Hard Times I

I am in Hanover, NH, having travelled here to attend a conference, and having very mixed feelings about it.  I used to teach at Dartmouth College, during the '80s, the second bad period for public education in the late 20th century.  (The first was the '70's; graduating cohorts were then known as the "lost generation" because it was so difficult to find a post as a professor.)  I was one fortunate graduate, and drove (tentatively--all those trees scared me) to Dartmouth, in the firm hope that the recession was ending, and things would more or less return to normal:  the postwar days, when professors made as much money as doctors, attorneys and other professionals, and were widely respected.  It was not to be.  The right wing launched its first assault on higher education in the 1980's, with special emphasis, at the time, on the Ivies, and first and foremost, Dartmouth College.  The Olin Foundation and other right-wing donors funded a newspaper called The Dartmouth Review.  It had no official relationship to Dartmouth College, but of course benefited from the brand; and whenever its unofficial faculty adviser was called to account for the paper's actions, he denied all responsibility.  Nobody thought to track his use of Dartmouth College “blitzmail” (email).  He was one of my English Department colleagues; he had access to our personnel files and participated in our personnel decisions.  He even divorced his wife and married the department secretary, such was his devotion to our doings.  He advocated the William F. Buckley kind of right-wing politics: economically “conservative,” contemptuous, socially and culturally elitist, and angry that their Ivies were letting in women and "people of color.”  After the Dartmouth Review was founded, there followed a long stream of hysterical attacks, especially on faculty who taught literature written by women, or indeed anything else that seemed unpleasantly alien to the old Ivy world and its new supporters.  The faculty reacted by doing nothing, arguing that it was beneath us to stoop to the level on which the Dartmouth Review had been squatting.  As a consequence, it got worse and worse.  After ten years of horrible departmental and decanal politics I left to become an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Jerry Brown is currently enabling the hijacking of the (formerly) finest public university in the world .