Free Speech: An Early Lesson
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
I’ve never protested anything in my life. I’m not proud of that fact, but there it is. Nonetheless, I really wished I could have joined the thousands protesting in Paris this weekend, raising a pen to the sky. Though it doesn’t come close in scale, the senseless murders in France brought to mind another protest marred by violence that provided for me an early lesson in free speech.
On the morning of November 15, 1985, I dropped off The Pretty Blonde, my bride for all of three months, at her $5/hour job at the Dartmouth Investment Office. “Look over there,” she said, pointing across the street toward The Green, a grass-covered field crisscrossed by paths that was the beehive of Dartmouth College. Rising out of the middle of The Green like a thatch of overgrown weeds were four dilapidated wooden shanties, constructed overnight by a student group calling themselves the “Dartmouth Community for Divestment (DCD)” to protest apartheid and Dartmouth’s $64 million worth of investments in companies that conducted business in South Africa. “Are you kidding me?” I said, rolling my eyes made red from reading too many spreadsheets. “All those kids are going to do is piss a lot of people off.”
That was an understatement.
Despite being deemed illegal by the Hanover Police, the College allowed the shanties to stay, at least for awhile. At some point, the New Hampshire winter would make these students come to their senses and long for the warmth of their dorm rooms. But then along came December, followed by January. The shanties were still there, and the locals were up in arms. Dartmouth President David Mclaughlin pleaded with the DCD to vacate the Green before their presence disturbed the traditional festivities of Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival. But the students remained steadfast and refused to take their protest elsewhere. The campus was ready to erupt.
It finally did. At 3:35am on January 21, 1986, a band of 12 students acting under the name of the “Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green before Winter Carnival” drove a U-Haul truck onto The Green and demolished three of the four shanties with sledgehammers. The fourth was spared only because two members of the DCD were sleeping in it.
Two factors that enhanced the magnitude of the outcry against the action were that 10 of the 12 attackers were staff members of the Dartmouth Review, and that the attack came the morning after the College’s official celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. The Dartmouth Review was an off-campus, conservative bi-weekly published by students that was also known to piss a few people off (they referred to the protesters as ‘preppie pinkos”) In the aftermath of the incident, the DCD hung a banner across the wrecked shanties reading: “RACISTS DID THIS.” This image appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, and on every major television network. The Village Voice called the destruction of the shanties “the college event of the year.”
Meanwhile, The Dartmouth Review’s first cover after the incident featured the image and read: “Two Months Too Late,” and jokingly advertised the sale of limited edition, commemorative sledgehammers.
Free speech. Just one more lesson I learned at Dartmouth.