Laura Ingraham

As a Dartmouth undergraduate, she was a staff member of the independent conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review. In her senior year, she was the newspaper's editor-in-chief, its first female editor. She wrote a few controversial articles during her tenure, notably an article alleging racist and unprofessional behavior by a Dartmouth music professor Bill Cole. Cole responded by harassing Ingraham's dormitory roommate and inciting anger against her in one of his classes. Cole later sued Ingraham for $2.4 million; the college paid for his lawyer. He ceased the lawsuit in 1985.

She also authored a piece characterizing a campus gay rights group as "cheerleaders for latent campus Sodomites". Additionally, she is known for having secretly taped the meetings of the LGBT student group at the time, later publishing the transcript, and the names of the officers, in the Review. Jeffrey Hart, the faculty adviser for The Dartmouth Review described Ingraham as having "the most extreme antihomosexual views imaginable," and noted that "she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual." In 1997, Ingraham wrote an essay in the Washington Post in which she stated that she changed her views after witnessing "the dignity, fidelity and courage" with which her gay brother Curtis and his late companion coped with AIDS. Ingraham regrets the "callous rhetoric" of her youth, and now supports some legal protections for homosexuals. Read Less