POWERLINE
Dartmouth
and double standards
By Scott Johnson
In the apocalyptic
satire Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley meets with his military
advisors as they seek to recall a bomber on its way to dropping the big one on
the Soviet Union. President Muffley invites the Soviet ambassador into the War
Room to join the discussion. When fight breaks out between the Russian
ambassador and General Buck Turgidson at the Pentagon, President Muffley
exclaims: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
At Dartmouth College,
however, you can’t satirize reality. Dartmouth now gives us: “Ladies
and gentlemen, you can’t study in here! This is the library!”
Jos Asch notes that Assistant
Director of Alumni Relations Meg Ramsden has been writing to alumni to inform
them that the Black Lives Matter rotesters who invaded the library and
screamed racist epithets at studying students will not be
sanctioned by the College. They didn’t violate any rules.
The Dartmouth Review
gave us a memorable account of what went down at the library this past fall in “Eyes wide open
at the protest.” This, according to the college, is free speech at play:
Black-clad
protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd roughly one
hundred fifty strong. Ostensibly there to denounce the removal of shirts from a
display in Collis, the Black Lives Matter collective began to sing songs and
chant their eponymous catchphrase. Not content to merely demonstrate there for
the night, the band descended from their high-water mark to march into
Baker-Berry Library.
“F***
you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your comfort!” “F*** you, you
racist s***!”
These
shouted epithets were the first indication that many students had of the coming
storm. The sign-wielding, obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the
usually quiet backwaters of the library. They surged first through first-floor
Berry, then up the stairs to the normally undisturbed floors of the building,
before coming back down to the ground floor of Novack.
Throngs
of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long
march. They confronted students who bore “symbols of oppression”: “gangster
hats” and Beats-brand headphones. The flood of demonstrators self-consciously
overstepped every boundary, opening the doors of study spaces with students
reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed
further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The
protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way.
Students
who refused to listen to or join their outbursts were shouted down. “Stand the
f*** up!” “You filthy racist white piece of s***!” Men and women alike were
pushed and shoved by the group. “If we can’t have it, shut it down!” they
cried. Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their
insults, shouting “filthy white b****!” in her face.
Confident of their
special status at the college, the BLM crowd gave us political thuggery in
action. Their behavior certainly constituted disorderly conduct.
Ramsden emphasizes
that no physical contact occurred — no punches were thrown — but the thuggery
put students in reasonable fear of their personal safety. The conduct of the
BLM crowd was, moreover, an outrage against common decency and civilized norms.
The college would have us believe that if roles were reversed, high principle
would have dictated a similarly indulgent outcome.
As Charles Kesler
observes in a New
York post column adapted from his current Claremont Review of Books essay
on Donald Trump:
The
left has gotten used to the way it runs the universities — by a powerful,
ideological majority so dominant that there is little, if any, opposition.
They
enjoy this imbalance; they regard it as natural, advantageous for students and,
increasingly, as a model for how the rest of the world should be run.
On
campus, the shock troops and deanlets wield the extraordinary power to order
atonement and punishment, police the boundaries of speech and distribute
benefits and rights by race, sex, gender, politics and ethnicity. This is
political correctness, and it’s now the first of the left’s political
institutions. It marks a new, ugly stage in liberalism.
Dartmouth has just
given us another vivid case study illustrating Charles’s observation.
