DARTMOUTH REVIEWED. After a decade of discontent, Dartmouth President James Freedman is gone. He will not be missed

By Jeffrey Hart, National Review, June 22, 1998

"James Oliver Freedman, now stepping down after 11 years as president of Dartmouth, possesses great interest -- not as a scholar but as a specimen. He has manufactured himself as the distilled essence of contemporary academic liberalism. Naturally, he proclaims himself a feminist and a multiculturalist, and he is loud in his advocacy of racial preferences and special rights for gays. Whereas the civilized liberalism of Matthew Arnold sought centrality, Mr. Freedman seeks iconic `victims' and marginality; whereas Arnold looked to the best that has been thought and said, Mr. Freedman fears that a student required to read a play by Shakespeare would thereby miss out on a `gem' like Toni Morrison -- correct, if you believe that a student can read only one book. Mr. Freedman is Jewish, and he makes conspicuous use of that fact when he can exploit it politically, although his relationship to Judaism is tenuous. He himself has defined his Judaism as devotion to `idealism' and to `scholarship' -- which does distinguish not him from a Hindu or Muslim scholar, let alone from Erasmus or Hooker ... In the fall of 1987, conservatives at Dartmouth welcomed the accession of Mr. Freedman ... Although Mr. Freedman made much of his supposed attachment to the First Amendment, he quickly precipitated a series of sharp collisions with Dartmouth conservatives whose exercise of free speech led them into political incorrectness. One of these confrontations has become known as `The Bill Cole Affair' ... President Freedman appeared one afternoon on the steps of the Parkhurst administration building, equipped with amplifiers and surrounded by black undergraduates plus a few bongo drums, and made a passionate speech against `racism.' He did not mention Baldwin et al. by name, but of course everyone understood who the `racists'' were. Then, also still before the CCSC hearing, there took place a Candlelight Vigil Against Racism. It did not emerge until later that this parade had been organized by the Freedman administration, which even supplied the candles. The CCSC suspended Baldwin for six terms -- a very severe sentence -- and the others for somewhat less. They were convicted of `vexatious oral exchange,' a heretofore unknown College offense ... It did not take long for the court to overturn the CCSC verdict and order the students reinstated. And it was through all this that I first glimpsed the nature of James Oliver Freedman. It was especially striking to hear him tell a meeting of the general faculty that their annual raises would be affected by the legal bills the College had been obliged to pay -- these bills, of course, a result of his own behavior. Possibly even more revealing was the Mein Kampf Affair. In the fall of 1990, someone slipped a quotation from Mein Kampf into a much longer quotation from Theodore Roosevelt that always appears on the [Dartmouth] Review masthead. The subverted issue of the Review had been only partially distributed on campus when Kevin Pritchett, the editor-in-chief that year, discovered the Hitler quote. He immediately cancelled campus distribution, stopped the mailing to subscribers, had an apology printed and distributed, and had a clean issue of the newspaper run off and distributed. What more he could have done I cannot imagine. But a day or two later, a wooden platform had been set up in the middle of the Dartmouth campus, complete with amplifying equipment. Hundreds of onlookers were milling around, many wearing T-shirts emblazoned with one of those red circles with a line through the word HATE. At this Rally Against Hate, all sorts of wild things were said by Mr. Freedman, historian Arthur Hertzberg, and many others. Most notable, perhaps, was the following statement by Mr. Freedman, which was later printed and distributed by the College information service, and which he himself often described, I'm not joking, as his `Gettysburg Address': `For ten years, The Dartmouth Review has attacked blacks because they are blacks, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews.' Every word of this `Gettysburg Address 'except the first three is false, and can be shown to be so from the text of the newspaper, not to say the composition of its staff. The current editor of the Review, standing by as Mr. Freedman bellowed through his amplifier, was Kevin Pritchett, who is black. Two previous editors-in-chief came from the Indian subcontinent, one of them being Dinesh D'Souza, who now has published two important best-sellers on education and on race. The first president of the Review had been Nathan Levinson, and the Review had had many Jewish staffers and editors. (Indeed, one freshman who listened to the `Gettysburg Address' was Andrew Baer, a staffer on the Review who had lost some thirty relatives in the Shoah. One immediate effect of Mr. Freedman's Rally Against Hate was that young Andrew Baer had swastikas inscribed on his dormitory door, and his frightened parents considered withdrawing him from Dartmouth.) Is it even remotely possible that Mr. Freedman believed what he shouted from that platform? Did he really believe that the Review looked to Hitler for political guidance? This seems impossible. No one this side of Paraguay looks to Hitler in that way. When Mr. Freedman was asked by the Wall Street Journal how he would feel if, in due course, it were established that a saboteur had inserted the words from Mein Kampf, he replied, `I just haven't thought about that.' In fact, it was soon established who had inserted the words on the masthead. It was indeed sabotage. WE come now to the zany climax, a collector's item of Tartuffian chutzpah. Last fall Mr. Freedman chose the opening of the Roth Jewish Center at Dartmouth to deliver himself of some remarks about Dartmouth's Jewish quotas fifty years ago. On February 11 of this year, Mr. Freedman gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he said: `I chose that occasion [the Roth inauguration] to talk about that history. Some of this was related to the fact that, in my time at Dartmouth, we've had enough evidence of anti-Semitism from The Review (a conservative off-campus newspaper). [William F.] Buckley wrote a book called In Search of Anti-Semitism where Dartmouth was one of the four case histories he looks at.' Mr. Buckley did indeed use Dartmouth as one of his case histories, and what he concluded was that, where irresponsible charges of anti-Semitism were concerned, Mr. Freedman was `the principal malefactor of the season.' That Freedman cites Buckley as if in support of his allegations is world-championship chutzpah, absolutely breathtaking. As I said in a letter to the editor: Mr. Freedman says in the Los Angeles Times that he was 'seething' over the fact that Dartmouth was seen as anti-Semitic [because of the Review]. Excuse me. If someone in the general public had the impression that there was anti-Semitism at Dartmouth he undoubtedly gained that impression from Freedman himself, who was loudly and falsely hurling charges about it. People may be forgiven for believing the statements of an Ivy League President. They should get over that, at least in the case of Mr. Freedman."

Isolated Freedom From Intimidation,
Cornerstone (Nebraska Weslayan University), November 15, 2002
"A statement created in response to anti-semitic incidents last spring on college campuses is creating controversy because of its implication that Jewish Students are the only students in need of an 'intimidation free' environment. On Oct. 7, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) released a statement calling for 'intimidation free' campuses, which was signed by more than 300 university and college presidents including Wesleyan’s own, Jeanie Watson. However, according to an article in the October 4 New York Times, the statement has become the center of attention on campuses around the nation because it only mentions intimidation towards Jewish students. The signature gathering effort was initiated by James O. Freedman, a former president of Dartmouth College. Freedman, along with six other college presidents, created the statement after a series of incidents last spring in which Jewish students were targeted on college campuses. After identifying the need for a change, a letter containing the statement was distributed by Freedman to other college presidents across the county ... However, several college presidents around the nation have been bothered by the asymmetry of the statement, which calls for campus debates to 'be conducted without threats, taunts, or intimidation,' but only specifies Jewish students as the targets of this harassment ... [Nebraska Weslayan official] Siemsen said that he was unaware that the AJC [American Jewish Committee] was even involved with the statement until last Friday, when the Oct. 4 New York Times article was brought to his attention. Likewise, it is unclear whether the AJC helped to initiate the statement along with the seven college presidents, or if the organization chose to adopt the statement after it was drafted. Nonetheless, the AJC did run a full-page ad in the New York Times on Oct. 7 that contained the statement and the names of those presidents who have endorsed it. William Chace, president of Emory University and one of the original signers, contacted the AJC to see if the statement could be changed to add another paragraph that would be less one-sided. The AJC said that this would not be possible since so many presidents had already signed the original statement ..."

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