Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

Indoctrinate U trailer

The Alexander Hamilton Institute has started a group on Facebook.   Check it out.

Supporters might be interested in these notes from a recent meeting hosted for the Fellows by alumni supportive of the Alexander Hamilton Institute.

In response to specific questions about the mission of the Institute:

i. There is a difference between advocacy and scholarship. For example, the difference between the Institute and the Heritage Foundation is that the Institute will not issue policy papers or take positions on political issues. Our mission is scholarly.

ii. We are not a right-wing counterpart to the Kirkland Project. The Kirkland Project advocates; the Institute informs and analyzes.

iii. The Institute provides benefits for students at Hamilton through the four groups that meet periodically at the Institute to discuss issues based on prescribed readings or to present speeches.

iv. The Institute does not offer courses for credit.

v. We rely on the generosity of donors to fund operations and are grateful for their support.

vi. A donor has indicated that he intends to support programming at the Institute by providing a series of gifts of $100,000 per year for the next five years. The first of such gifts has been completed. Those monies are not available for bricks & mortar or other occupancy expenses.

vii The AHI has reached an agreement in principle for a long term lease of its headquarters at the former Alexander Hamilton Inn at favorable rates. The terms will include an option to buy its headquarters, and we expect to close on the lease shortly. The annual cost of operating the building is for the account of AHI, and is an ongoing funding requirement.

viii The directors of the Institute welcome questions from prospective benefactors about the governance, organizational, and financial structure of the Institute.

Members of the alumni group were generally concerned by Hamilton’s open curriculum and what was perceived as a lowering of academic standards. The group applauded the effort of the Institute to address the deficiencies of intellectual life on the campus of the College. We emphasized that the Institute is not an adversary of the College, that the Institute is not an ‘anti-Hamilton’ at the foot of the Hill, that we look to provide opportunities through which the students can enrich their education.

Fresh from the Christian Science Monitor: Scholars discover the comic book

“…Now, comics are coming into their own in classrooms of all kinds, gaining an unprecedented level of respect and spawning serious debate over their greater meaning.

“Comics have changed. They’re not the comics that we grew up with,” says Peter Coogan, an organizer of the academic-oriented panels at Comic-Con. “They can stand up to literary and critical analysis,” he says.

Across the country, hundreds of professors and college students spend their days analyzing comics, and the University of Florida even allows postgraduate English students to specialize in comics studies.

Meanwhile, teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools are embracing comics as tools to help students learn to read and enjoy words.”

Hamilton College finally acknowledges the nomination of one of its own to be seated on the National Council  on Humanities. Here is the College’s write up found under Faculty News, not to be seen under College News  

You wouldn’t know it from reading the release, but this is a first such nomination in the history of Hamilton College.

The release does not mention that Prof. Paquette is a Charter Fellow and Founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Inc. which the College declined to have on campus. Nor does it mention that Prof. Paquette was denied a raise this past year.

No courtesy call prior to the release, no quote, no photo, not a peep from the President or Dean of Faculty … nothing. But someone has a sense of humor: right above Bob’s announcement is one about  “An Implicit Association Test to Measure Relational Aggression: Preliminary Results and Directions for Future Research”. Relational aggression is therein defined as the deliberate attempt to harm someone through the manipulation of relationships and social status.

We are pleased to announce that the White House has put forth to the Senate the nomination of Robert L. Paquette to be a Member of the National Council on the Humanities for a term expiring January 26, 2014.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/07/20080710-4.html

“In Hamilton’s case, she [Inzer] said, the college was doing a better job of attracting the kinds of applicants it wanted without merit aid…”    source: Doing the Right Thing – and Thriving

Kind of begs the question: what kind of students does Hamilton want?  Merit is no longer in the calculus, and in fact it seems by implication to be the wrong thing.

Anyone with exposure to Hamilton’s students gets the sense that, in the main, they are of extraordinary quality…perhaps more resistant to what many suspect is growing flaw in process.  The students attending the AHI’s colliquium did not hesitate to vigorously and effectively defend Prof. Ambrose from the challenges of the Harvard students. That said, anyone with any exposure to Hamilton’s students also knows they increasingly are dealing with something most alumni never had to and would not tolerate: explicit politicization of the classrooms on the Hill.

We hope that a Command Turnover Review would accompany the ascension of a new Chairman.  It’s been painfully obvious that President Stewart didn’t bother with one at inception, primarily because the board didn’t want or expect one. 

This one should include a broad, confidential survey of students’ on the Hill in this regard.  It’s needed.

Congratulations to Doug Ambrose on his promotion to full professor at Hamilton College.  Prof. Ambrose is a Charter Fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. The omission of that fact from Hamilton’s announcement is no doubt an oversite.

“This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.”

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Critics says proposed Milton Friedman Institute would be a right-wing think tank

“It is a right-wing think tank being put in place,” said Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religions and one of the faculty members who met with the administration Tuesday. “The long-term consequences will be very severe. This will be a flagship entity and it will attract a lot of money and a lot of attention, and I think work at the university and the university’s reputation will take a serious rightward turn to the detriment of all.”

For the full monty see:  the story in the Chicago Tribune

Without doubt the inaugural colloquium was a huge success. Beyond all expectations.

As noted on the AHI website “Liberty and Slavery: The Civil War between Gerrit Smith and George Fitzhugh,” integrated three undergraduate classes—from Harvard University, Colgate University, and Hamilton College—into an intensive conversation with a diverse group of fifteen academics and informed citizens. They included a judge, a museum curator, a Methodist minister, an award-winning high-school teacher as well as some of the most influential historians of their generation. The result exceeded the ample expectations of the AHI’s founders. Professor Stauffer called the event “one of the highlights of his career, if not the highlight.” Tim McCarthy, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, informed one of the founders of the AHI a week after the event, “My students are still talking about it!” Video of the opening night’s events and audio of the colloquium’s six sessions are now available at the AHI’s Papers & Publications for examination by interested parties.

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We’ll keep the challenge short and present it as an idea for discussion.

Let’s up the stakes and broaden the tent.

• Leverage the existing intellectual work product
• Repackage the substance of the colliquium & retarget to the high school level as the preeminent explication of the abolitionist/apologist dialogue in all the dimensions you explored so wonderfully in the colliquium
• Utilize internet and other media/technology to leverage national distribution as a free good available to public & private high schools across the United States and the world

Civic literacy & superior scholarship created by AHI, its Fellows, affiliates & associates, leveraged by the technologies of new media and the internet to a near zero marginal cost of distribution for the benefit of high school teachers and students across America. QED

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What do you think?

Last spring, Paquette received his annual salary letter but there was something absent from the letter … a raise. In a letter dated May 25, 2007, Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo wrote to Paquette, “Bob, despite your publications in 2006 and your efforts at teaching effectively, I cannot see clear to increasing your salary in 2007-2008.

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AHI Open House Reunion Weekend

The AHI cordially invites alumni returning to Clinton for Reunion Weekend ‘08 on the Hamilton College campus to attend an open house at our headquarters on 21 West Park Row, Friday, June 6th,  9 am to 4 pm and Saturday, June 7th, 9 am to 1 pm.

Refreshments will be served. Visitors will receive a priceless gift.  Founders and fellows will be on hand to discuss the future of the AHI.  We will use the opportunity to share with visitors exciting news—to be made public in the forthcoming weeks—about a major gift and initiative.

You know its getting pretty wild when even the New York Times notices something’s up.   Enjoy the Reunion. Skip the Check :  “These universities have a modern mentality about investing,” she told me, “but they still have an old-fashioned mentality about spending.”

How about negative pedagogical alpha?

“the college approved a plan that would transfer real oversight to an unelected executive committee – and give unelected trustees a 2-1 numerical advantage on the board, down from the 50/50 split today….

Which brings us back to the current election. Right now, the Association of Alumni is supporting a lawsuit that is the only thing stopping Dartmouth from implementing its board-packing plan. In other words, the election for the association’s leadership is in fact a referendum on the board-packing plan.” 

source: WSJ Dartmouth Against Democracy

Loyal readers will notice we took down Peter and Ben’s pages that were remnants of their campaigns as petition candidates.  hcagr thanks them for their commitment of time, effort and money to try to improve the school.

From the Continental, the only source of real student journalism on the Hill.  It is very well done.

from Behind Closed Doors 

Last spring, Paquette received his annual salary letter but there was something absent from the letter … a raise. In a letter dated May 25, 2007, Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo wrote to Paquette, “Bob, despite your publications in 2006 and your efforts at teaching effectively, I cannot see clear to increasing your salary in 2007-2008. While we were disappointed in the outcome of discussions surrounding the Alexander Hamilton Center, it is incumbent upon us all to handle such disappointments in a professional manner.”

In The Myth of Academic Freedom - Personal Experiences of a Liberal Principle in the Neoconservative Era (Fragments of a Work in Progress) [Social Text 90, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2007, Duke University Press] he provides previously unknown information about what happened during the great unpleasantness at Hamilton.

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Prof. Robert Paquette has published a new piece in the New Criterion: The World We Have Lost: A Parable on the Academy  It’s no parable.