Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

We present an excerpt from a comment posted on this site:

” …mentioned “a professor who in an all-campus email politics every member of the faculty, regardless of discipline, to turn their courses over to the issue of global warming” - that was me, though if I recall correctly I asked that instructors cover it where it was relevant to their course (if I didn’t, that was a mistake) and didn’t suggest how it should be covered. I make no apologies, as I consider global warming an exhaustively documented threat to our nation’s security, our civilization, and life on this planet as we have known it for thousands of years. I don’t consider it an issue of political ideology. I teach anthropogenic global warming as a scientifically established phenomenon and present a lecture refuting the skeptics. Call that institutional bias if you wish, but I would no more consider that institutional bias than if I taught a paleontology or biology course that accepted evolution. What I do also teach my students, however, is that though the science is established, the question of what to do about it and whether to do something about is indeed a matter of politics and ethics. “

December 14, 2011 at 08:43AM | Peter F. Cannavo

A humble consideration: No Need to Panic About Global Warming (excerpted below):

“In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2….”

/s/

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

January 19, 2012

Re: Anti-Semitism Awareness

The recent rash of vandalism and arson against Jewish houses of worship in Bergen County, NJ highlights a disturbing reality: Anti-Semitism is flaring around the world in new and virulent forms. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Benjamin Weinthal reports that “German experts in the field of contemporary anti-Semitism define the phenomenon as ‘Querfront’ anti-Semitism, which roughly translates as ‘crossover’. The fusion of hate ideologies coalesces the radical left and extreme right with fanatical Islamism.” We see such crossover in the United States in the strange bedfellows of the Westboro Baptist Church and some elements—small I hope—of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. “For the first time since the end of World War II,” Alan Dershowitz wrote a few weeks ago, “classic anti-Semitic tropes—the Jews control the world and are to blame for everything that goes wrong, including the financial crisis; the Jews killed Christian children in order to use the blood to bake Matzo; the Holocaust never happened—are becoming acceptable and legitimate subjects for academic and political discussion.”

A search of Hamilton web archives reveals no programming—zip, zero, nada— on this important issue, and after months of trying I’ve had no luck getting the Days Massolo Center interested (or even getting the courtesy of a reply). The Dean of Faculty was peeved at my persistence in pursuing the matter with the Center.

With Hamilton’s calendar teeming with events about social justice, diversity, and prejudice, why the neglect of anti-Semitism? On a campus with a political center of gravity far to the left, two explanations come to mind. First, such programming may simply be crowded out by the reigning cultural left’s interest in other matters. Second, as Michael Cohen argued in a 2007 essay in Dissent, for “the left that doesn’t learn” anti-Zionism has become ostrichism or worse about anti-Semitism. “Anti-Zionism,” according to Cohen, “means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let’s be blunt: there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.”

In the end, explaining our neglect is less important than rectifying it with serious, balanced programming about anti-Semitism, left and right. I am confident that, if necessary, the Alexander Hamilton Institute will, once again, step into the breach on behalf of Hamilton students. But the Hamilton administration would be well advised to take the initiative on this important, if not fashionable, issue.

Theodore J. Eismeier
Government Department

source: http://students.hamilton.edu/spectator/opinion/p/letters-to-the-editor-1-1/view

[ed -  reproduced here wihtout the author’s permission. He can call if he chooses.]

“Developing one’s mind is no different from developing a strong body: exercise and, specifically, cross training. By studying art, science, the humanities, social science, and languages, the mind develops the mental dexterity that opens a person to new ideas, which is the currency for success in a constantly changing environment” -  AG Lafley in A Liberal Education: Preparation for Career Success in the Huffington Post of December 6, 2011.

If so, why is there no required curriculum at Hamilton College?  Students may graduate without ever having studied the enumerated fields.

Hamilton’s Blind Loop Syndrome is neither new nor a constructive course for the College. EOM

We present below in full the annual letter from the President of the Alexander Hamilton Institute:

From the President’s Desk

December 2011

Dear Friends:

Click to read more ...

Check out the new website at the same address: www.theahi.org

If you think they do good work, please consider sending a donation.  As always we urge you to consider fully the quality & standards of scholarship of all the works of the Institute and, increasingly, of the accomplishments of the students who participate in them.

We also note the Alexander Hamilton Institute announced earlier this year the formation of new subsidiary under the direction of Mike Rizzo of the University of Rochester. Onwards!

The announcement from the Hamilton College: Endsley Performs in Philadelphia

Not sure if these were performed in Philly. Not sure it matters.

Crystal Leigh performs “I am”

Dr. Crystal Leigh

There’s more on google for those seeking further enlightenment scholarship.  One hopes for a case of mistaken identity, and we are open to correction but until then, Carissima!

Hamilton makes the news in Vice president of policy brings attention to narrow academic specialties

Item: Hamilton College, whose annual tuition and fees stand at $41,280, offers, intra alia, “Video Game Nation,” a humanities course that, “[i]nvestigates how to critically interpret and analyze video games and the roles they play in visual and popular culture, and how to test the application of these approaches to various issues in gaming and digital media culture more generally. Topics and themes include genre and aesthetics, the game industry, spectatorship, play, narrative, immersion, gender, race, militarism, violence and labor. (Writing-intensive.)”

Now, tell me again, why is it you don’t have a job?

A response to President Stewart in defense of faith
By Jeremy Adelman ‘13

October 20, 2011

In her Aug. 24 address at Convocation, President Joan Hinde Stewart announced glibly, “evolution is a fact,” a barb directed squarely at biblical literalists and meant, no doubt, to assert her superiority as a learned scholar over the troglodytes who tromp weekly into churches. However, her statement actually demonstrated her ignorance of both science and faith; because of its empirical foundations, science’s “facts” are data—everything gleaned from these results is readily contestable by new experiments and novel theories. To illustrate this point, consider an analogy to history; a historical fact (analogous to the beaks of Darwin’s finches) is that the Franks defeated the Umayyad Caliphate at a battle near Tour, but the interpretation that Martel’s victory stymied the Muslim conquest of Europe (analogous to evolution), however widely accepted by academics, is only a theory.


More insidious, though, is President Stewart’s ironic attempt at mocking blind faith by proclaiming the incontrovertibility of evolution. As she is no biologist, I doubt very much that President Stewart came to her conclusion after poring exhaustively over innumerable papers on the subject—more likely, she deferred to the opinions of those who do.

Considering the breadth of human knowledge, such deference is logical and even admirable, but is nonetheless undeniably based upon faith, rather than reason. That is, when President Stewart proclaimed evolution a fact, she really announced her faith in the expertise of evolutionary biologists. Intellectually, this is equivalent to the Bible literalists espousing belief in creationism on the basis of faith in Genesis —to maintain otherwise is to cling to the delusion of superiority which comes with a little knowledge; as much as we know, there will always be more we do not comprehend.
Indeed, rather than criticizing faith, President Stewart ought to be singing her praise, for faith is fundamental, not anathema, to the concept of scholarship. Every discipline, from communications to chemistry, requires at its core certain postulates which cannot be contested if one is to advance in knowledge. Even mathematics, which prides herself on the existence of absolute, rather than relative, proof of her theorems, needs the assumption on pure faith of a number of axioms in order to function.


Of course, blind faith does indeed occasionally stand as an impediment to the advancement of reason — however, more often than not, it is the faith of the sort President Stewart expresses, namely, faith in the genius of men, rather than a faith in the genius of God. Lost in the oft- rehashed narrative of Galileo is the fact that the church was defending not the Pentateuch but Ptolemy, whose geocentric universe enjoyed the same “scientific consensus” as evolution today (albeit among a certainly less scientific world). Rather than debase science, religion has a tendency to adopt its views — thus has evolution become a manifestation of God’s divine will in the catechism of the Catholic Church (one wonders whether someone isn’t already pondering the theological interpretations of superluminous neutrinos). In fact, the vaunted Big Bang theory now central to our interpretation of creation, was first proposed by a Belgian priest, Georges Lamaître, and faced overwhelming criticism from such luminaries as Albert Einstein. For, as Joan Hinde Stewart would say, in 1927, the static universe was “a fact.”

——————————-

from the Spectator Online

Excerpt College & Captivity  of September 2, 2011:

… “When I am not teaching inside Attica, I teach at Hamilton College, a very good and very expensive private liberal arts college (at $50K/year),” Doran Larson writes in the latest issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “There [Hamilton] I offer courses in American and global prison writing.”…“The course on American writers begins with slave narratives and work songs, surveys the early twentieth century, and concludes with Black Power movement writers, including George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal,”…

We leave it to Greater and Perhaps Sustainable Minds as to whether this is an improvement in quality of Scholarship at Hamilton College. We think not, but leave it to the alumni for their consideration.

Somehow we suspect this one missed the quarterly alumni review…

Over the years, we have several times cast a mournful glance at little Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. This expensive “liberal arts” institution, which is just about to celebrate its bicentennial, has made itself into a poster child for all that is trendy and meretricious in American higher education. At Hamilton, it is business as usual to invite Annie Sprinkle, a porn-star turned “performance artist,” to demonstrate the use of sex toys to students and other members of the community. If there is a writing class to be taught, Hamilton administrators think it clever to invite Susan Rosenberg, the felon and former member of the Weather Underground, to be an “artist- and activist-in-residence.” Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to a Nazi administrator, was just the sort of anti-American radical that would appeal to Hamilton, so it was not surprising that the overwhelmingly left-wing faculty should seek to invite him to address the young scholars there. In their latest act of pedagogical irresponsibility, Hamilton has hired Alessandro Porco, a Canadian “poet” whose chief claim to fame are poems celebrating the porn star Jill Kelly, known to her admirers as “The Anal Queen.” It would not be appropriate to quote Mr. Porco’s poetry in these pages. We’ll just observe that in one typical effusion the poet portrays himself, in unspeakably graphic terms, sexually molesting the twin daughters of George W. Bush. One critical observer asked what the response would have been had Mr. Porco decided to focus his pornographic attentions on the daughters of President Obama instead of President Bush. Answer came there none.

That’s a good question, but perhaps even more to the point is the fact that, while Hamilton College is busy hiring smut-peddlers masquerading as poets, it is also dismissing serious scholars like Christopher Hill, the historian and prize-winning novelist, who was recently jettisoned by the school. His sin? Being a white male of traditional scholarly aspiration and accomplishment who specializes in such unfashionable subjects as the origins of common law. There has been a lot of talk recently about “the higher education bubble.” The sound of the gas oozing out is particularly noticeable at institutions like Hamilton, where moral paralysis competes with shopworn radicalism to produce a ghastly travesty of higher education. A few years ago, the public was distressed by Hamilton’s gross irresponsibility, but the consternation eventually gave way to titters: Who could take those spoiled children seriously? Now, we suspect, the dismissive levity will slide slowly into the wearied indifference of contempt. Despite its lavish endowment, Hamilton College, like so many institutions of higher education, is living a posthumous existence. It may continue to twitch, like a severed frog’s leg stimulated by electric shock. But the vital spirit is gone, a victim of institutional suicide.

_______________

This reproduced without permission from The New Criterion, September 2011, p.3, to which all alumni should subscribe.

Evidently, the scrubbers are out on the Hamilton College website to modify the name & background information that is presented to the world. Modify the name & modify what a google search turns up, so as to omit the unsavory stuff? See the latest Comments on Scholarship at Hamilton College.

Hamilton College should be proud of what it is doing and should welcome the spotlight.  This is a discussion one might have with a third grader…  “[insert child’s name], you shouldn’t do things of which you’re not proud.”

The problem is that the administration & faculty are proud of this, they just don’t want parents, prospective students, existing students, and alumni to know. And do tell, where are the trustees? Or do they condone this activity?

From the sex clubs of Montreal to your children. It’s now called scholarship at Hamilton College… or fraud.

The trustees and administration continue to deliver the results of their leadership and vision. A new mission statement: 

“Hamilton puts the ‘loco’ in loco parentis!”

A warning to college parents and grandparents

See p. 2 for the legacy of She Fears You.

Did we get this right? Perhaps Forbes was unaware of the faculty’s thought leadership on fracking?

http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/

A large number of Faculty turns around a letter, in about 72 hours we understand, which emotes and protests the possibility of natural gas exploration in upstate NY.  The priorities are clear.

Below are the statistics from the Wingspread Group on Higher Education as published in ACTA’s Becoming an Educated Person.

• 26.2 % of recent bachelor’s degree recipients earned not a single undergraduate credit in history;
• 30.8 % did not study mathematics of any kind;
• 39.6 % earned no credits in either English or American literature; and
• 58.4 % left college without any exposure to a foreign language.

Alumni should ask for information as to Hamilton’s numbers on the same issues. We know Hamilton’s policy on core curriculum & required courses: there are none.

What are the educational outcomes of this policy?

Alumni don’t know, although we do have some insight to an inclination to She Fears You and a disinclination to fracking.

Here’s an alternative to the faculty letter: Hamilton College should lease some gas rights to its land (presuming it retains the rights), take the royalty payments, and cut tuition by that amount. It would be a courageous example of extracting the highest & best use of assets, completely co-strategic with the core mission, and beneficial to the economic well being of the entire community. Kind of like an educational gas royalty trust…

We won’t hold our breath.

excerpt from A Tale of Two Shale States

The Manhattan Institute study shows that a quick end to the moratorium would generate more than $11.4 billion in economic output from 2011 to 2020, 15,000 to 18,000 new jobs, and $1.4 billion in new state and local tax revenue. These are conservative estimates based on a limited area of drilling. If drilling were allowed in the New York City watershed—which Governor Andrew Cuomo is so far rejecting—as well as in the state’s Utica shale formation, the economic gains would be five times larger.

Consider New York’s Broome County, which borders Pennsylvania and from which you can spot nearby rigs. The county seat of Binghamton ought to be a hub for shale commerce, but instead its population is falling as its young people leave for jobs elsewhere.

A study commissioned by the county in 2009 found that Broome could support up to 4,000 wells, but drilling even half that number would create some $400 million in wages, salaries and benefits; $605 million in property income from rents, royalties and dividends, and some $43 million in state and local tax revenue.

The Broome analysis pointed to Texas, where Chesapeake Energy paid Dallas Fort Worth International Airport $180 million for drilling rights on 18,000 acres of airport property—$10,000 per acre. The airport receives a 25% royalty on the natural gas produced by airport wells—more than $28 million in fiscal 2008. The study also noted the boon that rising oil and gas property values have been to Texas landowners, tax authorities and school districts.

Your gifts & tuition dollars at work in the letter below which we understand was submitted today.

Next on the faculty agenda for September: we hear closing Gitmo! Hey, hey, ho, ho!

Quel embarras de richesse! The imbecility must cause an awful headache for the trustees (Advil anyone?). More worrisome, the visibility of failure of institutional management, of core mission & quality control. The stuff just keep stacking up. It’s obvious old hat, and people will ask one day, “How did this happen?”. The response that ‘everyone is doing it’ may prove unsatisfying from the perspective of legacy.

Oh, look! Just today in the WSJ: Academia’s Crisis of Irrelevance

And the band plays on…

____________________________________________________________
 
Dear President Stewart, Members of the Senior Staff and of the Board of Trustees,
 
     As you may know, an existing state moratorium on the drilling of new high-volume hydraulic fracturing natural gas wells expired on July 1 and the Department of Environmental Conservation delivered a Revised General Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) regarding hydrofracking in the state shortly thereafter.  This has cleared the way for large scale hydrofracking to begin in the state.  The focus of gas exploration in New York State has thus far been in the Marcellus shale formation which does not quite extend into our region.  However, there is currently intense interest in exploring for gas in the Utica shale formation, over which Clinton and most of Oneida County sits.  A coalition of landowners who collectively own more than 10,000 acres in New Hartford, Vernon Center, Paris and other local towns has already contracted with a consulting group to negotiate with gas companies on their behalf and several landowners who live in Clinton have signed leases with gas companies, including the Cranes, who live just up the Hill from the College.  Unless there is governmental intervention, it seems very likely that hydrofracking will happen in our area in the not too distant future.
 
     We believe that local hydrofracking would have a significant negative impact on the College.  Even if hydrofracking could be done “safely”, the associated activity would essentially turn our area into an industrial zone.  Well pads would be littered throughout the region, destroying the natural beauty of the area and there would be a high degree of noise and light pollution during the drilling of wells.  Furthermore, the amount of heavy truck traffic in the area would increase dramatically.  To drill and frack one well requires more than 1000 trips by 18-wheel vehicles to transport water and fracking fluids. Each well pad can contain up to 30 wells and each well can be fracked up to 18 times.  The associated noise and impact on roads from that amount of heavy vehicle traffic would be significant.
 
     Thus far, the industry has not been able to demonstrate that hydrofracking can be done safely.  Most of the press coverage about environmental effects of hydrofracking has focused on the contamination of water used in the drilling process.  The 2005 National Energy Policy Act exempts hydrofracking activities from compliance with a host of environmental regulations, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Superfund Act, among others, and the industry has thus far thwarted attempts in Congress to pass the proposed “Frac-Act,” which would restore most of those protections.  This means that energy companies do not need to disclose the identities of any of the compounds used in fracking fluids and that there is little to no government oversight of fracking operations.  Numerous incidents have been reported in other states where hydrofracking activity has contaminated drinking water wells and watersheds with toxic chemicals originating in fracking fluids and with natural but harmful substances released from the earth in the fracking process.  If hydrofracking were to be done in our area, the potential for damage to local water resources is high.
 
     What has received less attention, but is perhaps a more problematic issue, is the air pollution associated with hydrofracking.  Like the noise and aesthetic damage caused by hydrofracking, air pollution is a guaranteed effect.  At a minimum, there will be pollutants released through all of the diesel exhaust used in the fracking process.  This includes exhaust not just from all of the heavy vehicle activity used in the relatively short term drilling and fracking of the wells but also from the compressors and separators that will run constantly over the twenty-five year lifetime of all of the active wells in the area.  Furthermore, in addition to producing natural gas, active wells produce numerous other volatile compounds, including hydrogen sulfide, which is an acute poison, benzene, which is a potent carcinogen, and radioactive radon gas, among many others.  These non-desirable volatiles are usually flared off of wells and released into the atmosphere.  There is also a non-trivial amount of uncaptured natural gas that is constantly being released from wells.  Instances of the release of unusual amounts of volatiles can have immediate, acute health effects but more importantly, the slow and constant release of diesel exhaust and volatile organic compounds leads to the formation of ground level ozone.  Air sampling in areas of the country with large scale hydrofracking that are in highly rural areas with no other heavy industry has found that concentrations of ground level ozone is as high as the levels in the city of Los Angeles.  Ozone at levels this high causes lung damage that will lead to greatly increased levels of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the local population, especially in children and the elderly.
 
     It is hard to imagine that the College would not be severely impacted if hydrofracking activity begins in the area.  Students and their parents are attracted by the College’s beautiful natural surroundings and by the fact that the campus is quiet and safe.  That natural beauty will be largely destroyed and informed parents who understand the dangers of spending four years in an area with active hydrofracking will discourage their children from applying or attending.  It will also be more difficult to attract faculty and staff; who would want to move to an industrial zone to start a career and raise a family?  There may even be established faculty or staff who choose to leave the College instead of facing the noise, pollution and potential health threats brought to the area.  Current and potential employees of the College will also likely be affected financially.  In areas of the country with hydrofracking activity, property values have dropped by as much as 75% on properties with active leases and up to 14% on properties without leases but within 1000 feet of a well. Currently, eleven local banks have policies, following HUD rules, prohibiting a mortgage on leased properties and on homes within 300 feet of a leased well site boundary (not the actual well site location), insurance companies will not insure these properties and title insurance is affected as well.  Potential new hires will be discouraged from coming to an area where purchasing a home is a very poor investment and existing homeowners may find that their homes will become worth less than the balance remaining on their mortgages and could not be sold if doing so was desired.
 
     This is a matter of serious concern for all members of the College community as well as local residents.  It is also a matter of concern for alumni, who are profoundly attached to the College in part because of its beautiful rural character.  Upon returning to the Hill for reunions, alumni might be greeted by a landscape marred by drilling operations.
 
     We believe that the risks of hydrofracking in our area greatly outweigh any potential economic benefits. The Town Board has recently passed a one year moratorium on gas drilling in the Town of Kirkland to allow time for the board to study the issue and decide on how and if to limit drilling activity in the town.  We urge the College to take an active role in discussions at the town level, and also to advocate at the county and state level, to preserve the College’s interests and the quality of life that we currently enjoy.
 
Frank Anechiarico
Joyce Barry
John Bartle
Carole Bellini-Sharp
Rebecca Bodenheimer
Charles Borton
Jennifer Borton
Debra Boutin
Karen Brewer
Heather Buchman
Jean Burr
Alan Cafruny
Alistair Campbell
Peter Cannavo
Wei-Jen Chang
Timothy Chapp
Natalia Connolly
Emily Conover
Myriam Cotten and Dan Farrell
Cindy Domack
Katheryn Doran
Andrew Dykstra
Stephen Ellingson
Todd Franklin
Michael Frederick
David Gapp
Christophre Georges
Erin Glaser
Barbara Gold
Steve Goldberg
Nathan Goodale
Kevin Grant
Naomi Guttman
Martine Guyot-Bender and Larry Bender
Tina Hall
Lydia Hamessley
Robert Hopkins
Stephenson Humphries-Brooks
Jennifer Irons
Maurice Isserman
Marianne Janack
Derek Jones
Tom Jones
Esther Kanipe
Robert Kantrowitz
Shoshana Keller
Alfred Kelly and Sharon Kelly
Robin Kinnel
Philip Klinkner
Robert Knight
Larry Knop
Catherine G. Kodat
Mireille Koukjian
Anne Lacsamana
Chaise LaDousa
Doran Larson
Craig Latrell
Michelle LeMasurier
Charlotte Lee
Herman Lehman
Ted Lehmann
Scott MacDonald
Seth Major
Joseph Malloy
Russell Marcus
Robert Martin
Michael McCormick
Jacquelyn S. Medina
Jeremy T. Medina
SueAnn Miller and Frank Price ‘68
Rebecca Murtaugh
Peter Millet
Perry Nizzi
Onno Oerlemans
Kyoko Omori
John H. O’Neill
Mary O’Neill
Patricia O’Neill
Steve Orvis
Ann Owen
Phillip Pearle
Colleen Pellman
Sam Pellman
Bill Pfitsch
Catherine Phelan
S. Brent Rodriguez Plate
Jeffrey Pliskin
Deborah Pokinski
Nancy Rabinowitz
Peter Rabinowitz
Douglas Raybeck
Robert Redfield
James Ring
Sharon Rivera
Ian Rosenstein and Sarah Rosenstein
Monk Rowe
Carl Rubino
Janelle A. Schwartz
Franklin Sciacca
Richard Seager
Martin Shuster
Robert Simon
Jeremy Skipper
Jane Springer
Jesse Sprole
David Stoughton
Nathaniel Strout
Katherine Terrell
Bonnie Urcioli
Christopher Vasantkumar
Jonathan Vaughan
Zhuoyi Wang
Douglas Weldon
Richard Werner
Ernest Williams
Sharon Williams
Maria Willstedt
Thomas Wilson
Steven Yao
Penny L. Yee

[ ed comment: letter verbally confirmed with source, not independently verified. Apologies to anyone left off the list erronously or by fault of timing.]

The event is hosted by the James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions and Princeton University. What a wonderful achievement for these students of Hamilton. See the link for details:

The Fourth Annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference on the American Polity

We note without surprise that Hamilton College’s website is silent [remarkably terse] on this exciting scholarship of its own students, at least that we have found. Nevertheless, it takes time to celebrate and advise the world that Low Carbon Day is April 14th. 

First things first, don’t you think?

Updated on April 22, 2011 at 01:24PM by hb

Same story, just a different course at Bowdoin: A Golf Story

Since everyone seems at a loss to find sensible criteria to identify ideological skewness on campus, may we suggest the same criteria by which Course Ratings are derived.

Course Rating is a measure of the difficulty of courses for a scratch golfer… The rating is expressed in strokes and decimal fractions of a stroke, and is based on yardage and other obstacles to the extent that they affect the scoring ability of a scratch player. Course Rating used to be based solely on length. The longer the course, the higher the rating. But obstacles, in addition to distance, are now part of the consideration.

Consider a well qualified applicant a sratch golfer, and just apply the same criteria to the probability of encountering intellectul diversity.  

We’ll hold with skewness of distribution, seeing no benefit in addressing platykurtic distributions.

[ed - we asked for and received permission to reproduce the article below]

Click to read more ...

According to the Observer-Dispatch of April 13, 2011, a statement by Hamilton College said, “The federally required programming presented by Hamilton College has been misrepresented by the Jefferson Center.“ 

Are we to understand that the federal government required Hamilton College to

• select, present, and pay for She Fears You?
• advise students that attendance was mandatory for male freshmen?
• seek a statement of personal complicity in the culture of rape from each male freshman?

Based on informal  discussions with competent (and we believe comtemporaneously sober) counsel we have been given to understand the statement by Hamilton College as reported in the OD is not true in either content or context. However, we realize the need for statutory explication and will ask the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education to comment. Stay tuned.