Dartmouth vs Cornell

FountainSiren
Sat, 08 Jul 2006 05:56:50 +0000

Sorgirl,

You’re obviously a very hurt person. I sincerely hope that your experience at Dartmouth is not the cause of your current malaise. Moreover, I hope that none of us here has made things worse for you than they already were. Your attack has been relentless on the Dartmouth Forum. It must be exhausting. It may be that getting it all off your chest, as you have done here, will be therapeutic. I hope so.

Still, I’m sure you understand that I am loathe to let stand your obvious slanders, either of Dartmouth or its students, even if they emanate from a great deal of personal pain.

As for me, I have never met Mr. D’Sousa, whom you mention above. I understand he attended Dartmouth in the early 80’s and was one of the first writers at the Review. Even worse, I’ve never read any of his books and couldn’t have named a single title. It is curious to me that you have. Seriously, it can’t be good for you.

It would of course be difficult, if not dishonest of me to claim Mr. D’Sousa as one of my “idols” under these peculiar circumstances. Hopefully his heart is in the right place, and if not that it will be in the future: as with all of us.

But I have to say that such tactics as you have employed here are more common to hate groups than those who fight hatred.

Sadly, certain vicious types once did similar things to the SCLC and many of its leaders, including Dr King–amongst the many horrible things they did. They would find a communist, former communist or someone who was reputed to be a communist amongst his colleagues or followers–it wasn’t hard to do–and then try to tar the whole Civil Rights Movement, Rev King and many of the other leaders of the movement with the same sticky, sickly brush.

Some very august journals of the day took these reports at face value and printed them. The New York Times among them; you’ve probably read it. They would make great claims, such as the lie that the movement was a “tool of the Soviets.” I’m not sure if they went so far as to claim that Trotsky, Stalin or Mao were amongst Dr King’s “idols” and heroes, though–it would have been far too transparent, cheap and obviously mean-spirited to do so, even in the bad old days. Saying this, I do not mean to demean Marxist who, it seems, are taken very seriously within the academy. It would be cruel to ask, “are you now or have you ever been a communist?” You would be quite a zealot to ask, “Have you ever worked at a place that once employed a communist?” Wouldn’t you think?

As you no doubt know, as someone who has attended college, what you have engaged in is classically referred to as a logical fallacy. Please don’t try it in one of your papers or you’ll be sure to drop a grade for lazy, if not very bad reasoning.

Sorgirl, time heals all things…if you let it. Perhaps you could put all this energy to something productive. I’m sure you could.

Peace on you and yours.