Habitual Wright administration sharks have frenzied themselves about this month’s hot topic. Free speech at Dartmouth has become the central issue of debate amidst a host of real problems caused by our administration’s policies. During trustee elections, candidates have used the emotional content of this nonissue as a talking point in order to ease their election. This week, FIRE – the organization that recently lifted its vocal sanction against the College’s speech policies – has finally been exposed for what it truly is: an external organization attempting to gain a comprehensive understanding of various schools’ politics. Instead of achieving this understanding, however, this organization has only succeeding in misapprehending the intricacies of campus debate.

Yet an increasing trend in ad hominem attacks in campus publications begs the question about the true limits of free speech at Dartmouth. In Paul Heintz’s Guy and Fellow, columnist-cum-campus celebrity Stephanie Herbert makes hilarious oft-awaited cameos edging on the side of personal attack. Less recently, artistic pundits attacked and effectively destroyed the Butcher’s Bargain as a “legitimate” work of art. In this case, instead of centering on the limits of aesthetic expression, arguments were often obsessed with the artist’s liberal intentions. Through attacks against performance art, the cult of defenestration has grown with the seminal influence of Thaddeus Olchowski. To get a feeling for the extent of these individual references, we might explore The Dartmouth Review’s recent article on bloggers. Peppered with statements like “I’ll be sure to email you a reminder, Ms. Bernstein, as well as making a note to myself that you’ll one day be an Important Figure in Academia,” the article was based on a commerce of assailed individuals.

The cult of the personality is undoubtedly strong in the pantheon of campus society. Individuals are the greatest singular force of change in Dartmouth’s shifting landscape. They are the figures by which campus publications rise and fall, organizations gain or lose prestige, and student life transforms. Yet this cult of personality should not lead to a cult of personality attacks. Such assaults are not only dangerous, they are also inimical to the free flow of campus debate. They are the real regulators of free speech, causing strong personalities to be silenced without a full understanding of arguments while simultaneously distracting people from the issues themselves.

As a campus publication whose mission is the circulation of good arguments from multi-partisan perspectives, The Dartmouth Independent feels it is important to foster both an environment in which free speech is possible and one in which arguments are the focus – not people. Does this mean, however, that the university administration needs to sanction the improper use of speech within our community? Was the administration correct to take such extreme action against Zeta Psi?

As a community, we should apply our own normative sanctions to behaviors that lie in the hinterlands of free speech. In the instance of Zeta Psi, the campus should have risen up in condemnation of the inappropriate material and normative internal sanctions should have occurred. In the past, outlying sanctions from the college administration may have become necessary because internal sanctions of our own behavior are mysteriously absent. De Tocqueville once noted that people are mainly inhibited from speaking freely not due to threat of governmental sanction but due to social pressures. Hopefully, as we grow as a college, we will also mature as a society, both applying the appropriate social pressure to certain kinds of attack, and encouraging the spread of intelligent debate.