I recently graduated from Dartmouth College where I was honored as a valedictorian. During the graduation ceremony, the college’s president, Phil Hanlon, gave a speech in which he lauded Dartmouth for being a place where people approach questions “with a truly open mind” and “respectfully debate [their] conclusions with others, especially seeking out those who hold different points of view.” As an openly conservative student, I can say that none of this was true.

This is probably not surprising, given the fact that college campuses are overwhelmingly Left-leaning, but when I was accepted at Dartmouth, although I didn’t expect the vast majority of my classmates to agree with my political views, I hoped that there would at least be a willingness to engage with conservative ideas. Not only was that not the case, but it quickly became apparent that the student body viewed conservatives as both unintelligent and morally reprehensible. I feel that this gave them license to attack conservatives with a maliciousness that’s hard to believe.

As the President of the Dartmouth Republicans, I was a lightning rod for a lot of this hatred. I was the subject of numerous misleading articles and opinion pieces, sometimes written by protestors, in Dartmouth’s campus publications which are confusingly called The Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Review. The purpose of these articles was to harm my reputation and leave a permanent internet history that would dissuade future employers from hiring me.

Moreover, I was a pariah on campus. My events were heavily protested, and I was frequently flipped off, shouted down, and sworn at. I was called a racist to my face simply for being pro-life. The Dartmouth Review even threatened to sue me over receiving an event flier. Despite being a valedictorian, I was called “anti-intellectual” more times than I can count. These are just a few examples, but there are many more.

I’ve spent a long time wondering what permitted this extreme hostility at Dartmouth, and I realized that it was due in large part to a combination of the Dartmouth administration who enabled it and the campus publications that set the narrative, which perpetuates a culture of intolerance towards conservatives. The purpose of these articles is to shame students for expressing right-wing views and encourage them to self-censor.

Case in point, we tried to host world renowned journalist Andy Ngo to give a lecture on Antifa’s violent history in America. Students on campus responded by making violent online threats against the event. Unfortunately, the Dartmouth administration capitulated, and despite the 100 police officers in and around the building, they canceled our event at the last minute, forcing us to host it on Zoom. Instead of condemning the violent threats or punishing the students who made them, the administration blamed the Dartmouth Republicans for their decision to cancel.

Reinforcing this false narrative, The Dartmouth wrote that the event was canceled due to incompetence and disorganization from the club. Despite the presence of FIRE’s investigation into the administration’s claims, there were never any corrections to this article. Kyle Mullins, the editor-in-chief of the paper, brushed aside my concerns.

A few months later, The Dartmouth allowed a student named Gregory Mesa, whom I had never met, to write an op-ed calling me out by name and blasting me for views on immigration that I don’t even have. Mesa concluded by challenging me to debate him, knowing it was the last week of class and that he was about to graduate.

Needless to say, this wouldn’t have been allowed if it was about any other student. In light of Mesa’s article, I decided to join The Dartmouth as an opinion writer to correct the narrative. Beyond that, I was hoping that the other writers would finally see me as a person and not the alt-right caricature they imagined.

I reached out to Mullins to clear the air, since he had personally denounced our club, and many of the biased and misleading articles had been written during his tenure. I emphasized that people of diverse beliefs all share a common thread of humanity. He had previously given me his phone number, but when I reached out, he refused to meet, and then he shopped around a complaint to various disciplinary bodies on campus in order to try to get me punished.

I later found out that I had been barred from the paper due to vague and unsubstantiated allegations that I somehow caused the paper’s staffers “safety concerns,” but I was never given any further explanation. I wasn’t even able to respond to any of the articles that had been written about me because invariably, the student editors would find various excuses not to allow me to publish anything that resembled my initial draft. With no faculty oversight or clear guidelines, they would ask me to remove key points of my argument or literally spend weeks “fact-checking” the same facts multiple times. I was never able to tell my side of the story.

Despite all of this, I have no regrets about standing up for my beliefs. If anything, this experience taught me the importance of having the courage of one’s convictions. However, I feel the need to issue a warning. Extreme leftist intolerance on college campuses has become the norm. The prevailing attitude is that these students will grow out of it as they experience the real world, which will force them to conform to reality, but in fact, it’s just the opposite.

These students, especially those at prestigious colleges like Dartmouth, will go on to shape every facet of society to align with their worldview, and unless serious action is taken, the leftist insanity in this country is about to get much worse before it gets better.

Chloe Ezzo is a graduate of Dartmouth College where she studied French and Russian and served as the President of the Dartmouth Republicans.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.

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Smeared, Scorned, And Shouted Down: My Experience As An Openly Conservative Valedictorian At Dartmouth