The Indians lose - Dartmouth College fails to elect Wilcomb Washburn

IN A TRUSTEE ELECTION widely looked forward to as quite probably signaling an alumni revolt against the leftward lurch in the academy, the results could not have been more disappointing.

Dartmouth has been the scene of one intellectual and moral scandal after another: a deliberate refusal to require essential reading, victim-studies courses, safe-sex kits involving equipment for male-male sex, Angela Davis honored, Ron Dellums and other near Communists honored, opposition hounded, a president who talks about wanting more "intellectualism." Not intelligence or learning, but "intellectualism." You would think the cup had at last run over.

In Wilcomb Washburn the opposition had a genuinely superior candidate, a scholar in American studies at the Smithsonian Institution (see his article in NR, Sept. 30, 1988). His establishment opponent was a Boston real-estate man with no visible credentials and no ideas, except enthusiasm for the status quo.

About half of the eligible alumni voted . . . and came down 60 to 40 for the leftward status quoand, worse than that, for a continuing anti-intellectual sentimentality. As Adlai Stevenson said after losing to Eisenhower, "It hurts too much to laugh, and I'm too old to cry." Dartmouth has now sufficiently defined itself.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
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