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Many student editors feel equally combative. Visually, their papers are often cluttered and oldfashioned, but they argue their cases with blunt headlines and florid, Buckleyesque prose. Most are far more interested in opinion than in news. Says Roger Brooks, editor in chief of Princeton's year-old Madison Report (circ. 2,500): "I believe in saying what I think." Paul Davies, president of the Stanford Review (circ. 1,000), agrees: "We are here to balance student debate." Because many papers begin as personal vehicles, some are short-lived. Those that survive may evolve: the University of Wisconsin's weekly Badger Herald (circ. 10,000) has been a conservative voice since 1969 but has gradually muted its attacks. Contends Editor John Stofflet: "Now people look to us for objective news." Occasionally, ideological zeal, undergraduate high spirits and the general absence of faculty supervision for these independent groups have led to rhetorical excesses, which have often been retracted with apologies.
At one campus the merciless vitriol of a conservative weekly has provoked an uneasy, university-wide debate about just how much free speech a civilized community can tolerate. Pervading the pages of the Dartmouth Review, founded in 1980, is a sophomoric brand of macho humor. An essay in its Oct. 18 issue spoke scornfully of a "never-never land where men are women and women are persons." The same issue contained a mock memo berating student homosexuals: "Wasn't the closet more comfortable than the trash bag? You guys could suffocate." Contends Editor in Chief E. William Cattan: "We are writing for Dartmouth students. We have to make it spicy."
Far more serious than misfired jokes is the Review's repeated charge that Dartmouth's black students expect, and get, preferential academic treatment. Last year Co-Founder Keeney Jones wrote an article assailing affirmative action in what purported to be black street slang. In its annual critique of the curriculum in September, the Review disdained giving either women's studies or black studies the detailed analysis accorded to more traditional academic departments. Asked the Review rhetorically: "If Jews or Serbo-Croatians claimed victim status, and bit people, would they get their own departments too?"
The Review's inflammatory tone suggests that the editors seek to be agents provocateurs. Fed up at last, Dartmouth's faculty of arts and sciences voted, 113 to 5, to "deplore the abuses of responsible journalism that have been a regular practice of the Dartmouth Review." College President David McLaughlin concurred. "Free expression is not a privilege, but a fundamental right," he said. "When freedom of expression is used relentlessly to attack the integrity of individuals or segments of the community, it tests to the utmost our commitment to this right."