A lasting infamy.

The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty-Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper, edited by James Panero and Stefan Beck (ISI, 361 pp., $25)

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FOR a conservative, the first dip in the pool of college politics is often disastrous--the waters are frigid, and one is made to feel like the scrawny five-foot Speedo-clad four-eyes who just showed up at the football team's annual keg party. It's enough to drive some students away from politics for good, but it drove me to apoplexy, and to engagement. I can't recall which serving of inanity from the campus Menu of Outrage I was frothing over on the phone with my oldest brother, but he quickly cut me off. "Listen," he said, "college is like a sandbox: The children may throw sand at each other, but in the grand scheme of things it's unimportant. You should just try to have a good time." Yes, I thought, but these same children will eventually grow up and one day they may be cramming the same misshapen ideology down the throats of senators and presidents and if no one else is going to stop them--dammit--it's up to me.

My well-intentioned brother cannot have been pleased when, two short years later, I ascended to the editorship of The Dartmouth Review, the notorious conservative campus journal that has for 25 years tormented activists and administrators at Dartmouth. When the other side throws sand, the Review responds with a gleaming set of brass knuckles, a crushing combination of logic, wit, humor, and--the sine qua non--derision. The willingness to attack opponents mercilessly, and sometimes unfairly, doesn't win many friends on campus--but it does earn a certain amount of notoriety. In our case the reputation went national. Mention The Dartmouth Review to a college administrator, and it's a safe bet he'll break out in a cold sweat. Fame may last a minute, but infamy lasts a lifetime.

The hilarious journey from the backwoods of New Hampshire to national renown is chronicled in this new book, The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent. (And yes, all the things mentioned in the book's subtitle--threatened, sued, bitten, etc.--really happened.) James Panero and Stefan Beck, both of The New Criterion, have done a masterly job not only in collecting a fair sampling from 25 years of archive material, but of assembling it in a cogent, highly readable manner. Even someone entirely unfamiliar with Dartmouth will find the various episodes entirely self-explanatory.

The history of the Review is chiefly one of irony--of a college administration trying feverishly to remove a thorn in its side, but instead making its own situation dramatically worse. At the time of the Review's founding in 1980, leftists on campus thought they were living in ideological end-times. Sure, there were still battles to be fought, but liberalism steamed forward unchecked, and the rise of political correctness had proven unassailable. Even if conservatism made inroads in D.C., the campuses remained safe. That was certainly true at Dartmouth, until the iconoclastic newspaper burst on the scene and ruined the liberals' party with its strident brand of journalism.

The Dartmouth elite immediately fought back. For example, when an administrator attacked and bit (!) one of the paper's founders, the faculty responded by censuring ... the paper. James O. Freedman, who became president of Dartmouth in the late 1980s, engaged in a number of high-profile publicity stunts targeting the Review. The only effect was to turn the campus into a media circus--and to create in the Review a national icon for other campus conservatives to emulate. (Freedman was eventually hauled into court after his administration suspended a number of Review editors for--I'm not making this up--"vexatious oral exchange.") The Review relished the fight, and the telling of the story became just as important as, if not more important than, the story itself. As former editor Dinesh D'Souza noted, messing with the Review is like wrestling a pig: Everyone gets dirty, but the pig likes it.

The incidents that earned so much national attention are recounted in detail in this book, but more impressive, and entertaining, is the way the volume captures the paper's spirit--that collegiate ideal of fun with a purpose. Many of the stunts were admittedly obnoxious (sophomoric because they were sophomores, Bill Buckley once said)--but they were hilarious because of their sheer excessiveness. When the college refused to remove unsightly shanties from the Green--a months-long protest against apartheid--editors formed the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival (DCBGBWC), which promptly tore down the monstrosities. (A Review article on the resulting kangaroo court was titled "Twelve Environmentalists Charged.")

Once, after a dean urged the public censure of a Review reporter, the paper censured the faculty (a 35-2 staff vote, they drolly added). And a professor who complained that the Review incorrectly reported on his sporting a "polyester tie and a rat's-hair mustache" received this apology: "We regret our error. In reality Professor Spitzer has a rat's-hair tie and a polyester mustache." Flip to any page of the book and you'll find similar hijinks.

As much as this book is a celebration of the rise of campus conservatism, it also offers an unspoken warning. There's a lot of chatter these days about the "mainstreaming" of the movement, but journals, especially on campus, don't have to be "mainstream" in order to be legitimate. In many respects, it's the disinclination to be mainstream, the tendency to fly in the face of prevailing orthodoxies, that creates their legitimacy. As soon as one admits to being "sedate"--as one essayist in this volume sadly does--the desire for popular appeal can overwhelm principles; the corrupting power of politics begins to eat away at ideological foundations. And pretty soon students end up mewling about how repressed they are on campus--and begging state legislatures to step into the fray, la the academic-bill-of-rights movement (whose proponents The Nation accurately labeled "crybaby conservatives").

That's not much fun, and it's not the way to go--which is why the arrival of The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent is so perfectly timed. Conservatives on campus face a choice: They can play the banal games of their counterparts on the left, or they can wage a guerrilla war from the right, with cleverness and reason as their natural weapons. For anyone who wants to fight the good fight, this book is as much a guide to strategy as it is a highly amusing stroll through the annals of a supremely entertaining campus journal.