The Dartmouth trustee battle won’t die down. Yesterday’s issue of The Dartmouth contained letters by trustee Peter Robinson, who attacked the board for its decision to oust Todd Zywicki, and one by one of the high Tories on the board, John Engelman, who blunders badly in throwing down the gauntlet regarding the Dartmouth speech code.

Zywicki has penned a rebuttal to Engelman, which has not yet been published, but I reproduce it here:

In his April 29 contribution, John Engelman challenges me “to produce a copy of [Dartmouth’s prior] ’speech code.’”
I accept his challenge.
The website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — experts on campus speech codes — substantially documents the actions and policy statements by Dartmouth administrators that originally led Dartmouth to be classified with a “red light” or “poor” rating on speech and why it subsequently upgraded Dartmouth to one of only a handful of colleges and universities in America with a “green light” rating (see http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5621.html).
As FIRE stated in a February 2005 letter to Dartmouth Trustee T.J. Rodgers, http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5471.html, referring to a letter in 2001 by President Wright, “The May 10, 2001, letter, if issued by the president of a public university, would constitute an unconstitutional speech code.”
That policy was rescinded just months later and the punishment meted out has been reversed. Dartmouth now has a green light rating on free speech from FIRE, an accomplishment for which I give President Wright (and T.J. Rodgers) great credit.
Perhaps — as Mr. Engelman suggests — FIRE simply imagined the actions and statements at Dartmouth that led to the original “red light” rating and perhaps it then later imagined that these initial imaginary restrictions had been lifted, thereby earning Dartmouth a “green light” rating.
Or perhaps it is Mr. Engelman, not I, who is “play[ing] fast and loose with the facts.”
Todd J. Zywicki
Professor of Law
Editor, Supreme Court Economic Review
George Mason University School of Law

One more point. Zywicki aroused the anger of the Dartmouth establishment by referring to former president James Freedman as “an evil man.” Well, if Freedman wasn’t evil, he certainly was nasty in the way he treated people who didn’t share his politics, especially students on the Dartmouth Review. Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart sets forth some particulars here.