Word: peninsulas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indulge us over here at Dartboard for just a moment. This may sound a little strange, but think of campus publications as police officers. Peninsula would be that stern police officer who exhorts you to moral behavior. Perspective would be the officer who, before heading off to the donut shop, kindly looks the other way as you stumble home drunk and underage. And the Harvard Salient--well, they would be the Keystone Cops. Our question is a simple one: can't those people do anything right...
...Peninsula continues to wage its political battles the only way it knows how: without reference to methodical thinking or subtle argumentation. There is nothing probing about these photographs, nothing instructive. They will not convince anyone, and by now, they will probably not shock too many either. They sure do come in handy, though, when you desperately want to grind an ideological ax without getting caught up in the messiness of serious contemplation...
...Peninsula's sensationalism is all the more surprising considering the magazine's historic commitment to the academic canon, the "Great Books" approach to learning. What motivates such an educational philosophy if not a reverence for the fantastic power of words to shape our cultural horizons? Does it not naturally follow that balanced, carefully wrought analysis, and not graphic gore, ought to be the bread and butter of today's conservatives...
...Peninsula's decision to go beyond words, or rather, below them, points to a larger crisis in American conservatism. The shrill, populist conservatism embodied by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich is hostile to intellectual culture. That hostility is not utterly unfounded. It is no secret that academia has historically been antagonistic to the Right, and never more so (in America) than in the past score of years...
...Right's wholesale dismissal of the 'elite northeastern universities' (Representatives Armey and Gingrich both have Ph.D.s from southern schools) it throws out the good with the bad. Like Peninsula, this brand of conservatism has utterly aborted the project of serious debate and nuanced argumentation. It prefers easy pictures and tidy slogans to the knottiness of words...