Fast Times at Dartmouth

by Liberty and Power

First Dartmouth officially kills off its speech code . Now I hear that my old friend and formner housemate while we were working at the Institute for Humane Studies, Todd Zywicki at Volokh, has won election to the Board of Trustees of that institution. Congratulations are in order.

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David Timothy Beito - 5/13/2005

No doubt, this is part of the answer. Of course, for quite some time some officials at Dartmouth have claimed that they didn't even have a speech code. FIRE pointed out that they did so the administrators might have felt forced to make it official for other reasons as well.

Perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of trend in which higher ranked schools to abandon speech codes (Wisconsin is an example). If this continues, the lower ranked schools, which slavishly follow academic fads set by the top tier, may be next. There is still a long way to go, however, before we have firm evidence that this is happening.

Ralph E. Luker - 5/13/2005

David, I'm wondering if we're not getting the news in reverse order -- that is, if Dartmouth officials knew that the two insurgent candidates had won the election and, therefore, they jetisoned the speech code. I suspect that if I were an administrator at Dartmouth and knew that two additional insurgent candidates for the board had won their races, largely on the speech code issue, I might want to get that issue off the table before it became a major point of confrontation with the board.