Dartblog

There is an old adage about journalists. What they write seems to be reasonable and accurate almost all the time. Unless you happen to have any amount of firsthand experience with the topic at hand, in which case you know they are almost entirely wrong.

That’s certainly the case with this Associated Press article by Katharine Webster on the election of petition candidate Stephen Smith—the fourth petitioner in a row—to Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees. Trustee-elect Smith won by a wider margin (55% of alumni voting cast a vote for Smith) than any previous candidate, and he was continually vilified by an opponent who ran his campaign as a mirror of Smith’s, adopting the same stances on the same issues and even attempting to portray himself as a conservative, since he was sure that petition candidates were winning not because of their considered stances on the issues facing Dartmouth but because of their political opinions.

Stephen Smith’s website is still active and with one click his entire five-page letter to alumni, detailing instance after instance of mismanagement, all meticulously researched, is available for download. Any responsible reporter covering the Dartmouth Trustee election would see it as a broad manifesto covering a wide range of topics. And any responsible reporter looking at the last five years of petition victories (and the failure of the constitution last year) would, if she were considering the liberal versus conservative angle, have to abandon it when the petition candidate still won against a conservative establishment candidate.

Katharine Webster decided to report inaccurately and lazily, as Dartmouth students and bloggers all over the Internet are noticing.

A. S. Erickson at Dartlog, who interviewed Stephen Smith for an article earlier in the year, describes the AP report as a “diatribe” and notes:

I found it particularly interesting that [AP] referred to the petition trustees as the football-and-fraternities faction. When I talked to Smith, he was actually critical of the amount of funding football was receiving in comparison to swimming.

Adi Sivaraman calls the AP “sore losers” and writes:

I can’t quite bring myself to say that this is worse than Fox News, but it’s not far off the mark. Accusing Smith of representing a movement pandering to the “football-and-fraternities faction”, opposing women and minorities, and being adverse to serious scholarship is ridiculous. The blatant partisanship seems to imply the impossibility of sincere desires at all. Is it possible, even in the abstract, that perhaps Professor Smith isn’t an agent of reactionary forces? Could it be conceivable that perhaps he, too, has the best intentions for the college, but simply has a different view of how to realize them?

And Dave Nachman adds:

While Smith’s non-Dartmouth political views might be important to some, it’s not really germane in this election. It would be bizarre if one the trustee candidates started campaigning on their position on abortion or healthcare.

It also annoys me that they put all of this in the same sentence: “In the past decade, Dartmouth has cracked down on underage drinking, investigated racist and anti-Semitic incidents and put fraternities on a short leash, banning one for newsletters that detailed members’ sexual exploits.” Drinking and being in a fraternity shouldn’t go in the same breath as a discussion about hate crimes and anti-Semitism. But I guess it’s all the same to the ignorant outsider.

These are hardly card-carrying members of the Republican National Committee; Mr. Erickson, though he writes for the Dartmouth Review is in fact a card-carrying libertarian.

Over at National Review, John J. Miller writes:

The election of Stephen Smith to the Dartmouth College board of trustees was a big defeat for the Dartmouth establishment. But now the establishment is trying to win the spin, with lies. In an AP article, Richard Routhier, chairman of the alumni council’s nominating committee, claims that “Smith was not forthcoming about his conservative background, including a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Uh, not exactly. Here’s what Smith says on his campaign website:

After law school, I worked for two federal judges. The first was Judge David B. Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The second was Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court of the United States, which is commonly–yet wrongly–called the highest court in the land. (As Supreme Court clerks know, the highest court in the land is the basketball court above the courtroom in the Supreme Court!)

For what it’s worth, I reported on Smith’s affiliation with Thomas here—it’s just a brief mention, but it might have been far more detailed because Smith spoke extensively and colorfully about his old boss.

The problem isn’t that Smith hasn’t been forthcoming about his conservative background, it’s that Routhier and others like him aren’t forthcoming about their hostility to reform at Dartmouth.

Left, right, and center, Dartmouth has spoken clearly: The AP just doesn’t know what it’s talking about with respect to our small college.

UPDATE: And Ned Kenney adds: “The majority of the article is unfathomably biased and, at some points, factually incorrect…”