big green book, The

Miraculously Builded in Our Hearts: A Dartmouth Reader, Edward Connery Lathem and David M. Shribman, Dartmouth CoLLege and University Press of New England, 2000, $35

The title itself conjures up Ivy League pomp-and this series of essays edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe editor David Shribman and Dartmouth's Dean-Emeritus of Libraries Edward Connery Lathem offers plenty of that.

Yet it is also an insightful historical collection about the storied institution that inspired Animal House.

Take, for example, the rants of conservative Manchester Union Leader publisher William Loeb, objecting with typical all-caps vitriol, to the new Dartmouth president John G. Kemeny's announcement that he would suspend classes following the murders of four student demonstrators at Kent State University.

"AS MORE OF THEIR LOOTING, THEIR BURNING AND THEIR VANDALISM IS EXPOSED TO THE VIEW OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC, IT IS BECOMING VERY CLEAR TO MOST AMERICANS THAT A LARGE SECTION OF OUR ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IS INTELLECTUALLY AND MORALLY BANKRUPT," belched Loeb in a trademark front-page editorial.

Then there's former Dukakis campaign manager Susan R. Estrich's account of her junior year at Dartmouth in 1972, the year Dartmouth went coed and the boys insisted the new "cohogs would blow the curve, ruin the football team and force everyone into summer school." Nelson Rockefeller recounts how he spent his senior year in Hanover studying art and architecture. Author David Halberstam and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin offer particularly touching commencement advice.

See also retiring college President John Sloan Dickey's sound advice to administrators in a 1969 Yankee magazine interview: "The `extremist' groups remain small groups on almost every campus unless and until the college is forced into or trapped into some action which seems to the larger group of students or faculty to be wrong, or which draws a lot of people in on some issue other than the one which the extremists originally created."

Also in Dickey's interview, see roots of the later backlash against political correctness on campus: "At some campuses, we are also beginning to get students who are militant against the militants; they are tired of the demonstrations they have to walk through, tired of the strikes that make life intolerable for all students."

This is, after all, the alma mater of Illiberal Education author and p.cbasher Dinesh D'Souza, known in Hanover as Distort D'Newsa, according to Benjamin Hart's otherwise stiff account of the 1980s founding of the controversial Dartmouth Review.

Some of the essays are best left in Hanover. One might ask, for example, whether the Earl of Dartmouth's bicentennial greetings are necessary. "In 1904, my grandfather came here to lay the cornerstore of the new Dartmouth Hall ... `It was,' he said, `a reunion between Dartmouth and Dartmouth."' '

John O. Harney is executive editor of CONNECTION.

Copyright New England Board of Higher Education Summer 2000
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