Delhi, Deliverance & Dartmouth

When I arrived at Dartmouth twenty years ago, I was a sixteen- year-old naïf whom fate had delivered from my birthplace in the Punjab to a public school education in the backwoods of rural North Carolina. My father had chosen to start his medical practice there, without apparent concern for the signs on the highway proclaiming "the Ku Klux Klan welcomes you to Smithfield, North Carolina." It was from this somewhat bizarre juxtaposition of cultures -- "Delhi meets Deliverance" -- that I traveled to the Hanover green, where things were stranger still. "Safe sex kits," mock shanties where the Winter Carnival sculpture was supposed to be, rich kids dressing in rags and pretending to understand of the hardships of apartheid, the politics of divestment, and the efficacy of economic sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy (which, incidentally, the selfsame leftists now loudly decry when the target is Castro’s Cuba, the retro last bastion of communism).

While I sympathized with the noble anti-apartheid sentiments of the divestment proponents (who didn’t?), I quickly realized that something was very rotten in the state of Dartmouth. The lawlessness of the shanty-dwellers, their pseudo-righteous posing, their strained efforts to distance themselves from their mostly privileged upbringings, and their desire to project the evils of Dutch colonialism onto Dartmouth, all belied any sense of proportion or rationality. Yet even more striking was the fact that the College administration -- rather than giving the miscreants the disciplinary equivalent of a good spanking or, today, a "time out" -- patiently indulged the jejune antics of the radical chic protestors, answering their spoiled behavior with total inaction other than effete hand-wringing. This disconnect between actions and consequences was new to me, and only The Dartmouth Review was brave enough to point out that the emperor had no clothes. This early (to me) example of the Review as a "vox clamantis in deserto" championing an unpopular, but morally and logically correct, viewpoint, was like a siren song to my rebellious soul. I never looked back.

In retrospect, it is no surprise to me that in the balkanized and Orwellian world of Dartmouth in the late 1980s, the only place that I experienced complete meritocracy and egalitarianism was on the staff of the Review. It was the only place in my Dartmouth experience (with the possible exception of some of my three-and-four-student Greek and Latin classes with some outstanding and apolitical Classics professors) where my background -- be it gender, ethnicity, or religion -- was irrelevant to my role and my potential. All that mattered was how well I could report, write, edit, and reason. I had the great privilege to work alongside and learn from four of the Review’s finest editors -- Debbie Stone, Chris Baldwin, Bill Grace, and Kevin Pritchett. I learned courage and discipline from the peerless Jeffrey Hart and the quirky Douglas Yates -- at the time, the only two professors on campus with the intestinal fortitude to defend the Review in public. I was privileged to know and work with great and generous alumni such as George Champion, whose support made the Review possible. Along the way I made some lifelong friends and learned some painful and hard-won lessons about writing, politics, the First Amendment, and the art of war.

I no longer remember the names of most of the professors, student leaders, and College administrators who were the subjects or targets of many articles, exposés and editorials… but I can barely suppress a smile at the memory of my and my fellow reporters’ wintry antics.

One of the more vivid lessons that I learned during my editorship was that not everything is a laughing matter -- or at least, not a laughing matter fit for public, front-page consumption. Memorable satire often flirts with the boundaries of good taste, as Jonathan Swift makes clear. Having crossed that boundary on more than one occasion -- perhaps most strikingly by comparing James Freedman to Hitler during a controversy about the campus police’s tackling, handcuffing, and arresting freshman attempting to form their class numerals on the football field during halftime -- I would like to think that I now know better. Most of the time, anyway. (My new-age-style-parenting brother likes to ask his misbehaving three-year-old son the possibly illuminating question in media res: "Son, is that a good idea or a bad idea?" I wish someone wiser had asked me that question a couple of times during my editorship. Much gnashing of teeth might have been averted all around.)

What are the lasting effects and memories of my four years at The Dartmouth Review? I’ve assembled this partial list, in no particular order: love for underdogs; a passion for freedom of speech; an almost visceral distrust of authority; respect for debate; tolerance for honestly held and well-articulated views that differ from my own; a withering disdain for anodyne and characterless school mascots; defenestration (inside joke). In retrospect, things were rarely as black-and-white as they appeared to be when I was eighteen. After all, I have evolved into a San Francisco-dwelling ACLU board member; an elected Republican official who actively participates in the Federalist Society yet also devotes a substantial amount of time to pro bono legal work on behalf of political refugees, battered women, and religious minorities; and who reviews litigation discovery documents while listening to rap -- but prefers John Coltrane and Miles Davis for writing appellate briefs.

The Harmeet Dhillon who edited The Dartmouth Review might have looked upon such a person and mocked her "diversity" of viewpoints. Yet it is precisely the trial by fire, strange bedfellows at the ACLU, attempts to explain to an instransigent Morely Safer on 60 Minutes that I was, in fact, a bona fide immigrant even though I spoke English passably well, and in- numerable other sublime and ridiculous milestones of my Review tenure that ultimately engendered the complex, contrarian, and sometimes contradictory woman I have become. I hope that I will always be proud to call myself a "Reviewer." A "wah-hoo-wah" shout-out to my fellow Reviewers past and present, and I hope to many generations of them to come. May they all cherish their Review experiences as much as I have.