April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 1

Dartmouth’s Only Independent Newspaper

Volume 33, Issue 1April 1, 2013

The Hanover Review, Inc.P.O. Box 343

Hanover, NH 03755

Where, Oh Where, Have All the Good Teachers Gone?

Also Includes:

Horror Stories of Dartmouth Profs

Dartmouth Divestment Delusions

Mr. Ellis Appears on Jeopardy!

Opinions on Gay Marriage

Future of the GOP

Interviewing Bafumi on Election

The Dartmouth Review

Page 2 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

Divestment and Delusional Radicals

Mr. Desatnick is a sophomore at the College and Execu-tive Editor of The Dartmouth Review.

By Nicholas P. Desatnick

The state of campus capitalism is in disarray. Slowly but surely, America’s free enterprise system has been bleeding cultural support as effort after effort from the liberal orthodoxy have taken their toll. This has not happened all at once: Occupy Wall Street’s flagrant anti-capitalism died an ignoble death, Students Stand with Staff is but an untoward memory, and direct challenges to the free market are few and far between. Yet, appearances are deceiving. Just prior to this fall’s election, a Pew poll found that forty-nine percent of respondents be-tween the ages of 18 and 29 had a favorable view of socialism. By contrast, only forty-three percent expressed disapproval. With data like this, one needn’t have the statistical knowhow of Karl Rove to recognize that the free enterprise system is facing a crisis of legitimacy amongst the young. But unlike the floral-ridden challenges of yesteryear, this generation’s debate has not been marked by cross-campus dialogue or even good old fashioned protest; instead, it has ad-vanced behind the scenes, permeating academic thought and subverting the culture both inside and outside of the classroom. In order to see this surreptitious breed of liberal-ism in the full light of day, one need look no further than the Dartmouth community and its ongoing efforts to divest the College’s endowment from all fossil fuels. While this campaign is still in its infancy, it is but one of dozens that have taken hold on over 250 campuses across the nation. In a meeting last month, participating Dartmouth undergraduates called on the administration and Board of Trustees to “make the com-munity more environmentally sustainable” and “[deflate] the carbon bubble” by ending fossil fuel investment. That move came on the heels of a referendum at Harvard in November of last year, in which 72 percent of respondents pressed their university to sell off the stock of any large fossil-fuel company held in its $32 billion endowment. Remarkably, the vote drew significantly higher turnout than a 1990 measure that demanded immediate divestment from South Africa in protest of apartheid policies. Although shantytowns and “beautification committees” have yet to emerge in either Cambridge or Hanover, the implication of such a symbolic gesture is clear: the Divest Now campaigns have taken aim at the Rex Tillersons and Exxon Mobils of the moment and seek to make them as offensive as the PW Bothas and Afrikaners of the ‘90s. Watching from afar, campus conservatives can’t help but wonder what fools these mortals must be. After all, even though oil companies may not win popularity contests these days, no sane individual among us wants them to stop selling us fuel, much less be treated as international villains for not doing so. In fact, many of us realize that big energy produc-ers might even provide some tangible benefits every once in a while. Beyond powering the economy and securing our energy independence from rogue states and OPEC marauders, the domestic oil and natural gas industry offers the remark-able benefits of strengthening the middle class, supporting American households, and providing over 9.6 million people with stable employment. At the same time, they also gener-ate real wealth for hundreds of thousands of shareholders by routinely outperforming comparable investments and offering some of the highest dividend yields available. Then consider the healthy charitable trusts that many of them endow, the pension funds their successes support, the art collections they bequeath, the donations they make (political and otherwise). and you’ve got yourself a category of corporate citizens who sit firmly within the national asset column. In light of these services, do they really represent a brand of evil that merits their comparison to racists and reprobates? Apparently, they do. Growing numbers of students are convinced that oil companies are, in the words of campus organizer, Leehi Yona ’16, “irresponsible like no other.” Despite all of the very real services that Big Energy provides the nation, these activists maintain that climate change makes systemized resource extraction a zero-sum game at best; at

worst, it is a cataclysmic blow to the planet’s ecosystem that far outweighs any economic benefits it may bring. Accordingly, the divestment movement aims to arouse a public allegedly in denial about catastrophic global warming into and convince them that “an increased focus on the environment” is needed. It is the campaign’s belief that once awakened by its urgent warnings, the public will compel Big Energy to abandon its massive oil, gas, and coal reserves and leave them forever unused in the earth’s crust. This and more will come from meetings on college campuses and sustained demands for administrators and trustees to abandon investments in fossil fuels. As absurd as this all may sound, it is something that free market thinkers and American conservatives ignore at their own peril. The divestment campaign is a case study right out of an anti-de Tocquevillian drama in the political economy, a parable about the inherent flaw of any democratic system:

its susceptibility to the collective ignorance of the impassioned masses. Here, we have a naïve group of young voters who believe wholeheartedly in a cause that they have almost certainly not stopped to consider in full. But power lies in numbers, and when nearly three-quarters of voting Har-vard undergraduates elect to vilify our energy providers, something very contagious is afoot. As ill-conceived and futile as the divestment efforts may seem, they are nonetheless the preferred stance of those who hold the power to swing future elections and shift America’s economic culture in a radical new direction. This col-legiate movement, then, becomes far more than just one of the many liberal sideshows that sprout on Ivy-covered campus each spring; it is a window

onto much of what is wrong with the millennials’ conception of capitalism and our nation’s current political drift. Within our ongoing energy debate, popular focus natu-rally tends to rest on President Obama and Congress while largely ignoring the colorful array of radical environmental-ists, outspoken leftists, and burgeoning Marxists who fill the picket lines around the Capitol Building. This is a mistake. Liberals will only tell you so much about what’s driving spe-cious policies like cap-and-trade and fracking moratoriums. The grass roots activism of the divestment campaign, on the other hand, helps elucidate the agenda behind the policy and explain where the Green movement is ultimately headed. And once the intellectual origins of these schemes are revealed, it seems unlikely that most voters will be eager to hop aboard the bandwagon. The crusade against fossil fuel investment stems from an unholy alliance between two of the Left’s most radical politi-cal factions: the extreme environmentalism of Bill McKibben and the avowed anti-capitalism of Naomi Klein. McKibben, a professor of climate studies at Middlebury College, is somewhat of an academic rock-star, the Green movement’s Milton Friedman of our generation. After publishing The End of Nature, the first full-length account of global warming and its dangers, in 1989, he emerged as a leading voice within the nation’s drive to retrench its energy acquisition and consumption habits around a more sustainable foundation. His latest initia-tive, a group he named 350.org (which is itself a reference to the 350 parts per million that he considers to be the safe upper limit of carbon in the atmosphere), leads the campaign to block the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and serves as the activist inspiration for today’s collegiate divestment initiatives. Unlike some of his peers, however, McKibben understands that student ral-lies and endorsements from Bono won’t keep fossil fuels in the ground. Instead, his real goal is far more ambitious: to delegitimize big energy providers and thereby create enough popular opposition to keep most of our resources forever bottled up. The other antagonist is this social tragedy is the avowed post-consumerist, Naomi Klein. Long an inspiration for the anti-corporate-globalization movement that gave birth to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement, Klein has become one of the most visible and influential figures on the New Left and a cease-

less advocate for a post-capitalist world order. After finding that Americans of the Bush years were not terribly receptive to the idea of reparations for slavery and imperialism, she and her wayward allies have dropped the polarizing rhetoric of old and have focused their efforts on the environmental debate of today. Since then, they have adopted the notion of a “climate debt” as a backdoor way of advancing global wealth redistribution and securing recompense for developmentally backward regions of the globe. With this clever trick, Klein has made it clear that the agenda of the radical Left can march forward more effectively with green as a superficial stand-in for red. Drawn into climate politics by her devotion to global anti-capitalism, Klein has formed a confederation with McKibben and 350.org. In recent months, she has joined the group’s board and worked closely with its leadership to rebrand their eco-efforts as a mainstream plank within the Left’s political platform. This collaboration signals an am-bitious and potentially game-changing strategy. With some shrewd ideological maneuvering and some external rebrand-ing, these two strands of radical liberalism have found a new home on today’s college campuses and potentially within a generation of young voters. As scary as this may seem, it is nothing in comparison to the danger it poses to the future of the free enterprise system. When the economy’s literal and figurative fuel is openly demonized, what might it mean for capitalism’s long-term viability? Nothing good, I can assure you. Consult the work of McKibben and Klein, and you’ll find a remarkable divergence between what they espouse publically and the calculations within their proposals. The central tension behind 350.org and the divestment movement’s spin-off efforts is that simple mathematics is enough to not only reign-in Big Oil but also to reverse our current trajectory of cataclysmic climate change. McKibben himself has determined that three numbers – a 2 degree Celsius warming limit, 565 gigatons of safely burnable fossil fuels, and 2,795 gigatons of known fossil-fuel reserves - hold the key to environmentalism’s efforts. But just how much human behavior needs to change to realize these targets and in what ways is left a mystery to his adoring fans on col-lege campuses. They seem to think that by using aluminum water bottles, driving hybrids, and divesting Sunoco stock, the world will right itself and Gaia will gleefully tickle their bare feet with grateful blades of grass. According to the McKibben-Klein plan, however, the quiet reality is much more radical than that. Within their worldview, the eco-debate provides not just a chance to en-snare the corporate profit centers of Big Energy, but also to fundamentally realign the foundations of the global economy. When merged with Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization agenda, the Green movement ceases to be about human ingenuity in-novating solutions to externalities; it becomes an excuse to slowly unwind worldwide capitalism in a controlled decline. This is a grand vision that encompasses not only a uni-versal return to the land, but a new decentralized economic model that would fundamentally alter the way man relates to man. Under their plan, food production would be disaggre-gated from global supply chains. Americans would consume only locally grown produce. Meat would all but disappear

from our collective diet. Food would cost more and choice would go down. Automobiles would become rare and prohibitively expensive. Travel and all of the infrastructure associated with it would be replaced by telecommunications and that of cyber-tourism. They even propose to develop provincial forms of money to keep goods close to their point of origin. In sum, this radical coalition espouses the fragmentation of globalism and the end of consumer society as we know it. What does this all mean? Is this just about reducing our carbon footprint or is it about something greater? Knowing that the divestment movement has its

origins in such social absurdities, might it have more to do with a liberal paradigm shift and less to do with the sheer physics of climate change? We certainly think so. McKibben and Klein hope to radically transform our society and our economy, and it’s hard to say which is more disturbing: that their core follow-ers understand this, or that their campus recruits do not. To paraphrase the immortal and entirely ironic words of Rousseau, it seems that “man hath mistaken liberty and opportunity, for the chains of progress.” And Dartmouth, with its body of all too eager supporters may just prove to be ground zero for the lunacy to come. n

—Mr. McKibben started 350.org and has added num-bers to the environmentalist crusade—

—Ms. Klein now preaches both divest-ment and anti-globalization—.

April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 3

It was a bright and sunny afternoon in the middle of Sophomore Summer when I and several other forlorn students descended into the bowels of Moore Hall for our two hour long class on psychological development. It was a beautiful day, the type that every upperclassmen makes the sophomores promise to enjoy at the end of each spring. After all, Sophomore Summer is a hallowed tradition of the College. But two hours later when I returned to the sunlight, I couldn’t enjoy the tranquil day any longer. The lecture that day hadn’t been particularly incompetent – well, at least not compared to the lowered expectations for that particular class. It was renowned for easy tests, rambling lectures, and a very lax attendance policy. The giant auditorium was generally two-thirds empty, except of course on exam days. But today, the profes-sor’s stand up routine posing as a lecture had consisted of just a combination of long meandering stories about her family’s drug habits, her support of homosexual rights, and finally an off-handed joke or two about the death of Senator Santorum’s children. Apparently, it was a result of inbreeding accord-ing to her. Now, I’m not the most social conservative person in the world. I’m not even s ure if I support gay marriage or not as it lies on the intersection between liberty and values. So, it wasn’t that content that offended me. Nor was the most disturbing thing that someone who praised themselves as open-minded could find humor in the death of in-nocent children. It was the lack of response from the audience. A slightly embarrassed titter from those who recognized the deeply offensive nature of the joke and a loud guffaw from those who shared the same political leanings as the professor. That was it. Not even mutters of discontent as we got up to leave. Well, besides me of course. And it was then that it struck me. No one cared. This wasn’t a class one took to learn, at least not for the vast majority of people who would leave Dartmouth with De-velopmental Psychology on their transcripts. It was just a way to fill distribution requirements. Besides, at least half the class would leave with an A-. Perhaps more. Median is such a wonderfully vague term. This shocking rhetoric was a somewhat isolated oc-currence for a student who stuffs their schedule full of Economics and Mathematics classes. In fact, Dartmouth has

tended to have more open-minded and less radical instruc-tors than my New England prep school in those subjects.In my Public Economics course, my professor began with saying: “None of you will be able to guess my political beliefs.” It was a brilliant course. But of course, there are many professors who do not have the same restraint, even those in seemingly unrelated subjects as Psychological Development. A general rule is that the less numbers in the subject, the more radical ideologues dominate the faculty.

Yet, the students who suffer through these majors do not confront these professors. They merely avoid their subjective grading. Sadly, a shadowy game of whispers and rumors now surrounds the tense process of course selection each term. Friends of mine have mentioned that they don’t feel comfortable picking classes based solely on interesting subject matter. They have to carefully seek out the sane professors in order to receive a balanced and fair education. And why does no one complain? Well, it doesn’t really matter to a significant proportion of the

student body. A general malaise has fallen upon the Dartmouth stu-dent body. Classes outside of your prospective career area are an inconvenience along the way to walking across the Green and collecting a diploma that serves as a passport to becoming a future leader of the world. It seems that the College now spends more time talking about how it is molding the future leaders of the world than it does molding

them. You see: what’s the point of taking different and difficult classes if you will only learn biased ideology? And even worse: be punishd for not accepting it? And so, you fulfill your distribution requirements by finding the easiest classes

in the easiest departments, and of course, you check the records for the highest medians. The only remaining dif-ficult classes or majors happen to be the ones that prepare you for your actual job. When someone mentions they’re taking a course in finance or engineering, everyone mur-murs in sympathy. The same is not true for classes in the softer departments - far more often, they are accompanied by raucous laughter.The values of broad and deep educa-tion are long forgotten and tossed by the wayside of four years dominated by quietly avoiding radical teachers and seeking out classes that prepare students for a real job. It’s time to take the liberal ideologues out of liberal arts. n

EditorialHigh Time to Kick the

Liberals Out of Liberal Arts

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The Editors of The DarTmouTh review welcome cor-respondence from readers concerning any subject, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on mate-rial published previously in The review. We reserve the right to edit all letters for clarity and length.Submit letters by mail, fax at (603) 643-1470, or e-mail:

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We as a group of men and women who often speak out are also thoroughly enraged by the Dickey Center..

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News Editors

Divestment & Delusional Radicals Page 2Horror Stories of Dartmouth Professors Pages 4 & 5The GOP Is Not Yet Dead Pages 6 & 7Interview With Michael Ellis about Jeopardy! Page 8Interview With Prof. Bafumi about 2012 Election Page 9Opinion: Gay Marriage is Legal Page 10Opinion: Protect Marriage & The Family Page 11Last Word & Mixology Page 12

Inside This Issue

Thomas J.P. Harrington

Today, the professor’s stand up routine posing as a lecture had consisted just of

long meandering stories about her family’s drug habits, her support of homosexual rights, and finally an off-handed joke or two about the death of Senator Santorum’s children.

Will R.F. DuncanWeb Editor

Taylor D. CathcartHead of Sales

Page 4 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

Stinson’s: Your Pong HQCups, Balls, Paddles, Accessories

(603) 643-6086 | www.stinsonsvillagestore.com

The final paper is worth 85% of your grade, and course reviews indicate that Lebow is a fickle grader. Enter at your own risk.

Youtube Videos and Social Change

When you see the comments about it on the Hacker Club’s course picker, you know that you have found the ultimate freshmen seminar layup: “Theater for Social Change” with Mara Sabinson. These comments include such statements like “we were assigned reading that 80% of the class didn’t do,” “youtube is a large component of this class,” and “I didn’t learn anything about writing in this course.” Stellar reviews.I stumbled into this class after I did not get into my first choice and could not believe what I experienced. About half of every class consisted of watching YouTube videos and the professor rambling about weird protests. She liked to talk about her involvement in AIDS protests in the 80’s, most of which involved a mob of struggling thespians lying down in a public place. While most people would call this a normal day at Brown, she saw the experience as the ultimate expression of defiance and was sure to inform us of her past struggles against the oppressive authorities daily. The amount of “theater” involved in this class is mini-mal. I only remember a couple assignments to read plays, but reading them was never really required. All a student had to do was mention something vague about activism and she would take your point and run with it. We had to write short plays, but the quality of writing was always second to the controversy of the subject matter. A poorly written play about bullied homosexuals was almost sure to receive an A. Although the objective of the freshman writing program is to prepare students for the level of writing demanded at Dartmouth, Professor Sabinson made little effort to achieve

this goal. The only time that we received writing help was the day that RWIT tutors lectured the class on style. While their presentation was effective, Professor Sabinson’s lack of attention to writing training was embarrassing and antithetical to the College’s meaningful initiative to raise writing stan-dards. Papers never had to be longer than 1500 words and never received truly critical grading. Disagreeing with her radical perspectives was the only way to receive anything less than an A-. Professor Sabinson openly mocked any conservative stance. Unfortunately for my peers and me, this particular class took place during the Occupy bonanza. Although I strongly disagreed with the movement and its effectiveness, I was reluctant to speak my mind as her only response was outright dismissal of my argu-ment and rejection of my credibility as a student. Professor Sabinson engendered a chilling effect on free thought and discussion. After enduring a few weeks of this class, I struggled to understand why Dartmouth would keep such a terrible teacher in the faculty. My confusion was settled once a friend sent me a link to a page on a law firm’s website that outlined a case in which Professor Sabinson sued the College after it extended her a buyout offer. Professor Sabinson claimed race-, sex-, and age-based discrimination despite the fact that no evidence thereof existed and that under her leadership as Chair, the theater department declined into a state of complete disrepair. Most would consider that fair grounds for dismissal. We here at The Dartmouth Review might consider that as far more than fair grounds. Luckily, the College won the case but Professor Sabinson remains a tenured member of the faculty. Hopefully future freshmen will be wary of this class and find a professor who will actually help their writing skills rather than waste their time. Unfortunately, so many students end up terrified of the unfair grading of liberal arts class professors that they crowd into easy courses despite knowing that they will be a waste of time. What a sad state of affairs at Dartmouth College indeed.

Dartmouth Professor Horror StoriesCounterfactual Adven-

tures with Lebow When sitting in at the beginning of Richard Lebow class, one struggles to decipher whether the man is totally brilliant or totally nuts. In actuality his is likely a bit of both, but unfortunately while such uniqueness can often be a vehicle to a great experience in this case it simply does now work out. Lebow is a professor emeritus at the College by now, but about once a year he still handles the teaching of Gov-ernment 56, International Relations Theory. The emphasis is very much on the word theory, as many concepts from international relations are quite marginalized in the cur-riculum. Lebow is a stridently unique IR theorist, not only operating as a constructivist (the newest and least prominent of the three major IR paradigms) but asserting that his IR theory is in fact the only constructivist system in existence. Lebow’s views are certainly interesting, in the way that all genuine iconoclasm is. The trouble comes from the fact that he uses his class as a front in his ongoing war against the IR establishment. The entire first half of the course is focused on questions such as “What is Theory?” and the delightfully confusing “What is Knowledge: Erklärung versus Verstehen.” The goal is to teach students his particular epis-temology as much as it is to explain the basic arguments of different IR schools. His combative approach is also seen in how his syllabus has evolved over time. In 2009, the course still included individual units on the major IR theories of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. In the syllabus for this spring, only Lebow’s own constructivism receives its own unit. One can see Lebow fighting his battles in other ways. Generally, historical counterfactuals are frowned upon by social scientists and historians because one can-not gain genuine observations from them and they amount to essentially educated guesswork. Lebow, however, likes counterfactuals and has written a book about their value, so naturally his class now has an entire unit on counterfactuals in which all of the readings are written by himself. This is a rather common occurrence; Lebow himself is the author of over 30% of the required reading. The true highlight though is the list of suggested essay topics, which takes up the final page of the syllabus. High-lights include:

-Does knowledge require knowledge of cause?

-Is “unity of science” a defensible position?

-Defend or critique the ontological and epistemological as-sumptions of neo-positivism.

-If fact and fiction are not distinct categories, can science be distinguished from polemic?

Certainly, there are a few essay suggestions which deal more explicitly with IR matters, but it’s clear where the professor’s interest is, and one must be wary of a misstep:

“Stop asking questions and start writing everything down!”

—Col. James Donovan ‘39

April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 5

Dartmouth Professor Horror Stories

Hiding From Unfair Professors & Liberal

Arts Classes The classroom was a place that stifled intellectual curiosity and exploration. The professor wanted nothing but the regurgitation of basic facts from her favorite parts of the readings. When I brought up an interesting counter point early into the term, I was shot down with “No, you’re wrong.” My teacher ceremoniously paused for about three seconds to let this sink-in and then continued the class dis-cussion without further discussion or explanation of why my thinking was “wrong.” This class began to not feel like the exploration of a subject and multi-faceted discussion I had been expecting, but felt rather like a dictatorship where anything but conformity was punished and publicly reviled. The final paper was a perfect example of my entire experience. Knowing that the professor was extremely par-ticular about ‘acceptable ideas,’ I sought her out office hours multiple times and consulted her over several versions of the paper. I received glowing approval during every visit and email exchange, and was told to pursue my ideas. However, when the final paper was returned I was faced with a nasty surprise. The professor blatantly criticized the very things she approved and praised in previous conversations. I felt lied to, misled, and offended and couldn’t help but shake the feeling that this was a deliberate action. Was the professor really not paying attention to any previous conversations and giving thoughtless counsel, unsure about her own criteria? Or did the professor have a complete turnaround in judgment and criteria since assigning the paper? Or could it possibly be that the professor gave false assessments in intermediate stages of the paper already knowing what my final grade will be simply because it was easier for her to say, “yes, I think you should pursue that,” rather than actually provide a constructive critique of my ideas and presentation? Shocked by the professor’s evaluation of my perfor-mance, I attempted to find out how my paper had failed from the professor. My initial suspicions were confirmed, as the professor’s comments were directly at odds with previous statements. Seeking some sort of a righting to what I felt was injustice, I contacted the department administrator and my dean. I felt deceived and instead of receiving a clear and concise resolution in either direction, I was dragged into a process that lasted over several terms. From having the department head ignore my emails to my professor refusing to meet with me, the entire process was extremely strenuous and degrading. In the end, nothing more was done than the professor reevaluating the paper with the same biased eye. Feeling betrayed by what I perceived was a dysfunctional process, I gave up on my attempts to find justice and resolved to not expose myself to classes that could hurt my well-being in this way again. From then on, when choosing classes I stuck to my major and classes that had numbers where a “right” answer would be easy to confirm. At least then, when I was wrong, I could check the math to figure out why – or if I was even wrong. At least then, I could find out the truth.

Studying Masculine Conquest of Virginia?

Nobody likes being misled, but for Dartmouth’s history majors, this is all too common an occurrence. Take, for ex-ample, the College’s latest addition to the American foreign policy track: Professor Chennault’s history 25.1 course. What began as a look into the origins of national non-intercourse and burgeoning colonial policy, quickly turned into a tuto-rial on how the white man wronged the world and set it on an irretrievably racist trajectory. This term-long thesis was not some unhappy coincidence or the result of repeated ex-posure to personal bias; instead, it was a sustained attack on American history that – in the words of Professor Chennault herself - “call[ed] into question mainstream, exceptionalist understandings” of modern society’s origins. As soon as the shopping period ended, Professor Chen-nault worked toward this end with unsurpassed diligence. Nightly assigned readings included the works of avowed feminist, Kathleen Brown, who argued that Europeans settled the New World “as part of masculine crusade” to pacify the sexual frivolities of liberated women, and of historian cum social commentator, Walter Johnson, who suggested that “racist attacks on Barack Obama” belie a perpetuation of the slaveholder mentality in the modern era. To ensure that no revisionist nuance escaped the class’s attention, weekly discussion sections recapitulated these themes with topics like “what implications does the virginal inspiration for “Virginia” have on masculine conquest?” and “are today’s blacks culturally discouraged from owning property?” Come assessment time, essay topics never failed to dis-appoint either. My personal favorite instructed the class to examine the common imperialist, racist, and sexist motives for the British colony at Jamestown and the American slave settlement in Liberia. Apparently, the white supremacist overtones present in both are much more important to un-derstanding our early history than, say, the European inspira-tions for the Model Treaty or the intellectual origins of the Monroe Doctrine. In this way, under the veil of “recreating America’s multi-culturist history,” relevant American history was bastardized, distorted, or outright ignored in the pursuit of a neurotically progressive agenda. But then again, what is to be expected when personal bias replaces modern scholarship in our colleges and univer-sities? Rather than the “laboratories of learning” that they were conceived as, Dartmouth’s social science classrooms have become nothing but petty political pulpits for the most radical among us.

Even Math Isn’t Safe It was my freshman winter and I’d never seen such cold weather. I trudged through several inches of snow every day to attend my class on Differential Equations. It was a relatively-high -level math class, but largely based on learning how to manipulate equations and apply them in the real world. Sounded like it would be filled with all sorts of interesting problems and ways to explore using differential equations. Instead, it was a disaster. The professor had combined

the two sections together so that nearly 70 students were crowded into one of the larger lecture rooms. I was a little disappointed in this - wasn’t I promised small class sizes in all of the Dartmouth admissions paraphernalia? But after all, it was math. The journey didn’t end there. At the beginning of each class, our professor would appear a few minutes late, frizzled hair pointing every which way as she walked to the front of the class. The next hour would be spent watching her continually fumble for the right answers to the questions. Most days, she just gave up and asked the three brightest students in the class who sat at the front for the answers. I felt lost and confused most classes, but assumed it was just because I was a stupid freshman. I would soon learn from attending office hours that everyone else was as well. Our bewildered TA was always swarmed with people asking questions about the homework. Unfortunately, most of the answers or ways to find the answers could only be found in the supposedly optional textbook which the professor had urged us not to buy. Our TA would often have to fall back on just handing us the answer to the problem sets and then trying to explain it to us by working backwards. For most of us, he never succeeded. Our first midterm was even more catastrophic. It had snowed that day and as a result, our Professor didn’t show up. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem - but a quarter of the test was on material that she had explicitly told us we would not be tested on. I remember because I had asked her in an open review session if we should include certain equations on our personal handmade formula notes for the exam. She rejected the idea and said that we were not responsible for that material. Luckily, when I bombed that portion of the test, I was able to convince her to at least adjust my score partially given that fact. I do not know if my other classmates were so lucky. After the first midterm, everyone was grumbling about the unfair and seemingly arbitrary grading. But it got worse. Then came the end of the term. We had a final project and several problem sets squished together. Both were impossible. You would see freshmen and upperclassmen alike from the same class struggling in Novack until four in the morning together. Everyone would run back and forth from one end of the cafe to the other asking for advice or help in just getting started with certain problems. It engendered a convivial spirit among us - the shared suffering built a bond. If nothing else, that much I can thank the Professor for. She hazed me into meeting four of my closest friends in that class. But in so doing, she asked us to do a project whose hand-out was riddled with mistakes. I remember multiple groups going in and finding different issues which she responded to with a blank stare and then a nod of agreement. Of course, this solved nothing. When our group handed in our final paper, we all were praying for some sort of miracle. After all, it was terrible. We’d all just tried for hours upon hours to understand the theory behind it, but we couldn’t. It was too difficult. And yet, when we got it back, we’d received a nearly perfect score. As we rejoiced, I noticed that nearly every other group was as well. Puzzled, I started talking to them. Almost everyone had done extremely well. It seems that she’d just given almost every group a free pass in order to balance out the abysmal scores on the midterm. Although there didn’t seem to be much difference that I could spot between my paper and those few who had been so unlucky as to receive mediocre scores, I was happy. The class ended up with an A-/B+ median and I moved on to my freshman spring with nothing but a memory of a terrible class and a half-baked idea of what Differential Equations were. High for a Dartmouth math class. And unreasonably high for no apparent reason. But that’s how Dartmouth professors deal with poor reviews - they bribe students with grade inflation. The students graduate in four years, but the professors remain at The College. Rotting away at the core of our liberal arts education.

Dartmouth Not Worst At least we don’t attend Florida Atlantic University. A professor there asked his students to write a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” on it for Jesus Christ and then to step on that piece of paper. Why? Because it was in the textbook for the intercultural communications class. It seems to us here at The Dartmouth Review that this inflam-matory exercise not only is beyond the pale for good taste, but is also just disturbingly Orwellian. We may not be the biggest Santorum fans in the world, but it certainly brings to mind his worries that colleges were indoctrinating their students. Ah, for the halcyon days when we could just laugh those worries away. With stories like these, who even has to read 1984? n

“I believe that, my dear, is what we used to call an education. Pity to see it’s in the Endangered Species category.”

—Col. James Donovan ‘39

Page 6 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

GOP 2012: Not all Doom & Gloom

Mr. Jing is a junior at the College and The Dartmouth Review.

By Kirk Jing A steady drumbeat of columns after November have continued to predict the upcoming demise of the American Right. From political scientists who have been predicting a decline for years (Ruy Tuxiera comes to mind) to somewhat less renowned or informed newspaper columnists opportu-nistically claiming a 51%-48% victory foretells the complete extermination of the smaller ideology, conservative readers can find no shortage of gloom and doom news. Certainly, very few positive policy outcomes resulted from 2012 (besides the top-ticket election loss, education reform, public pension reform, and good government reforms also suf-fered high-profile referendum defeats). In addition, much in-coming demographic change is indefensibly challenging to the American right. Very few think that the immediate course of ac-tion ought to be blinders on and full march forward. However, triumphalist Democrat celebra-tions may ring just as hollow as Rove’s oft-misquoted “per-manent Republican majority”. As disappointing as 2012 may be towards true believers, many lessons taken from the cycle paint a far more mixed and nuanced picture of the future of American elections. Much has been made of the so-called coalition of the ascendant: a grouping of demographically ascendant Latino voters and economically ascendant young white (and Asian) professionals (the Stuff White People Like crowd) that will propel the Democratic Party into a position of demographic domination. Indeed, much of urban and coastal America, as well as a variety of once-Republican immigrant gateways, have increasingly become one-party Democratic strongholds. However, even though a variety of once purple states (Nevada, Colorado, Virginia) have tinted blue, these demographic shifts have simply not translated very well into legislative influ-ence. Republican House losses in 2012 were overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of Northeastern and predominantly Hispanic districts, districts where the Democrats have already established total control. Even though a strong majority of votes for the House of Representatives went to Democratic candidates, the House still retains a strong Republican majority that almost certainly will not be threatened for at least a decade. A Huffington Post article lamented the evils of “Republican gerrymandering” as cause to blame by pointing out that if as-suming a universal swing, the Democratic Party would have needed to crush the Republicans by over 7% in the national popular vote to simply take a narrow majority. However, the Washington Post noted that redistricting was largely a wash for both parties. Although the GOP won strong majorities in various state legislatures around the nation after in 2010 just in time for redistricting, Democratic gerrymanders tended to reap much greater rewards, such as in Illinois, Maryland, and Cali-fornia. Democrat control in Illinois led to the worst GOP losses in the nation, Maryland’s O’Malleymander was so contorted, the (normally very liberal) Montgomery County Democratic Party condemned it, and California’s bipartisan commission was, as pointed out by the nonpartisan investigative journalist outfit ProPublica, essentially controlled by Democratic Party operatives. The poster-child for Democratic accusations was Pennsylvania, where Democrats took the popular vote but took only five out of the state’s eighteen congressional seats. However, with the collapse of Democratic support in working-class Western Pennsylvania and the increasing dependence of the party on the urban area surrounding Philadelphia, the electorate is very much naturally gerrymandered. The nature of this so-called coalition of the ascendant is that it is built on an educational, cultural, and geographical reality that makes it far more likely for a modern Democrat to simply not know or associate with anyone holding dissenting views than vice versa. This so-called demographic ascendance has led to more Democratic voters becoming concentrated in smaller and more politically homogenous regions. Although

these demographic changes have allowed Democrats to feel more confident about future Electoral College results, they have not translated into control of Congress. In addition, as shown by recent Democrat crusades on amnesty and gun control, the increasingly confident demands of these strongly left-wing

supporters increasingly contradict the policy desires of the more culturally moderate voters whom the Democrats require to build a winning legislative coalition. In addition, this type of party competition does have its precedents. Much has been stated about the necessity of the Repub-lican Party to “restore its brand”, often by columnists who argue Republicans must adopt Democratic policy positions to remain competitive. Parallels are often drawn to 1980, when the Democratic Party was very much like today’s Republican Party, attacked for perceived extremism. However, problems exist with that line of thought. For one, like the GOP of 2012, the policy positions of the Democratic Party of 1980 were largely not extreme. A disastrous nomination in 1972 (acid, amnesty, and abortion), a tone-deaf generation of (admittedly) extreme Watergate babies, and keen Republican messaging had savaged the Democratic Party. Indeed, for many Americans, Shirley Chisolm, Bella Abzug, and Gerry Studds had become the face of the Democratic Party in the same way that Todd Akin has become for modern Republicans. However, neither of these were quite fair. Much like Republicans, the national Democratic Party generally opted for more moderate figures. For all the mockery Carter endures from mainstream conservatives today, Carter won the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination by running as a culturally conservative, Southern moderate. During his term, he passed sev-eral fiscally moderate measures that modern Democrats would balk at (airline deregulation, common-sense energy policies, and zero-based budgeting), took several principled foreign policy stances modern Democrats would never evince (the Carter Doctrine), and chose to pass no healthcare reform rather than an unworkable plan from radical Congressional elements and a cartel of myopic labor unions. In 1980, Democratic voters once again chose that rela-tively moderate candidate over the slimy, murderous ringleader of those congressional shenanigans, Ted Kennedy. Yet, Democrats took a beating. After annihilating Carter and inflicting some of the nastiest Senate cycle losses in history, Republicans crooned that they had inaugurated a new era of one-party dominance. Political pundits even went as far to claim that Republicans had a permanent lock on the electoral college due to states such as California, New York, and Texas being solidly Republican and indeed, Republicans easily clinched electoral college majorities. Yet, after Reagan’s honeymoon, Democratic House majorities would eventually prevent serious adjustments to social spending and entitlements, sneak through tax hikes far larger than the Kemp-Roth cuts, and even implement a largely unconditional amnesty program. Narratives of supposed ideological ascendance and

arguments about the zeitgeist of certain eras may be a useful heuristic for thinking about history, but when evaluating actual possible policy outcomes, the raw numbers on the ground are far more useful. The “Reagan Revolution” may have greatly

influenced the way Americans spoke about government, but with solid Democratic control of America’s purse strings in the House of Representatives, did not result in actual down-ward adjustments to spending. In comparison, structural Re-publican control of the House of Representatives has already yielded several dividends for the right. Political observers from fifteen years ago would be shocked to see Democrats rejoicing and Republicans screaming in indignation after a deal that permanently extended 99 percent of the Democrat-reviled Bush tax cuts. As tiny and relatively insignificant as it may be in the grand scheme of the budget, the sequester represented the first absolute cut in discretion-ary spending since post-World War II demobilization almost 70 years ago. Most infuriat-ing to Democrats, despite his electoral victory, Obama’s

aggressive proposals for amnesty and gun control are largely DOA in Congress, an irritation probably familiar to Republi-cans who saw much of Reagan’s agenda in 1984 flounder in Congress. After Democratic hopes of a resurgence collapsed in 1984 after nominating a candidate who went down in flames after proposing tax hikes (that the winning candidate would largely implement after winning), Democrats may have realized that in many ways, like the GOP of 2012, they were largely culturally alienated from the rest of the country. Many like to croon that the GOP will be forced to adopt Democratic social positions to remain competitive, like how many think that Bill Clinton drove towards the cultural center to win in 1992 and create a new Democratic Party. Certainly, Bill Clinton talked about social issues in a less frightening way for Americans than previous Democrats, but in terms of actual policies, there was little move-ment towards the center. From Clinton’s extremely aggressive assault weapons ban, to his repeal of the Mexico City Policy, to repeated vetoes of partial-birth abortion, a procedure which by that time had been banned in almost all of the Western world, there is little to suggest that the “Clintonization” of the party did anything to moderate the social positions of the Democratic Party. Likewise, the flaming failures of the Mourdocks and

Akins of the party show that the rhetoric of the Religious Right has become exceedingly outdated, but such a conclusion doesn’t neces-sarily poison every position they support. Many (leftists) argue that Republicans will be required to adopt orthodox left-wing social positions to attract the young, but the reality is significantly less clear than that.. The political preferences of young Americans are far more complicated than slavish adulation for Obama. For one, the vaunted Democratic preference advantage among young Americans shrinks

the younger those Americans get. Although Obama won nearly 66% of Americans under 30, he won only around 60% under 24. In addition, in a nationwide poll of high school students, Obama only won 52%. In addition, even many (older) individuals on the right worry that something is deeply wrong with America’s youth, that they are simply completely untethered to the previous generation and vote Democratic because of a pathological leftist inculcated by modern society. However, increasing Democrat preferences among the young aren’t because millennials are simply “wired differently” or have values incomparable to their parents, but simply because so many millennials have parents who weren’t part of the electorate. Both Anglo-White and black voters aged 18-24 voted slightly more Republican than their parents. However, many new Hispanic voters expressed

—The appropriate response to the 2012 results according to Beltway pundits—

—Despite all of their faults and flaws, we still love them—

April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 7

Dems Not Destined for Eternal Victorypolitical preferences similar to their parents, a fact that skews the youth vote towards Democrats because in many cases, their parents are not voting citizens. In addition, with Latin American birthrates collapsing and the economic rise of Latin America, migration from Mexico has long-since turned negative, with immigration from the rest of Latin America decreasing. The once high fertility rate of Hispanic-Americans has recently collapsed, helping dash hopes among Democrats that a strongly Hispanic America will lead to permanent Democratic majority, especially since such a hope assumes that the voting patterns of Hispanic Americans will not change after the end of that immigration wave despite that be-ing the experience of every other immigrant group in American history. One caveat exists: this feared cultural discontinuity and right-wing extinction can actually be seen among Asian-American voters. Middle-aged Asian immigrants, excluding heavily Republican Filipinos and Vietnamese, tend to express a moderate Democratic lean while young American-born Asians vote more Democratic than African-Americans of the same age cohort. However, with immigration from Asia tapering down and second-generation Asian-American birthrates being almost nonexistent, there will be no wild dash towards the cultural left for American society as a whole. In addition, trends among the youth do not entirely favor one party. Same-sex marriage appears to be a legal inevita-bility, but to a radical from 1960’s Greenwich Village, the aspiration of so many LGBT Americans towards a form of traditional monogamous marriage might seem disappoint-ingly reactionary. On the other hand, on a variety of left-wing sacred cows from an “assault weapons” ban to affirmative action to government paternalism (Bloomberg, soda, etc.), young Americans have proven much more hostile than their parents. A poll found that even though a narrow majority of older Americans supported an “assault weapons” ban, over 70 percent of younger Americans opposed such legislation. Even on an issue like abortion, where commentators like to imagine the youth being far more left-wing, public opinion barely shifts between generations. In addition, Pew Research poll even found that young Americans, even Hispanic-Americans,

were more hostile than their parents and generally disapproved of an amnesty scheme, possibly an outgrowth of the severely diminished economic futures of today’s young people. As

such, the current legislative agenda of the Democratic Party is comprised almost entirely of policies young Americans are largely hostile towards, amnesty and gun control. In addition, the massive popularity gap between the two parties and the supposedly damaged brand is largely driven simply by low Republican opinion of their party. A Pew study found that less than 70 percent of Republicans have a positive opinion of their own party as opposed to around 90 percent of Democrats. Unsurprisingly, a Democratic base constantly enticed by a stridently left-wing President are more upbeat than a Republican base that twisted its nose for McCain and Romney. However, Republicans are united in one aspect – their almost universal disgust for the Democratic Party. Among independent voters, the parties are unsurpris-ingly both exceedingly unpopular, with Democrats holding a 4% favorability advantage. Although Republicans have a

popularity gap to make up in the next few years, that gap is neither a wide chasm or insurmountable obstacle. Lastly, left-wing policy ascendance runs into one major

issue: arithmetic. Log-rolling is much easier with a constantly expanding pie. However, with an aging nation, one must often run to stand in place. Even if American productivity growth matches that of the postwar boom and the Internet Age, a stagnant or shrinking workforce means that America will inevitably grow slower than it ever has before. The economic reality of a slower-growth United States means that the popular social programs Democrats promote will not be supportable on the tax revenues of the future. No matter how high taxes on the “wealthy” may rise, those new revenues will not be sufficient to sustain current entitlement programs, let alone yet-to-created programs that Democrats widely back. Democrats may find it exceptionally easy to promise middle-class Americans attractive social programs funded by the wealthy, but when the aging of America (fewer taxpayers, more dependents) makes it necessary to also burden middle-class Americans to fund those programs, Democrats will no longer be able to have their cake and eat it too in the arena of middle-class public opinion. The vocabulary of the Left may very well be

ascendant today. However, lessons from history and from modern-day polling do not suggest that the basic policy positions of American conservatism have gone out of date. Democratic triumphalism may surge as Democrats enjoy the intense satisfaction of seeing Republicans forced to speak in their language (future Republicans will need to find a way to deal with inequality), but like the Republicans of the 1980’s, modern Democrats may grow frustrated when such rhetorical dominance fails to translate into policy victories. Although the Left may have fewer headwinds to deal with, the future of American politics will largely be determined by how adeptly each side adapts to the new American reality and deals with the new headwinds they will encounter rather than predetermined by some mystical demographic shift. The future could be ours if we but continue the fight and properly react to these normal tempests of public opinion. n

The Grafton County Republican Committee Invites You to The Lincoln-Reagan LuncheonWith Former US Senator Scott Brown (R-MA)

Student Tickets

Only $25

Lunch At The Hanover InnOptions Available

The Event will begin at 12 Noon on Saturday, April 20th, 2013 at The Hanover Inn. To purchase tickets either go to: graftongop.eventbrite.com or call Grafton

County Vice Chairman Tyler Drummond at (603) 867-8100.

—Despite the Chicken Littles on Capitol Hill, the future of the GOP is quite strong and robust—

Page 8 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

TDR Alum Michael Ellis on Jeopardy!

Ms. Sohr is a freshman at the College and Arts & Culture Editor of The Dartmouth Review.

By Caroline A. Sohr

Former Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review, Forbes Top 30 Under 30 for Law & Policy, and Bush White House aide Michael Ellis will be appearing on Jeopardy! on Monday April 22nd. He has had quite the career in both conservative politics and law. Mr. Ellis was lucky and talented enough to clerk for Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Tune in to see him make Dartmouth College and TDR proud - and hopefully take home a significant amount of money. We were lucky enough to interview him before both about the process of Jeopardy! as well as his thoughts on his career and the College. His opinion on the College and the process of shifting towards a Dartmouth University is particularly relevant and timely.

The Dartmouth Review: How did you decide to try out for Jeopardy? What was the application process like?

Michael Ellis: I watched Jeopardy pretty regularly growing up, and my mother had actually tried out for the show a few years back, so I was familiar with the application process. But nonetheless I decided to try out on somewhat of a lark. In January 2012 I took the online test that Jeopardy offers twice a year. You don’t need to have any special qualifications for the test. It’s just 50 open-ended questions, and you have 15 seconds to respond to each one, effectively eliminating the possibility of someone looking up any answers on, say, Google or Wikipedia. After you complete the online test, they don’t tell you how many questions you answered correctly. You just have to wait for a call to find out if you’ve advanced to the next round. In late April, they called me and invited me to come to an audition in Cleveland. I trekked up to Cleveland where I took another 50-question test and did a practice game. In the practice game, I’m pretty sure they were looking to see if the prospective contestants were quick on their feet and had personality or something interesting going on in their lives. That audition was in May, and in the months after I more or less forgot about the tryout. But in November they called me out of the blue, and invited me to come out to L.A. to tape an episode of the show.

TDR: How did the taping process work?

Ellis: I went out to L.A. in early December for the taping. My wife and my parents came too and sat in the audience. It turns out they film about five shows a day, so if you win your game and advance to the next round, you don’t even have to fly back to L.A. The “next day” is actually only about 20 minutes later. But anyway, before I filmed my episode, I was kept in a holding area, sequestered from anyone involved in writing the clues, with probably about fifteen other people who were going to be on the show that day. They don’t tell you in advance against whom you’ll be competing, but when they’re ready to start filming, someone comes to the front of the room and calls out three people, and off you go.

TDR: How did you train for Jeopardy?

Ellis: Before I found out I was going to be the show, I tuned in occasionally, but I didn’t watch with any sort of devotion. But once I found out I was going to be on the show, I made sure I was in front of the TV at 7:00 every night to watch. I started scoring myself to keep track of which clues I was getting right and wrong. It turns out there’s really a website for everything. There’s a website that has compiled every Jeopardy clue from every show, so I started answering some of those for practice. I also bought a few books for people preparing to be on Jeopardy.

TDR: What were the questions like?

Ellis: When I was preparing to be on Jeopardy, I started to realize that it is possible to study for the show, even though they can ask you about seemingly anything. Certain subjects recur quite frequently. State capitals come up a lot, as do U.S. Presidents, the Periodic Table of the Elements, Shakespeare,

and the Bible. Jeopardy hits on a lot of the things that are the hallmarks of being, you might even say, a classically well-educated person. It’s also very important to know the associations between certain famous phrases and answers. For example, you should know that if the category is about Shakespeare and the clue mentions “my kingdom for a horse,” the answer is Richard III. When I was preparing for the show, I tried to train my brain to recognize these associations instead of memorizing countless obscure facts.

TDR: Do you feel like the liberal arts education you received at Dartmouth prepared you for the breadth of knowledge you’re expected to have on Jeopardy?

Ellis: In some respects, yes. There are some categories about which I don’t think you could find a class at Dartmouth, un-less the College has changed since I graduated. Maybe they have courses on Billboard Top 40 songs now. But, anyway, I was definitely a bit weaker in the categories related to pop culture, TV, and movies than those about, say, history, geog-raphy, or literature, a lot of the things that you learn from a liberal arts education.

TDR: In all of your preparation, did you stumble upon any tricks or hints?

Ellis: While the clues may seem pretty obscure, there’s often a short cut. When reading a clue, usually all you have to do is

look for the word “this.” For example, when you see “this 16th President,” you know right away that the answer is Lincoln, regardless of whatever other extraneous information they include before and after that word. While I was practicing at home, I also tried to improve my reaction time by clicking a pen before answering any question. I’d say on about 2/3 to 3/4 of the questions, all three contestants know the answer. Therefore, it’s re-ally important to be quick with the buzzer, especially in the first round when the questions aren’t that hard. The trick is that you have to wait until Alex Trebek finishes reading the clue

to buzz in. If you buzz in before he finishes, you’re locked out for maybe a half a second, but even that is enough time for someone else to slide in front of you. You can know the answer to every question, but you won’t do well unless you can be quick with the buzzer, although it’s more about good timing than just speed.

TDR: What about the Final Jeopardy round?

Ellis: Final Jeopardy is a totally different ball game. The questions tend not to be as predictable as those in the earlier rounds. They’re a bit trickier, but you also have time to think about your answer. Only about two-thirds of contestants get Final Jeopardy right, so if you’ve done well enough earlier in the show, you can win without knowing the answer to Final Jeopardy. As far as wagering goes, they actually give you a fair amount of time to think about how much you want to put on the table. While pretty much everything about the show is very fast-paced, Final Jeopardy wagering is not. I think they want to make sure everyone has enough time to think about, calculate, and be comfortable with their wager.

TDR: Any final thoughts on Jeopardy?

Ellis: It was certainly one of the most exhilirating things I have done. I really encourage anyone from Dartmouth who thinks they may have a knack for trivia to try out. Also, although I only really got to interact with him on stage, Alex Trebek was very friendly, as were all members of the Jeopardy staff. All in all, it was a great experience, but you’ll all have to tune in on April 22 to see just how great it was.

TDR: Changing gears a bit, what’s it like being a “Top 30 Under 30”?

Ellis: It’s a very nice honor, especially to be considered among such an impressive bunch of folks. I think it’s a good thing that Forbes maintains these lists, but it certainly hasn’t changed my life. In fact, I’m still not exactly sure how they found me.

TDR: What was your experience with the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign?

Ellis: My freshman summer, I volunteered for the Bush cam-paign. At the end of the summer, they offered me a position as a paid staff member from January to November 2004. Because I had enough AP credits, I was able to take four consecutive off terms (my sophomore winter, spring, and summer, and junior fall) to work in polling and strategy for the campaign. This experience taught me that politics and political campaigns, in particular, are great meritocracies. If you are willing to put in the time and effort and produce good work, you can rise up the ranks pretty quickly. There aren’t many organizations that will let a 19-year-old college sophomore truly dive in and assume really important responsibilities, but political campaigns are one of them.

TDR: What were your responsibilities in the Bush White House?

Ellis: My experience working on the Bush campaign in ’04 led to a position at the White House right after my gradua-tion from Dartmouth. From March 2006 to February 2007, I worked in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, an office that actually no longer exists. Obama shut it down once he took office, perhaps because he thought it was closely associated with Karl Rove. While I was working at the White House, I was involved in polling. It wasn’t the best year of President Bush’s administration, and especially since I was tracking public opinion, it was certainly a very humbling experience. But nonetheless, it was a great opportunity, especially for someone straight out of college, and I’m thankful that I was able to serve.

TDR: How has your experience with The Dartmouth Review affected your later pursuits and achievements?

Ellis: First and foremost, I think the Review helped me become a better writer, which has certainly been important throughout my career. The name The Dartmouth Review still carries a lot of credibility and recognition in the larger conservative community. People know about the paper and its legacy as an independent voice at Dartmouth. For me, working on the Review was also a great way to meet likeminded folks on campus. The paper was both a social group and a publication. In fact, I met my wife, Katie Racicot ’06, through the Review.

TDR: As Editor in Chief of the Review, what did you think were the most important issues on campus?

Ellis: When I was editor, the alumni Trustee elections were a huge issue. In 2004, T.J. Rogers was nominated by the alumni themselves and beat the “official” candidate preselected by the administration. In the next two years, three more alumni-nominated candidates, Peter Robinson, Todd Zywicki, and Stephen Smith were also elected to the Board of Trustees, and it seemed, for a time, that independent Trustees might eventually form a majority of the Board. Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case, and today there’s really no competition and no divergence of views in Board elections.

TDR: Do you have any thoughts on the proposed rebrand-ing of the College as “Dartmouth University”?

Ellis: That’s some sort of joke, right? I thought we litigated this back with Daniel Webster in 1818. The administration wouldn’t actually try to change “the small college, yet there are those who love it” into a university. I understand that we want to attract talented students from overseas, where “university” and “college” have different connotations, but that means we should be all the more proactive about telling people what Dartmouth is and how Dartmouth is different from our peer schools. The idea shouldn’t be to make Dartmouth a smaller, more rural version of Yale or Harvard. Dartmouth won’t thrive in that environment. Those other institutions are larger, and they will have more graduate students and federal research funding. Students continue to come to Dartmouth for a lib-eral arts education with a focus on undergraduates. If you can’t make that sell to high school students, whether they’re from the U.S. or abroad, based on that, then I think there’s a problem with the core of the institution. We definitely need marketing to help people understand why Dartmouth is so great, but marketing can’t fix the underlying product, which, for the College, is undergraduate education. n

—Mr. Ellis in his Forbes photo—

April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 9

TDR Talks 2012 Election with Prof. Bafumi

Mr. Duncan is a sophomore at the College and a Web Editor for The Dartmouth Review.

By Will Duncan

We were lucky enough to sit down with Professor Joseph Bafumi to discuss the results of the 2012 election and the conclusions that can be safely drawn from them. Professor Bafumi teaches an excellent course on Campaigns & Elections as well as a seminar course on The American Voter Through Time. As a result, he brings well-needed historical insight into this elec-tion. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University before studying as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Currently, Professor Bafumi is leading students on the “Washington FSP” offered by the Government Department.

The Dartmouth Review: Was Mitt Romney a truly conser-vative candidate?

Professor Bafumi: He has some strikes against him on conser-vatism and on the capacity to woo the most conservative of voters. For one, he changed positions over time. He had different positions running for governor of Massachusetts than he did running for President, and even more different positions when he was running for the Senate back in 1994 against Kennedy, so his positions have changed. He doesn’t have the credentials or the legitimacy of some other major conservative candidates who have been pretty steadfast ideologically over time. He seemed a little bit more willing to accommodate his electorate in ways that are opportunistic. At least that’s how it seemed to many voters. He didn’t have quite the conservative credentials as a Santorum so that’s one of the reasons why Santorum came out of nowhere and gave him a run for his money. The Republican primary voter was really shopping around for anyone but Mitt but they couldn’t find anyone among the available candidates who they felt like had as good a chance as Mitt in the general election. Another issue he had was with a typical conservative con-stituency: the evangelical voters. A lot of evangelical voters are hesitant against the notion of voting for a Mormon. They just don’t feel that Mormons represent their point of view. Some of them feel pretty strongly that the Mormon religion is not a Christian religion. Even though Mormons believe in Christ and are Christian, many evangelicals don’t feel that they would want a leader who is from the Mormon religion so that hurt him too within a typical base of the Republican Party. My sense is that a lot of them probably stayed home and didn’t turn out to vote in the general election.

TDR: What about the fact that he was a multi-millionaire?

Bafumi: The fact that he was very rich and the fact that he made the 47% remark and in the primary, made it sound like a $10,000 bet was not much money and the capacity of the democrats to characterize him as out of touch and too elitist at least finan-cially speaking probably hurt him. It wasn’t his success alone, it was his success coupled with mistakes he made like the 47% remark and the $10,000 bet and the Democrats’ capacity to take advantage of those mistakes and really harp on them and paint him as out of touch.

TDR: Were the conservative ideas he put forth unpopular with many people or just communicated poorly?

Bafumi: In the first debate he did a really good job of talking about conservative ideas and what he would do if he were elected president, and Obama really looked pretty poor in that first debate for that reason. I think before then, people were focused more on his personality, his religion, the current administration, and the economy. It took a while before people were really focusing in on Mitt Romney. Maybe it started in the conventions when the American people were focused in. The Republican Convention was not flawless. The Clint Eastwood thing puzzled people and wasn’t quite as well orchestrated as the Democratic Convention. It was more about introducing people to Mitt Romney than it was getting his conservative message across. The first debate was really all about issues and he talked about his conservative beliefs and he did it very well. Early on people were focused on getting to know him and getting to know his personality. He made some mistakes that made it difficult for him to communicate with voters and then he did really well when he was able to communicate his conservative beliefs in that first debate. He saw momentum going in his direction, but Obama retrained on how to handle Romney in the debates. Even though Romney continued to do well in the debates, Obama was able to stem Romney’s momentum. Romney was able to deliver his conservative principles and message really well but

people were focused on the gaffes he made and the messages that the administration put out that took time and attention away from Mitt Romney. In the right context he did well in getting his message across, but often didn’t have that context to make that effective kind of communication.

TDR: How did social issues effect the election?

Bafumi: The immigration discussion may have hurt him. In the primary he was positioning himself pretty far to the right and it appeared he was anti-immigrant. He was doing this to appeal to a very conservative primary electorate. This made it hard for him to reach out to Latinos in the general election. The dynamic there hurt him on immigration. Gay marriage is a very new issue; it’s hard to see how much of an electoral impact it had. Obviously the electorate is changing pretty quickly but I don’t know if that hurt him or helped him in any substantial way. Abortion is the same way. I think the immigration hurt him because Latino voters ended up voting in higher numbers for Obama in 2012 than they did in 2008. Some argue that this gave him the win. The immigration debate and immigration policy stances hurt him.

TDR: Does the Republican Party need to shift its stance on some of these issues?

Bafumi: On immigration they need to find a position that doesn’t sound anti-immigrant but at the same time does not give those who are here illegally easy passage. They have to try and find some middle ground that is appealing to the conservative constituen-cies and the primary voters, but also can be found acceptable by the middle of the electorate. On the other issues, there are still a lot of conservatives out there who are pro-life but feel like there should be exceptions. Many feel like this should be decided by the states. To say that one is conservative on the abortion issue is to encompass many different positions on the abortion issue. I don’t think they neces-sarily have to change. On gay marriage we see things trending more favorable towards gay marriage but there is this libertarian strand of the Republican Party that can probably deal with that issue in a way that is thought to be pretty popular and that is to say that it is something that the federal government should not be involved in any sort of marriage issue. Government professor Sonu Bedi recently wrote an Op-Ed in the Huffington Post about how the separation of church and state suggests that the federal govern-ment should not be involved in deciding marriage issues at all. There is this libertarian part of the Republican Party that perhaps would do well appealing to the median voter, but would lose the evangelical social conservatives who, according to the polling trends, are increasingly out of touch with the median voter. Those are the big issues, there are others out there. Immigra-tion is the most important one that they really have to do some soul searching to find some middle ground that acceptable to the median American as well as the conservative factions. They have been very successful in attracting Latino voters in the past but they must do better now. George W. Bush did a fine job in appealing to Latinos and John McCain was not seen as unfavor-able to Latino voters. Once Obama got elected there was this sort of Obama backlash on fiscal issues and that’s how the Tea Party emerged, but then they got coopted by the social conservatives as well. It’s a hard party to define because it’s very confused, but the Tea Party became not only fiscally conservative but also socially conservative and moved to the right on immigration, which was ultimately a mistake. People need to remember that it was in very recent history that George W. Bush and John McCain were promoting an im-migration reform that immigrants liked and the median American voter thought could be acceptable. Because of 9/11 they didn’t get very far on trying to pass their brand of immigration reform. There is this recent history of Republicans like George W. Bush being able to appeal to Latino voters and there is no reason why the party can’t do that in the future.

TDR: In what direction is the Republican Party headed right now?

Bafumi: I don’t think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party are moving towards the middle right now. They have been polarizing and they may stay at their current rate or they may polarize even further. They will probably polarize a little further in the next election, with some of the Democratic senators losing

to Republican conservatives in some of the red states. Maybe only two or three, not necessarily the whole lot of them. I don’t suspect they’ll be moving towards the middle. I think the Tea Party and other elements of the Republican Party have moved to the right and will stay there. Same thing with the Democrats moving to the left – they will stay there. The Tea Party may become less out front over time. It’s hard to know. They’ve hurt the Republican Party by electing in primaries the most conservative of the candidates in some places. Whereas if they had nominated the person who was more mainstream Republican of pre-Obama, they would have had a better shot at

winning the seat. They’ve won some seats but they’ve also lost seats that the Republican Party could have won by nominating a candidate that wasn’t as con-servative. The Tea Party may have won its major attention

and media coverage in the past, and moving forward, while they’re still going to be a force in primaries, I think their major push and the major difference that they’ve made is over. Now it’s more about not the Tea Party as an entity but more of how the Republican Party finds its soul. Is it a party that will turn to Ron Paul and Rand Paul? Will it be socially conservative and include evangelicals as well as fiscal conservatives? Is it more the mainstream kind of Republican Party that was always fiscally conservative?

TDR: How did the 2012 election shape the future of the Republican Party? How do you see the GOP evolving over the next few years?

Bafumi: Republicans are going to think long and hard about how to handle immigration reform. They will want to nominate candidates with a more steadfast platform in the sense of having wavered in their stances over the years. They’re going to want somebody who is a little more careful in terms of the language they use. They will prefer someone who is a little more populist like George W. Bush, who doesn’t seem to be too far apart from the average American. In 2012, the Democratic Party found someone with better communication skills and more populist appeal and someone you might want to be friends with in Obama. I think the Repub-lican Party is going to do the same thing. They are going to find somebody who people would be more apt to want to have a drink with and somebody who is more principled in their positions over time, or at least seems more principled in their positions over time. Mitt Romney did not seem that way. They will look for someone who can communicate better and seems like the average American. There are a lot of people out there who can do that. Chris Christie is one, Jeb Bush is another. They have a pretty good farm team out there of potential nominees who can do these things and appeal to both the conservative electorate in the primary and also the general electorate after that.

TDR: So is it the candidate that matters more than a shift in the Republican Party’s platform?

Bafumi: There could be a shift, there’s this Ron Paul and Rand Paul faction of the party and they’re different than other kinds of Republicans. If they show a lot of success, there could be a shift. But my guess is that Rand Paul will trying running for president maybe in 2016 but probably in 2020. He won’t be the nominee immediately, but I think we’ll see someone who ap-peals to more mainstream and more conservative Republicans. Moving forward is hard to say, of course the Ron Paul faction may have more success. In the short term, look for it being more a question of some soul searching on some issues like immigration reform but really more of who the candidate will be. It will probably be someone who has positions not too far different from what the Republican Party has been thinking and doing all along. Long term there may be a more fundamental shift in the Libertarian direction. On both sides there has been this slow shift in the direction of Democrats going to the left and Republicans going to the right.

TDR: With all these forces pulling at the party, will it remain more on its current course or shift somewhere else?

Bafumi: I think they will try and find a consensus candidate who will try to appeal to the median voter and at the same time appeal to all of those groups without seeming like they’re in the pocket of any one of those groups – evangelicals, main-stream Republicans, self-described Tea Partiers, Libertarian leaning Paul voters, Independents. That’s why someone like Chris Christie or Jeb Bush stands out as possibly the contender. n

The Republican primary voter was really shopping around for anyone but Mitt but

they couldn’t find anyone...who had as good a chance as Mitt in the general election.

Page 10 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

Opinion: Why Gay Marriage is Legal

Mr. Cathcart is a sophomore at the College and Head of Sales at The Dartmouth Review.

By Taylor D. Cathcart

Last week, two landmark civil rights cases on same-sex marriage were argued before the Supreme Court. The first case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is a lawsuit filed by gay couples claim-ing that Proposition 8, an amendment banning gay marriage in California, is unconstitutional. The California administration elected not to defend Prop 8, agreeing with the plaintiffs, so the official sponsors of the referendum – “ProtectMarriage.com” and its leader Dennis Hollingsworth – have acted as defendants. Based on transcripts of oral arguments from last week, it seems like the Supreme Court might take the easy way out and rule that the case was improperly granted, since private citizens have never before defended a law in court. The other gay marriage case before the Supreme Court, Windsor v. United States, is a lawsuit by a gay woman claiming that the Defense of Marriage Act, a Clinton-era bill which withholds marriage benefits from married gay couples, is uncon-stitutional. Oral arguments last week gave hints that Windsor may be a simple federalism case, as the Su-preme Court seemed unconvinced that the federal government has the power to regulate marriage at all. Although the cases argued before the Supreme Court last week may be stifled by timidity and pro-cedural considerations, the real legal issues at play here have been debated extensively over the last three years. The Defense of Marriage Act has been ruled unconstitutional eight times in federal courts (including twice already in Windsor), and the current Prop 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, was fast-tracked to the Supreme Court after two high-profile victories for the plaintiffs. Several federal courts have already ruled that these laws violate the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the latter of which proclaims that the State cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When the courts ruled on due process, they first affirmed that the right to marry was a well-established Constitutional right. The court then had to decide whether same-sex marriage was protected under the definition of marriage. In the first Prop 8 verdict, the court cited definitions of marriage from dozens of precedent cases: definitions like “marriage is a coming together for better or worse, hopefully enduring and intimate to the point of being sacred,” or, “an expression of emotional support and public commitment.” Nowhere in these definitions, the opinion shows, has there been discussion of procreative ability or intent, and the State has never enquired about these things be-fore issuing marriage licenses. The definition of marriage has histori-cally only been restricted by things like race and gender in eras of racial or gender discrimina-tion – restrictions which are now recognized as shameful. For the esti-mated ten million gay people in our nation, civil unions are not a legitimate solution because they do not carry the same social connotations as marriage and were created only so that the State could of-fer benefits to gay couples while explicitly denying them the ability to marry. It is clear based on legal precedent that gay Americans enjoy the same Constitutional right to marriage and the pursuit of happiness as everybody else. Under the Due Process clause, the State cannot infringe upon Constitutional rights without due process of law and a compelling justification. Since the right for gay couples to

marry is protected under the Constitution, the constitutionality of bills like DOMA and Prop 8 hinges on whether same-sex marriages are harmful for society – if they are, the State could claim a compelling interest in regulating or discouraging them. To answer this question, the court in Hollingsworth heard testimony from eleven expert witnesses. The plaintiffs’ nine witnesses included a Yale social historian, a Stanford political scientist, the Republican mayor of San Diego, San Francisco’s chief economist, and a Cambridge developmental psycholo-gist. These witnesses were selected not for their politics but as internationally recognized leaders of their fields, and they presented an overwhelming body of evidence in support of gay Americans. Allowing gays to marry improves their productiv-ity and mental health, increases their contribution to society,

reduces healthcare costs for the government, improves overall economic outlook, and creates an institution of marriage that is more equal and more principled, the scholars agreed. The court agreed, too. When it first ruled on Hollingsworth, included in its opinion were several “findings of fact”, or facts which had been thoroughly proved by testimony in the trial. The court had seen hundreds of hours of expert testimony, and it concluded based on a consensus of academic information that individuals do not generally choose their own sexual orientation, that there are significant harms to society incurred by banning same-sex marriage, and that children raised by same-sex couples are at least as well-adjusted as children raised by opposite-sex couples. Clearly, the arguments in favor of Prop 8 had not been very persuasive. One of the defendants’ two witnesses, David Blankenhorn, admitted under cross-examination that “we would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before” and has since publicly changed his position and fully supports gay marriage. The second witness was described by

the court as advanc-ing personal views without a sufficient body of evidence. It should be noted that the defendants had ample opportunity to find more credible witnesses – had there been any to find. In the Prop 8 case, the court explic-itly affirmed that it would have deferred to legislative or popu-lar judgment if there had been “at least a debatable question” whether discrimina-tion against gays had any sort of compelling

justification. This sentiment has been echoed by other federal courts in trials concerning gay marriage. However, there is no longer any reason to believe that such a debatable question exists; everything we know about our society tells us that allowing gays the right to marry would improve our nation’s economic, social, and moral strength without harming straight couples. After six months of trial and deliberation, Proposition 8 was ruled “unconstitutional under any standard of review” in federal court, as had already happened several times with DOMA.

Marriage traditionalists argue that court decisions like these miss the point. They argue that opposite-sex parent-ing is far superior to same-sex parenting, or that same-sex marriages infringe upon the freedoms of those who oppose them. Statistics discount the first argument: 7% of children from opposite-sex marriages are held back a year during their academic careers, compared to 9.5% of children of same-sex partners. This two-and-a-half percentage point gap disappears after controlling for household income, which is pretty extraordinary considering the stigmas of persecution that laws like Prop 8 and DOMA continue to propagate among non-traditional families. One would expect that this effect would, if anything, stack the odds against children raised by homosexual couples. Any achievement gap that does exist is a

reflection of widespread discrimina-tion, not of gay Americans’ abilities as parents. There has never been a causal link established between the two. It is also absurd to argue that recognizing same-sex marriage infringes upon straight Americans’ religious freedoms. Allowing homo-sexuals to marry does not infringe upon the rights of heterosexuals any more than allowing people to prac-tice Judaism or Islam infringes upon the religious rights of Christians. Civil and religious institutions of marriage are entirely distinct, and specific religious beliefs, no matter how widely-held, have no place in our legislation. After all, religious authorities do not grant marriage licenses and no church should be forced to marry anyone they wish. Along the same lines, those churches

should not be able to withold civil institutions such as mar-riage licenses from citizens. The United States is, after all, a free country. As a nation, we need to step back and think about why exactly some of us oppose same-sex marriage. That group is dwindling even as we speak. Senator Rob Portman of Ohio strongly opposed gay marriage throughout his career as a politician representing Ohioan voters. In 1996, Senator Portman co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which restricted the federal definition of marriage to one man and one woman as well as prevented interstate recognition of homosexual marriages. Senator Portman then continued his stance against both gay rights and homosexual marriage by voting in 1999 to prevent gay couples in DC from adopting children. Last month, however, he announced that he had changed his stance on same-sex marriage and became the first Republican Senator ever to support it. The impetus? Senator Portman’s 21-year-old son came out as gay in a letter to his parents. Senator Portman remarked on the decision to change his stance and the revelation that his son was gay: “It allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and that’s of a Dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have -- to have a relationship like [my wife] and I have had for over 26 years.” For the first 55 years of his life, Senator Portman viewed gays as second-class citizens whose deviant behaviors were constitutionally unprotected. He saw gays as threats to a stable society and believed they were incapable of the same love he shared with his wife. It was easy for him to believe this because he was ignorant enough about homosexuals to mistake them for their stereotypes. That misinformed view resulted in a position he maintained for decades and supported laws which may now be ruled unconstitutional. Then as soon as Senator Portman encountered homo-sexuality in his own family, everything changed. It probably took exceptional courage for him to stand up in front of the media last month and admit he had been wrong, and for that Senator Portman should be commended. Of course, many have pointed out that this sudden change of heart may be related to the current debate surrounding the Republican Party’s future and the possible nominees for President in 2016. That theory of political gamesmanship, however, is missing the point entirely. The fact of the matter is that his prejudice had shaped his beliefs and his legislation for his entire career, and if he had just taken the time to learn more about the people he was actively repressing then he would have come to his senses a long time ago. Marriage has been redefined before, to eliminate racial restrictions and de-systematize gender inequality. It’s time to do it one more time. n

—Senator Portman reignited the gay marriage debate by switching his position after decades when his son came out to him. Senator Portman now argues for marriage equality—

—Former Secretary of State and Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton made significantly less waves in switching to support gay marriage—

April 8, 2013 The Dartmouth Review Page 11

Opinion: Protect Marriage & The Family

Mr. Gill is a freshman at the College and a contributor to The Dartmouth Review.

By Brandon G. Gill

Marriage is a unique institution that transcends any other relationship. The lifelong sexual exclusivity, mutual interde-pendence, and potential to create a family make it the most stabilizing force in our society. For the past few thousand years marriage has been defined, almost universally, as the union of one man and one woman. This system is best for our nation and should be preserved. Redefining marriage will destabilize our society and cause undue social and economic burdens that we cannot afford. Marriage was not created to exclude homosexuals. It simply serves a purpose that homosexual relationships cannot: procreation and the stable rearing of children. The purpose of marriage (especially from the government’s perspective) is to provide a foundation upon which children can be produced and reared in the most optimal environment. As Chief Justice John Roberts stated in the oral arguments of Hollingsworth v. Perry last Tuesday, “When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say lets have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes [the rearing of children] that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.” Redefining marriage to include gay couples undermines its central objective by shifting the focus of marriage away from the rearing of children, towards the emotional and economic desires of the adult participants. Furthermore, as the Witherspoon Institute puts it, gay marriage “would undercut the idea that procreation is intrinsically connected to marriage.” It would fundamentally change our nation’s social and familial structure, make marriage irrelevant, and even attack our freedom of conscience. Because gay marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon, there are very few examples of its effects. However, we can look to Scandinavia where gay marriage has become legal and socially accepted. In the 1990s, many Scandinavian countries legalized gay marriage. As Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has documented, the family structure has been all but eliminated, and marriage is becoming a novelty. In fact, it is becoming harder to measure the deterioration of the family there by the usual methods (divorce rates) because Scandinavians are hardly getting married in the first place. Simultaneously, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has exploded. As Kurtz writes, in only ten years, “Between 1990 and 2000, Norway’s out-of-wedlock birthrate rose from 39 to 50 per-cent, while Sweden’s rose from 47 to 55 percent.” Currently, “About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents.” Single parenthood is now the norm rather than the exception in Scandinavia. As Frank Turek, author of Correct, Not Politically Correct, points out, here correlation does prove causation because we have seen the same patterns of family disintegration resulting from liberal marriage laws in other parts of the world as well. For example, in 1969, the year the first no-fault divorce law was enacted in the U.S. (in California), the out-of-wedlock birthrate was roughly 10%. Now that all fifty sates and DC en-force these laws, it is about 40%. As we can see, no-fault divorce laws have undermined marriage in the U.S. for the same reasons gay marriage has in Scandinavia: they focus marriage on the desires of the married people, not on children. Further liberalizing marriage in the U.S. will exacerbate our already high out-of-wedlock birth rate. This is disastrous for both children and soci-ety. Study after study has shown that, statistically, children reared by their nuclear parents do better in almost every aspect of life when compared to children raised by a single parent. A study by Sara McLanahan, published in her book Growing up with a Single Parent, found that children born outside of wedlock are almost three times more likely to drop out of high school compared to their peers who come from traditional families. Another study in Sweden, published in The Lancet

in 2003 found that children in two parent homes were about half as likely to suffer from suicide attempts, alcohol and drug abuse, and serious psychiatric illnesses than children raised by a single parent. Children born into single parent homes also do not have as many opportunities as traditionally raised children because they only have one stream of income, as opposed to two. The social harms of the familial breakdown are too much for the United States to bear. Furthermore, as many homosexuals understand, it is nonsensical to argue that a child raised in the home of a same sex couple will get the same upbringing as a child raised in the home of his nuclear parents. Women and men contribute in different and unique ways to a child’s development. Ask yourself the question an eleven-year-old girl asked a dumb-

struck Minnesota legislature last week: “Which parent do I not need- my mom or my dad?” Though many gay rights activists like to argue that there is “scientific evidence” that proves children of gay couples are just as well off as children in heterosexual families, the truth is that gay marriage has not been around long enough for us to fully and definitively understand its effects upon children. As Justice Kennedy stated in the oral arguments last Tuesday, “There’s substance to the point that sociologi-cal information is new. We have five years of information [in California] to weigh against two thousand years of history or more.” If America is really looking out for its children, we should at least be prudent when redefining such a tried and true institution. Gay marriage also affects children by contributing to the perception that fathers are not necessary to a child’s up-

bringing. If children don’t need both a mother and a father, as many gay rights activists propose, what reason is there for a father to stay around? Same sex marriage would encourage single mother households within the majority heterosexual community and further the breakdown of the nuclear family.The economic burden this causes is enormous and will sow the seeds for a massive welfare state (many Scandinavian countries have some of the highest taxes and public welfare

expenditures in the world). Currently, family disintegration costs American taxpayers roughly $112 billion per year, and the out-of-wedlock birthrate in America is only 40%, a number two-thirds that of Denmark. The economic toll caused by the breakdown of the family has been enormous in Scandinavia, and we should not force ourselves to subsidize homosexual marriage. One of the more disturbing aspects of the gay rights movement is the toll it takes on our freedom of conscious. It seeks to force Americans to accept homosexual relation-ships as equal to heterosexual ones, despite possible moral or religious objections. Oftentimes, the gay rights movement argues that homo-sexuals are discriminated against because they do not receive

the same legal and economic benefits of marriage that heterosexual couples receive. However, the facts don’t always add up. According to the National Confer-ence of State Legislatures, many states including Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, recognize Civil Unions, which give homosexual couples all the rights and privileges of marriage. (Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut had civil unions before they redefined marriage). California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Nevada, and Wisconsin allow homosexuals to claim domestic partnerships, which give almost all of the legal benefits of marriage. Yet the gay rights crowd in these states is not content. In fact, California is in the center of the current Supreme Court hearings. The gay agenda is not to ultimately achieve economic or legal equality; it seeks to legally enforce unani-mous social approval of homosexual lifestyles, to obtain mandatory social approbation from the rest of society.

These dangers are real. Many Catholic adoption centers, including the Catholic Charities of Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and many affiliates in Illinois, have been forced to close because they stood by their religious beliefs and refused to allow homosexual couples to adopt children, even after they were told by their local or state governments to do so. Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois summed it up well: “In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated.” And so, the wheels of misfortune turn and turn again. It is frightening to think about the potential fate of our freedom of conscience if the United States government forces the American public to redefine marriage. It is only a matter of time, as many Catholic priests have predicted, until a simple moral disapproval of homosexuality will be considered a hate-crime.

Redefining marriage takes away its meaning and purpose and creates a litany of other relation-ships that could potentially be defined as marriage. One of the most liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, recognized this in oral arguments last Tuesday: “If you say that marriage is a fundamental right, what state restrictions could ever exist? Meaning, what state restrictions with respect to the number of people [that could get married], with respect to… the in-cest laws [are there]?” Sotomayor is exactly right: redefining marriage as a civil right, instead of an institution that serves a social purpose, opens it up to a limitless number of definitions including, but not limited to, polygamy, incest, and bestial-ity. As the openly gay co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, Doug Mainwaring, has said, we are not redefining marriage: we are “undefining” it, and the consequences are limitless. Modern liberals too often get so caught up in bragging that they are going against the current of tradition that they too often forget why certain values and institutions became tradition in the first place. They tend to believe that new is by neces-

sity an improvement. In the case of marriage, new is ruinous. Homosexual marriage is destructive, causes social instability, and imposes undue economic burdens on American society. America should oppose “undefining” an ancient, tried and true, and sacred institution. Marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Nothing else, nor should it be. n

—Protestors have ringed the Supreme Court from both sides. Here, socially conservative citizens protest so that the Court will uphold the legislative will of the people—

—Meanwhile, the other side wrap themselves in an enormous rainbow flag and wave signs comparing the prohibition of gay marriage to miscegenation laws—

Page 12 The Dartmouth Review April 8, 2013

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Barrett’s MixologyBy Charles Jang

Chess and alcohol appear to complement each other like no two other concepts. Tom Lehrer extols, along with poisoning pigeons in the park, skittles and beer. No one exemplified this so much as Joseph Henry Blackburne, a strong English chessplayer of the nineteenth century. Like Oscar Wilde, the man who could resist everything except temptation, Blackburne indulged liberally both in literal alcohol and chess, what he called the “mental alcohol”. Supposedly, the drunker he became, the better he played. (Once, he was so intoxicated that he accidentally drank his opponent’s shot instead of his own. When informed of this, he quipped, “My opponent left a glass of whiskey en prise(1) and I took it en passant(2).” Perhaps it was a sort of gambit(3).) He certainly earned his reputation as a hard drinker and a tough player – he earned the sobriquet of “The Black Death.” It is fairly simple to follow in Blackburne’s footsteps. Take a bottle of your favorite Scotch whiskey (or two or three). Fill a shot glass. Drink frequently. If empty, fill it up again. And again. And again.

(1) It is a dull person who tries to explain a joke, but here is my attempt: “en prise” is a chess term meaning that a piece is “hanging” or free to be taken.(2)En passant” refers to a rule in which a pawn can take an enemy pawn that has taken two steps forward instead of one, but only on the first move. This peculiar chess regulation refers to a rule change in the Middle Ages, in which pawns were allowed to advance two spaces instead of one in their first move. This was considered un-chivalric, as a pawn that would have had the opportu-nity to capture the errant enemy soldier would not be able to; hence, the rule.(3) A gambit is a temporary sacrifice in the opening, generally one or two pawns, made in exchange for active play. In the nineteenth century, it was considered unmanly to refuse a gambit, leading to spectacular combinations that were shaky, at best, all because proper defensive play was considered cowardly.

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The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligenceplus character - that is the goal of true education.

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

— Aristotle

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.

— John Locke

The education of a man is never completed until he dies.

— Robert E. Lee

Education is what remains after one has forgot-ten what one has learned in school.

— Albert Einstein

Education is the ability to listen to almost any-thing without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

— Robert Frost

I have never let schooling interfere with my education.

— Mark Twain

I didn’t want any degrees if all the ill-read lit-erates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

— J.D. Salinger

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

— Bertrand Russell

An educated people can be easily governed.

— Frederick The Great

Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.

— Ronald Reagan

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

— Teddy Roosevelt

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

— Chuck Palahniuk

I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is that there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, boola-boola, and all of that.

— Malcolm X

I love college.— Asher Roth

Somebody tell Roth that I don’t love college.— Chiddy Bang

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go the library.

— Frank Zappa

I miss college.— Tiger Woods

Everybody says hey, you’re not working, you’re not making any money. You say look at my de-grees and you look at my life, yeah I’m 52, so what? Hate all you want, but I’m smart.

— Kanye West

People go to college to find who they are as a person and find what they want to do in life, and I kind of already know that so it would be like I’d be taking a step back or something.

— Lindsay Lohan

Mr: Braddock: Well, would you mind telling me what these last four years of hard work were for?

Benjamin: You got me...— The Graduate

Christ, seven years of college, down the drain.

— John Belushi

It is sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it..

— Daniel Webster

I went to college for four years. — Kim Kardashian