Blackmail - staff of Dartmouth Review faces charges over feud with music professor William Cole

National Review, April 1, 1988

FOUR MEMBERS of the staff of the Dartmouth Review face charges of disorderly conduct, with the likelihood that they will be expelled if convicted. The charges stem from the Review's longstanding feud with a music professor named William Cole, of radical views and unstable temper. It has criticized and ridiculed his conduct of his classes. In return, Cole has exploded with obscenities, insults, and menacing and violent behavior.

The latest episode began when the Review transcribed a Cole lecture-an unstructured rap on race, mostly (he's black), in which he used an obscenity (with a prefatory apology) and at one point addressed white members of the class as "honkies."

Review staffers followed this up by phoning Cole at home. He hung up on them. They phoned again. He cussed them out in gutter language. They accosted him after class. He blew up, screamed obscenities, and broke a photographer's flash device.

The Review staffers say they brought the camera and a tape recorder because Cole has a record of "violence, slander, and lying." True enough, but it seems reasonable to infer that they hoped he'd react as he did and meant to provoke him.

At any rate, the campus also blew up. A couple of hundred black students held a series of rallies, accusing the Review of racism-a charge Cole has made all along, though the only racial epithets used were his own. Dartmouth's president, James Freedman, addressed one of the rallies, further inflaming the case, and publicly criticized the Review staffers, thereby prejudging their hearing.

The case can stand or fall on its own merits. Cole's side is self-serving in defining it as a racial incident, which it was not. Some anti-Review posters falsely quoted the executive editor, John Sutter, as saying, "We've got to get rid of all you incompetent niggers."

That's a time-tested way of widening personal conflicts and turning them into racial-ideological battles. Cole has enlisted a mob on his side, and the college has abetted his strategy.

Meanwhile, in Wappingers Falls, New York, a girl named Tawana Brawley, who is black, has created a similar uproar with a fishy story about having been kidnapped, raped, and held for four days by six white men. No evidence has emerged to support her claims, but a pair of radical black lawyers and a black demagogue preacher have parlayed the affair into a bitter controversy, urging the girl not to cooperate with law-enforcement authorities unless Governor Cuomo appoints a special prosecutor. The authorities, cowed by charges of racism against themselves, are afraid to dismiss the case, to require Miss Brawley's testimony before a grand jury, or to prosecute her mischievous mentors for obstructing justice. And so the quest for equality continues.