ACTA on AHC - Politics trumps education
Hamilton College has scuppered plans—and funds—for a new campus center devoted to the study of Western civilization, and the students are not at all confused about how the ideological agenda of a rigidly left-wing faculty has taken precedence over such elemental issues as educational quality, intellectual diversity, and students’ academic freedom to learn. ACTA has long taken an interest in Hamilton College’s less-than-stellar track record when it comes to ensuring that doctrinaire agendas don’t displace educational aims, and in a press release issued today is condemning the latest in Hamilton’s lengthening series of administrative missteps:
THE GRINCH COMES TO HAMILTON Students Protest as Scandal Reverberates Nationwide
CLINTON, NY (December 22, 2006)—Despite significant student demand, Hamilton College has scuttled a vibrant new center to study Western civilization and Alexander Hamilton. The creation of the new center was announced with fanfare earlier this year, only to be dropped in the wake of faculty objections. Since the announcement, Hamilton has increasingly drawn the ire of national commentators who say the university has allowed faculty politics to trump student needs.
“Students and alumni may rightly say the Grinch has come to Hamilton,” said Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “Instead of giving students a new center of learning, Hamilton is taking educational opportunities away—and drawing negative national attention as a consequence. It’s simply inexcusable!”
In a recent speech at the University of Notre Dame, Neal condemned the college’s actions. ACTA has been working with concerned Hamilton alumni for years to effect reforms on the campus.
Hamilton also received harsh criticism in an article appearing in the national magazine The New Criterion and a recent syndicated column, which called the college’s move an example of the “toxic spirit” that “clearly lives on at Hamilton”—among others.
The national publicity joins a chorus of student complaints, including two recent editorials in the Hamilton Spectator, the student newspaper, bemoaning the death of what was to be the Alexander Hamilton Center. In an editorial, students took the college to task: “Hamilton students have lost a great educational opportunity because people could not compromise.” According to the editorial:
“We have lost, among other things, the opportunity for internships, fellowships, research stipends and a greater dialogue with other institutions of higher learning, in correspondence with the Center’s mission to open up communication with outside colleges and universities and engage in serious scholarship.”
Another student columnist later added that the Center “would have significantly enhanced the students’ educational experience at Hamilton.” He wrote:
“Yet again, many professors, because of their ideological biases, personal vendettas and politics, have deprived students of this great intellectual opportunity. They have ideological blinders on and cannot see that this center would greatly benefit the students, Hamilton and the larger academic community.”
“Clearly, this is not just a local issue,” ACTA’s Neal said. “Hamilton’s distaste for intellectual diversity is the symptom of a much larger problem on our nation’s college campuses.”
In her speech at Notre Dame, Neal noted that the Alexander Hamilton Center “would have been a part of a growing group of such centers nationwide, including the renowned James Madison Program at Princeton headed by Professor Robert George.” But now, she said, the Center’s fate has become an example of a “prevalent culture on the modern campus that is politicized, one-sided, coercive, and manipulative.” She continued:
“This situation is the product of nearly three decades of postmodernist transformation of the academy. Whereas political bias used to be considered the enemy of dispassionate teaching and scholarship, postmodernism has turned partiality into a virtue….”
Too often the ambitions of the postmodernist academy reflect narcissistic faculty interests rather than student needs; academic freedom without academic responsibility; political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically.
According to its charter, the Alexander Hamilton Center was to be devoted to the “study of freedom, democracy and capitalism…within the larger tradition of Western culture.” Hamilton announced the creation of the Center on September 6. It then announced a $3.6 million pledge from a life trustee on October 13. But in the process, the Hamilton faculty voted overwhelmingly to condemn the Center.
Amid the controversy, a dean sent an e-mail on Nov. 27 saying that “now is not the time to proceed with the establishment of the center on campus.” An announcement was also posted on the Hamilton website saying: “Hamilton College has announced that the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be established at this time due to a lack of consensus about institutional oversight of the Center as a Hamilton program.”
“Hamilton is due for a serious course correction,” Neal concluded. “It has just hired a new dean for diversity issues, but if it continues to neglect diversity of thought, its reputation will be seriously harmed.”
Coverage of Hamilton’s decision at InsideHigherEd is instructive—commenters have much to say, including the comment that “it might be very interesting—and useful—to compare the proposed governance structure for this center with the charters that govern centers like Stanford’s Hoover Institution or Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center. I’m not completely familiar with how these two centers are governed, but I seem to recall that they are run by boards that are controlled largely by the centers’ funders or founders rather than the faculty of the host institutions. This doesn’t strike me as being all that different in form.” Such a comparison might indeed be very interesting and useful.
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Anne Neal is the President of the American Council of Trustees & Alumni, and this posting is reproduced from the ACTA blog with permission.
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Reader Comments (4)
Lacking in all of these statements, be they first-hand, or recitations of others’ words, is an acknowledgment of the assumption of civilized society that the parties involved are well-intentioned and truthful.
I do not believe that there is disingenuousness at work here; I would posit that any silence on the matter is attributable to a desire not to negatively influence any negotiations that may be taking place either now or in the future. Note that only Prof. Paquette, the bandwagon of familiar columnists and HCAGR (i.e., “hb”) are making noise, not the other faculty founders of the AHC or the administration. Even in the most acrimonious negotiations (e.g., labor contracts), a cooling-off period is often utilized.
I have said elsewhere that I was in favor of the establishment of the AHC, but that does not imply that the “balance” others seek by its establishment should be attained no matter the cost. While this blog and the various commentators here and elsewhere focus exclusively on the negative publicity garnering events, ignored are all the positive accomplishments made by the College administration and the Trustees.
It stands to reason that those same qualities which resulted in the many positive accomplishments and improvements on the Hill, are being utilized in these other matters.
If a person conducts his/her life from the perspective that there is bad faith at every turn, particularly with respect to a subject that is as near and dear to all of our hearts as the College, where everyone, faculty, administration, Trustees and alumni share the same goal of ensuring that the College continues to provide its students with the best liberal arts education, then I fear nothing will appease that person.
MOUNT VERNON—“The study of controversial issues can help us refine our own understanding of what is really true,” according to Dr. Robert Paquette. Dr. Paquette will be the Albert Sidney Johnson lecturer for the spring semester at Brewton-Parker College January 23, 2007, at 7 p.m. in Saliba Chapel on the Mount Vernon campus.
His lecture is entitled “Slavery, Political Correctness, and the Search for Truth.”
“Dr. Paquette is a leading historian of slavery, and he has most recently been embroiled in disputes regarding attacks on academic integrity,” said Dr. H. Lee Cheek Jr., chair of the college’s Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences. “For example, he was one of the first members of the American professoriate to question the academic credentials of Ward Churchill last year.”
Currently, Dr. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. He received his doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1982, and teaches courses and conducts research in the Old South, colonial Cuba, slave societies, the Caribbean, cross-cultural history, and colonial Latin America.
Dr. Paquette’s Brewton-Parker lecture will outline his current research, which examines the slave revolt that erupted in the sugar-producing region of territorial Louisiana, a few dozen miles upriver from New Orleans, in January 1811. The talk will piece together the surviving evidence to explore the origin of the revolt, its leadership, and the roles of slaves, as well as attempt to answer questions related to this revealing act of collective violence. Dr. Paquette will also discuss how slavery is debated within the American academy today, and the problems facing the study of controversial topics in our current academic climate.
Dr. Paquette’s first book, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba, earned the 1992 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians, was selected as a University Press Book for Public Libraries, and was nominated for Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize. His many books and publication also include a slavery reader from Oxford University Press.
The Albert Sidney Johnson Lecture Series is named for a prominent South Georgian and Brewton-Parker alumnus and faculty member. His son, Albert Sidney Johnson Jr., is a political science professor and vice president emeritus at the college. Johnson Sr. was born February 2, 1898, in Ailey, Ga., the oldest child of Mr. and Mrs. William Alexander Johnson. After graduating from Brewton-Parker Institute in 1917, he attended Mercer University, where he earned a law degree in 1922, and a bachelor of arts degree in 1926. He served as Brewton-Parker’s Athletic Director from January 1923 to 1925, and again from 1927 until 1934.
Johnson was also a teacher of history and political science at Brewton-Parker. He served two terms as a representative in the Georgia State Legislature, and was, at the time of his death, campaigning for a third term. Johnson was chair of the Judiciary and Agriculture Committees in the House. He passed away in Augusta, Ga., on June 2, 1934, at the age of 36 from complications following an appendectomy, and was buried in the Johnson family cemetery in Longpond.
“We decided to inaugurate a lecture series that would allow us to reach out to our student body and local area by providing insight on the most pressing issues of our day,” said Dr. Cheek. “All too often, we think of colleges as ‘ivory towers,’ removed from the reality of the world. This lecture series will demonstrate how central academics are to our everyday life, our faith and our roles as citizens.”
The public is cordially invited to the second Albert Sidney Johnson Lecture Series event. Admission is free, and a reception will follow the lecture.
As a matter of governance and process is it now an acceptable course of dealing at Hamilton College to:
1. Negotiate the terms of the Center
2. Agree to terms
3. Announce the formation of the Center
4. Publish the Charter listing Profs. Paquette, Prof. Ambrose, Prof. Bradfield, the President, and Dean of Faculty as Founders
5. Accept major gifts,
6. Publicize all of the above,
7. And then disclaim publicly the entire process?
Children call this kind of buffoonery a ‘do-over’. Institutions and adults call it bad faith. It is the stuff of incompetence and failed credibility.
[Candace de Russy 12/26 04:39 PM]
George is right that the elimination of the Alexander Hamilton Center by leftist faculty shows who controls Hamilton College and that this ruling claque won’t hesitate to use its power of veto to suppress non-leftist viewpoints.
Nor will it hesitate to pile on more ideological lopsidedness on campus. Indeed, as the campus kingpins were orchestrating the demise of the AHC, a new “diversity”- related position was announced on the campus, specifically, a new assistant deanship for “Diversity Initiatives” to be filled by one Steven Yao.
No room in the inn, that is, for a distinguished center for the study of American first principles and history. But all the space in the world for more group identity studies and politics.
This latest development demonstrates anew the skewed priorities at Hamilton – and the fecklessness of its administration and board of trustees.
http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/