Late last month, six staff members of The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine loaded 2,000 copies of their latest spoof into a Range Rover and drove two hours north to Hanover, N.H.

Their destination: Dartmouth College, which was rocked a year and a half ago by charges of anti-Semitism after student staff members on the ultraconservative Dartmouth Review inserted a passage from Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in the Review's masthead.

Their mission: to distribute a look-alike takeoff of the Review titled "Spring Fashion Issue," featuring photos of Adolf Hitler posing in the woods in preppy garb and articles mimicking the conservative themes, the personal attacks and the inflammatory style for which the Review has become known.

Inside the parody issue, the Dartmouth president, James Freedman, is assailed as a "poo-poo head," the Democratic Party is characterized as the party of the elderly kept alive by "Medicaire," and fictitious editorial writers apologize for publishing passages of "Mein Kampf" but hail its "rhetorical flair unsurpassed in German literature since Nietzsche."

All in all it seemed like a chummy Ivy League prank -- until a Review reporter caught the Lampooners in a dorm, replacing real issues with the spoofs, and called the police. "They were nose to nose," said Bob McEwen, head of campus security.
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Kenneth Weissman, the Review's editor in chief, then asked the Dartmouth administration to condemn the parody for its play on fascist themes, a request that was denied because Harvard, not Dartmouth students, were the instigators, said Alex Huppe, a Dartmouth spokesman. Mr. Huppe pointed out that the Review itself had once published a cartoon of President Freedman dressed like Hitler on its cover.
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Mr. Weissman said he had called the police because the Lampoon staff members "were removing legitimate issues of the Review" from dormitories. In an open letter posted around the campus, he charged the Lampoon with "falsely representing" the Review.