hall. Many of the students were disguised in masquerade and armed with whatever noisemaking instruments were at hand – horns, drums, calliopes, whistle-woods, pots and pans – and, in President Tucker’s words, “proceeded to make the night hideous with their clamor.” The assailed professor – who’d announced in the classroom that he’d heard Dartmouth students were a rough set, but he’d expected to find at least a few gentlemen and had not yet unearthed one – made matters worse when the mob arrived, so they reduced his office and its contents to splinters; the affray spilt over onto the Green and lasted into the small hours of the morning. President Tucker expelled every single miscreant he could get his hands on, and that was that. A professor, so far as we know, was never horned again.

Still, President Tucker understood the passions that fueled this kind of behavior could be directed to more gainful pursuits. There were excesses, but, as he wrote in his 1919 autobiography My Generation, Dartmouth’s “advantage, and it was very great, was in the well-nigh unrivaled passion of an originating spirit at once creative, adventurous, and charged with spiritual power.”

Misbehavior, love for trouble, was not limited to the undesirables. It was an ingrained part of the Dartmouth experience. “I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a College man in your sense of the word,” Robert Frost 1896 said when he returned to campus in 1916, soon after the publication of his first collection of poems. “But I liked the rushes a good deal, especially the one in which our class got the salting and afterwards fought it out with the sophomores across pews and everything (it was in the Old Chapel) with old cushions and even footstools for weapons – or rather fought it to a standstill with the dust of ages we raised.”

(Frost called his book, by the way, A Boy’s Will.)

When Frost spoke of a ‘rush,’ he was talking about a ritualized brawl, old as the College I guess, primarily fought between the freshmen and the sophomores. Marauding bands of upperclassmen would round up the pea-greens, the classes would array themselves into legions on opposite sides of the Green, and at the discharge of a pistol everyone would have at it. The rushes could degenerate into astonishing violence, and several students usually wound up unconscious. “If you have never been in a rush,” Clifford B. Orr 1922 wrote in a letter now in Rauner, “you do not know the feeling of endless pushing, panting, struggling, slipping, fearing every moment that you will be the next to disappear under the feet of the six or seven mad youths and be trampled.”

Orr’s class was one of the last to experience a genuine rush. The blood and guts got to be too much: the gashed faces, the black eyes, and the cut-up knuckles; the popped collarbones and busted femurs.

Students considered it the most fun they’d never want to have again,

varro came to Dartmouth in 1969 as one of the first female professors and was constantly mistaken for a secretary. Even President John Kemeny, largely responsible for coeducation in the first place, told Esquire magazine in 1979 that it was “a legitimate statement” to call Dartmouth men the Marlboro men of the East. They tend to be macho, he said.

Well I don’t know. Chris Miller 1963 is the author of the short stories that led to the popular Animal House film. (One’s in Rauner.

It’s called, ‘Pinto’s First Lay.’) In a 1982 interview, he explained, “My feeling about having been at an allmale version of Dartmouth is that I gained something from that experience and I lost something from that experience. And what I lost was really any sense of what women are really about… I mean, women were something to be attacked and swallowed on weekends.”

What he said he gained was an understanding of intensity, Dartmouth’s “manic edge.” There was character to the place, without tempering influence. Mary Ellen Dono-

SPECTATORS watch a “rush” in the 19th century administrators were increasingly concerned, and the rushes petered out. “It has surely been a grand and exciting time,” Orr wrote after his first rush. “Thank Heaven, though, it’s over.”

Change comes slowly at Dartmouth. Women were not admitted until 1972, extraordinarily late for higher education, and the Trustee decision was not unanimous. They fought it out for two full days before the verdict came down. The original ratio of men to women was eight to one. The environment for women must have been frightful. Everyone was extremely hostile. Blocks of

van 1972 remembered of coeducation, “Dartmouth was intimidating for everybody; I know there were a lot of unhappy guys, too.” And Lansing Lamont, who wrote a book called Campus Shock that partially dealt with coeducation at Dartmouth, talked about the way “you are always pushed to the limit by the men at Dartmouth.” Of course, he meant that in the pejorative sense, and he was talking about misogynistic behavior. But it’s the pushing of the limits that’s important, and losing that is something.

Dartmouth is more complicated than ever today, and diverse people

“Dartmouth is more complicated than ever today, and diverse people respond varyingly to the way things used to be. Perhaps you find that culture thrilling. Perhaps not. But there is no denying that that is the way things used to be. That is an Old School: it cannot satisfy everybody.” men would sit with cards marked one to ten and rate the women as they entered the dining hall. A huge issue at the time was divvying up the bathrooms; one night, an aggrieved student stole every toilet seat from every female bathroom. Marysa Na-

respond varyingly to the way things used to be. Perhaps you find that culture thrilling. Perhaps not. But there is no denying that that is the way things used to be. That is an Old School: it cannot satisfy everybody.

This is not the kind of Old School

that emerges from Old School America. That Old School is starched, scolding, and prim. “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” the authors write, “was on the cutting edge of the new school. Too much money and drinking for the old school,” they say. This is a saccharine, sentimental world of pogo sticks, hula hoops, letter sweaters, soda parlors, soapbox derbies, dance marathons, white picket fences, milkshakes with two straws, and make-out sessions with your best gal at Inspiration Point – all actual items. I’m not one to beat up on the Puritans (though burning witches used to be Old School, I’d say), but this is positively puritanical, at least in the modern connotation.

The goody-goody mentality detracts from the good points the authors do make, that there is such a thing as an Old School and that it is still relevant. But it was never this dull. And this is something, I suspect, that Mr. Slovenski understands himself. He is, after all, a member of the class of 1979.

The old saw, that old habits die hard, is an old saw for a reason. In an instance of good fortune, the details of which I’ll leave aside, I’ve acquired a substantial folio of College disciplinary reports from the early 1980s, right around the same time that Mr. Slovenski was here. These papers – which I doubt anyone in Parkhurst is still privy to, though I’m uncertain as to the state of administrative record-keeping – are a chronicle of behavior that’s both pervasive and breathtakingly irresponsible. In the characterization of the Dean of the College, it was “disgusting, immature, obscene, offensive, adolescent, etc.”

He was right. Here’s a typical citation, from November 1983: “-----had a lot to drink. He’s a freshman and it is a feeling that the punch that was served was very potent. Potent enough to make a girl turn blue and stop breathing and have to be transported to the Emergency Room in an ambulance with possible alcohol poisoning.”

Some of these memorandums concern the fraternity system. At times, the misdeeds are spectacular.

The Dean of the College wrote to the Fraternity Board of Overseers in 1983, “I received a phone call from Jim Wright, Associate Dean of the Faculty… expressing concern about information brought to his attention by departmental colleagues regarding a student’s inability to submit course work on time due to a pledge trip that resulted in his being left on Nantucket. Upon further investigation of this situation, I learned that the pledges were flown (via a private plane) to Nantucket by current fraternity members.”

The efforts to get things under control were feeble. After several pledges were found “bound and gagged” on cowfields in Stratford, Vermont, this is the way the Dean of Students describes his exchange with the fraternity concerning the affair: “I pointed out to ------ that binding and gagging and leaving students in the middle of the night just

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GIFF FOLEY “A Good Student and Civilized, Sort Of.” does not make sense and the risks involved in this type of activity are really tremendous. ------ said that he could appreciate my point of view, but he seems to feel that there are people who really want to do these kinds of activities, and if the students want to participate why should the College be so concerned.

I admitted to ------ that traditions die hard and it is probably reasonable to expect that it will take time for fraternity members to understand and appreciate the concerns that are held by the College regarding some of the questionable pledge activities that have been institutionalized over the years at the College.”

Later, a branch of the Dean’s Office issued “some suggestions for pledge raid safety” to the fraternities, including providing “shoes” and discouraging “the use of tape or rope.” The memorandum optimistically concluded, “Thanks!”

Then there is the infamous Gile Circuit case. The object of the Gile circuit was to consume a beer at every dormitory and every Greek house on campus, no mean feat.

(It was so-called because the circuit traditionally began at the Gile dorm; the dorms were allowed to host social functions in those days.) One evening in April 1982, a few fellows attempted to complete a double circuit. As they travelled, curious students began to follow them, and soon a large crowd was building.

For whatever reasons, the endeavor ended badly, and its final moments are only understood in hazy terms.

At 5:30 in the A.M., Webster Avenue was engulfed by fist-fighting and rioting. Students were throwing stones and empty vodka bottles at each other and touching off bottle-rockets. Reports indicated that firecrackers were thrown at dogs.

The fraternity houses were savaged, if not razed to the ground, as they might have been in Ed Bartlett’s Mr. Rago was a member of the Class of 2005, and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The Dartmouth Review.

day. Dozens of students were treated in the emergency room at Mary Hitchcock.

In the aftermath, the Dean of the College noted, “I personally inspected the outside of ------ two days after the incident, and noted at least one dozen broken windows…

I also understand that the shrubs in the immediate area were uprooted and tossed through windows. I’m certain we all agree that such behavior has absolutely no legitimate explanation.” He wrote, “Because I do not believe that this is the image that fraternities at Dartmouth want to convey, much less the reality of what fraternities want to be, I am writing to ask your cooperation in curtailing any such behavior in the future.” However, he continued, “This has been a difficult letter for me to write, as the freedom and fellowship which I enjoyed as an undergraduate fraternity member at Dartmouth are easily remembered.”

The leaders of the houses involved were called into his office to explain themselves. During one such meeting, a house president began to roll through the usual excuses – these were a few bad seeds, – well why should the College be so concerned, – in any event it won’t happen again, etc. A look of imperturbable displeasure fell over the face of the Dean, and he reached down, pulled out the fraternity’s disciplinary folder, and slammed it to his desktop. The folio was hefty and well-thumbed; and the thud brought the dilations to a sudden swinging pause. Silence. Silence. Silence. “This, gentlemen,” the Dean finally said, “is a litany of horrors.”

And he was right.

In very recent years – the early nineties, so far as I can tell – circumstances finally started to chill.

Students stopped driving gold balls into the windows of Parkhurst and beat their clubs into ploughshares.

The frat basements, which used to be so filthy that you could lose the soles of your shoes just in getting around, were finally cleaned up.

Now they are inspected once a week

by the campus police.

A short time ago I met an alum who attended the College right around the time things began to settle down. Over small talk, we got to talking about the Greek system, he asked me if I was in a house, and so forth. “Well,” he concluded, “I’ll tell you this, if I’d even wanted to join a fraternity, I never would have been Valedictorian.” Sign of the times, perhaps?

Think of Giff Foley 1969. Foley blew into Hanover in 1965 on a chopper motorcycle, a freshman football star from Winnekta. He was tough in every sense. Jeffrey Hart, his close friend, and professor of English Emeritus, said that when he hit a man on the field – he played defensive end – when he drilled someone, the guy would “just stop, like an arrow quivering in a tree.”

Foley was known to play hard off the field as well. He eventually came to an unspoken arrangement with the Hanover police; he was too likeable and too violent for them to handle. During his sophomore year, he opposed coeducation and hired a plane to loop around a big football game trailing an ad banner that read, GIFF SAYS NO. The stands, I’m told, went bananas.

Soon enough, his extracurricu-

inadvertently vomiting on the Dean of the College and his wife during a concert in Webster Hall. Still, things did not remain so unpleasant. In a short while he was drafted, fought at the Czechoslovakian border, acquired tuberculosis, and, after his convalescence, was reinstated at Dartmouth by the very Dean he had desecrated with the contents of his stomach. He finally graduated in 1958, and he and the Dean remained friends for life.

Perhaps the abuse of substances and all that goes with it are only the symptoms of a certain frame of mind, and not the cause of it. It’s not as though recreational intemperance somehow burrows into all men’s souls; and while surely it is ruinous for some, leading to a life of addiction and an early grave, addictions run both ways. The compulsions that lead to abuse often lead to greater things, – exhilarating, extravagant, unconventional, and occasionally tragic. Those who thrived under such a regimen thought things more thrilling at their heights and depths. Which is to say, when there were risks involved.

Before Dartmouth is dismissed as an irredeemable sink of iniquity, this ought to be considered. The College’s erstwhile student culture

“Easy as it is to dismiss Old School Dartmouth as a culture of misbehavior, vulgarity, and debauchery, that culture, which loudly predominated at Dartmouth for decades, did have a prescription for producing creative, adventurous, spiritual fellows.” lar activities ran him afoul of a few Deans and he joined the service and got some discipline. He earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart and when he returned to Dartmouth he had become “a good student and civilized, sort of.” After Dartmouth he ended up at Harvard Business School and was highly successful in the corporate world. He led a good rich life; but he could not live cautiously. Giff Foley’s final summons tragically came when his vintage World War II aeroplane stalled out while he was doing barrel rolls over Niagara Falls. Professor Hart eulogized him with words from Yeats: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he…

What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”

Giff Foley, I think, was Old School. That valedictorian fellow was not Old School. Tarring and feathering a bad man is Old School.

A Labyrinth is not Old School. Maybe I have more in common with the authors of Old School America than I’ve let on.

Of course, many of these stories seem to involve alcohol, and, it might even be said, hard drinking is the unfortunate prerequisite to most of them. Judson D. Hale 1955 said that one of the milestones of his Dartmouth Career was “my first drink (followed on the same occasion by my second, third, fourth, and fifth)… the first of many College episodes in which, sad to say, alcohol played a major role.” He later regretted those years terribly, considering them “a precious waste of time.” Hale, in fact, was expelled two months prior to graduation for

might have been coarse, profane, austere, grim, crowded to the full – certainly not for everyone – but its appeal was genuine and unadulterated, always drawing strong thinkers and colorful personalities to the Hanover Plain. And if these ardent spirits thrived on fast living and, well, ardent spirits, what of it?

It’s certainly no worse than now, when most things are purified and sanitized and spackled with pretensions and affectations. Nearly everyone’s been licked. New School Dartmouth often feels like an industrial mill, the jennies and shuttles and throstles of the looms calibrated just so, turning out résumé after résumé of sufficient pedigree and illustriousness to land a job. Students today are almost depressingly career-oriented. They have all their lives to become brokers and bankers and congressmen and captains of industry, and already they have done so. Pretty soft, I call it. Pretty soft.

Old School Dartmouth, it seems to me, rejected this kind of abstemious, risk-less living. Every escapade was an opportunity to one-up the one before, and there was little enjoyment or satisfaction found in moderation or restraint. For all their turpitude, when the boys here got into something, they got into it right up to their eyeballs. If they were going to horn a professor, they were going to destroy his office. If they were going to rush the Green, they were going to rush until they were bleeding and unconscious. If they were going to riot on Webster Avenue, they were going to dig up

the shrubs and fling them through the windows. And if they were going to drink a beer, hell, they were going to damn well drink fifty beers.

That is wry, of course. Still, the need to get into something up to one’s eyeballs is special and if that was not an academic part of the Dartmouth experience it was essential nonetheless. The lessons were (and are) endlessly applicable.

If you were to make an accounting of the current avatars of Dartmouth College – Jeffrey Immelt ’78, Bradford Evans ’64, Peter Fahey ’68, for starters – I think you would find more of them of the Old School than the New. Easy as it is to dismiss Old School Dartmouth as a culture of misbehavior, vulgarity, and debauchery, that culture, which loudly predominated at Dartmouth for decades, did have a prescription for producing creative, adventurous, spiritual fellows. Our Dartmouth, which is tamer and more decorous, does not.

To be Old School at Dartmouth today is to recognize this dilution.

It is to stop apologizing and making excuses and mincing about; to strip away all the pettiness and the timidity and to look at the cloying, self-pitying cowardice flitting around this place and say, – there has got to be something more than this.

There was, once. And there still is; but it is diminishing, and found among fewer and fewer students, and only in isolated pockets. Cast your lot with the hold-outs. That’s it, you know, that’s it.

Robert Frost attended Dartmouth only briefly and rebelliously; but he taught, read, and lectured here for decades, and the College became an enormously powerful element in his life. In 1962, two months before he died, he visited for the last time and spoke about his poetry and his world. And what made them all worthwhile was ‘extravagance.’ “I look on the universe as a kind of an exaggeration anyway, the whole business,” he said. “That’s the way you think of it: great, great, great expense – everybody trying to make it mean something more than it is.” In the face of this, something authentic has “an exaggerated claim” for its very authenticity, extravagant because such things are so uncommon. “And then, I could go right on with pretty near everything I’ve done. There’s always this element of extravagance. It’s like snapping the whip: Are you there?

Are you still on? Are you with it? Or has it snapped you off?”

Frost was essentially making the same argument President Tucker made, that Dartmouth was “creative, adventurous, and filled with spiritual power.” Old School is at heart a state of being and a state of mind, an appreciation that it is always your choice, that you can always decide, that you can always transcend the mediocrity of the masses, that modernity is not always essential. It is to do the rarest of things, to interrogate your convictions: always asking yourself if you really believe what you say you believe and if you’re ready to live it. Are you there? Are you still on?

Are you with it? What’s the point, if you’re not going all out?

12 Monday – August 14, 2017

The Dartmouth Review

THE LAST WORD GORDON HAFF’S

COMPILED BY JOSEPH R. TORSELLA

“The living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue.

The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words.”

–Pericles “To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.”

-Pericles “One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it’s gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that’s more terrible than dying more terrible than dying young.”

-Joan of Arc, in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

-William Shakespeare

“It is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people’s hearts, their memory abides and grows.”

-Pericles “Man was never intended to become an oyster.”

-Theodore Roosevelt Sr.

“It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.”

-Daniel Webster 1801

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”

-Cicero

“At Dartmouth, we make you into a man by allowing you to remain a boy.”

-John Sloan Dickey ‘29

“Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.”

-Marcus Aurelius

“Loving Dartmouth is a joyful experience. That experience is ours, but it can only come from understanding— understanding each other and understanding our College.

In that direction lies our destiny.”

-David T. McLaughlin ‘54 “Humor is just another defense against the universe.”

-Mel Brooks “Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.” -Karl Barth “How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don’t have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.”

-Ogden Nash “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”

-Thomas Carlyle “This isn’t a prison, boys; you have all your life to become lawyers, bankers, brokers - now is your time to walk on fire.”

-WFS

BARRETT’S MIXOLOGY

The Kallmann Ingredients

2 oz Light Rum (“only the finest”) 2 tsp Sugar (“pure cane”) 1/2 Lime (“fresh from the orchard”) 3 Fresh Mint Sprigs (“only fresh sprigs”) Chilled Club Soda (“preferably imported”) Best when prepared by an indentured servant.

I was invited to a well-heeled club for drinks with Kallmann, my old friend since my prep-school days. Kallmann is one of those independently wealthy fellows – a lavish spender (he once shelled out for a gold-plated stapler, top of the line), an exclusive connoisseur of luxury foods, the kind of guy who’s always had his ass wiped by servants with warmed hand-towels, and so forth. I found him in a high-backed leather chair, fresh out of breath from flogging the help. In an off-hand manner, he launched into one of his lengthy anecdotes about his travels. “Was I scuba diving in Bora-Bora or hunting the natives in Bolivia – no, come to think of it, I was hiking the foothills of Cienfuegos in Cuba. Next thing I know, I’m made by a ruthless gang of international smugglers, thirsty for the handsome ransom my parents were sure to answer. They gave chase and eventually cornered me in a bazaar. Their leader dragged me into a back alley and pressed his rusted scimitar against the flesh of my throat, and I thought it was the end.” “What happened,” I gasped with bated breath. “Well,” he continued, “luckily I had my wits about me. I reached into my satchel and pulled forth the only weapon I knew how to wield: a wad of money. I tossed it into the face of my assailant, and, while that wretched street urchin desperately snatched at the bills, I sauntered off unscathed. I entered the nearest cantina and ordered the most expensive mojito the barista could fix me.” We had a good laugh over that one. Then, with a desultory wave of his hand, Kallman summoned over two more of his servants. He ordered one to fix us a round of mojitos, and the other to crouch down, as he needed an ottoman.

— Joseph Rago ‘05

“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

-Thomas Campbell “True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.”

-Thomas Carlyle “Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

-Thomas Carlyle “To live each day as though one’s last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing – here is perfection of character.”

-Marcus Aurelius “One does not feel sad at not having some good thing which is outside one’s experience: real grief is felt at the loss of something which one is used to.”

-Pericles “What’s the point, if you’re not going all out?”

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-JR