There’s a fascinating argument going on between two Dartmouth Review- niks. But wild dogs couldn’t drag us into the middle of this one, so we’ll just report the facts. On February 23, Laura Ingraham, a former Review editor who has gone on to fame as a CBS pundit, wrote a piece for the Washington Post. She recalled her Review days when she had called homosexuals “sodomites,” but said her views have been tempered since she learned her brother is gay. She said that before she saw AIDS ravage her brother’s partner, she had thought AIDS was just another disease. Now she is an advocate of increased AIDS funding.
Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth professor and the Review’s longtime faculty adviser, has been circulating a memo in which he takes Ingraham to task: ” Ingraham constructed a Stalinist show trial in which she acted as the prosecutor with her former self as defendant. In this political show trial she invited The Dartmouth Review to join her in the dock as she made her phoney political confession.” Hart continues, “In fact, while at Dartmouth, Ingraham held the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable. For example, she was wary of eating at a local restaurant then called ‘Bentley’s’ because she thought the waiters and cooks were homosexuals and might be spitting in her food.” And he concludes, “This is an extremely dark episode in career- building and conscious manipulation. It obviously was designed to promote what she foolishly believes to be a career in the media.”
Ingraham responded in calm tones. “It was a piece written from the heart and not meant in any way as an attempt to malign my friends.” She went on to express hope that Hart’s missive was written in a “flash of anger.” And she concluded, “I wrote the piece mainly for my brother and for Richard, who died yesterday.”
Hart sent around his response, opening, “Nothing that follows is confidential.” He called Ingraham’s letter “pathetic” and asserted that Ingraham “legitimized the smears everlastingly issued by the Dartmouth administration.” As to her final sentence, Hart wrote, “Socko ending! In fact, people die all the time, and not only of AIDS, as she seems to think, and for which she demands more federal spending as a ‘duty to us all.'” Finally Hart declared: “I have absolutely zero interest in her career. If she wants to read garbage over a teleprompter, fine.”
Any volunteers to mediate this dispute?
