Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

As found in the NATIONAL REVIEW
March 5, 2007 issue

The Death of the Hamilton Center
A case in upstate New York has implications all over

JOHN J. MILLER

On August 24, 2006, Hamilton College president Joan Stewart, one of her top deans, and three professors toasted the birth of the Alexander Hamilton Center. They poured champagne, clinked glasses, and anticipated a bright future for their new project. “We drank from a bottle of Dom Pérignon that I had purchased for the occasion,” says Robert Paquette, a history professor who was to become the center’s first director. The group was in a festive mood — and a couple of them even joked that they should go light on the bubbly because they were supposed to meet with parents of incoming students later in the day.

The administration of the small liberal-arts college, located in upstate New York, certainly had high hopes for the project. “The Alexander Hamilton Center is an exciting faculty initiative, one that will draw renewed attention on this campus to the considerable scholarly interest in the life and work of the founder who lent his name to our college,” said Joseph Urgo, the dean of the faculty, in a formal announcement on September 6.

By the time the trees started changing colors, however, the center had collided with left-wing professors who couldn’t abide the concept of a campus program whose resources were placed beyond their grasp. And before the fall semester was over, the college’s board of trustees had shot down the Hamilton Center. The debacle is a study in political correctness gone haywire — and it offers a cautionary tale for conservatives as they struggle to establish small beachheads on hostile campuses.

The idea of the Hamilton Center developed through the friendship of Professor Paquette and Hamilton College life trustee Carl Menges, a retired investment banker who has donated several million dollars to his alma mater. At first, Paquette and Menges wanted to create a prize for scholarship on Hamilton. Eventually they hatched a plan with history professor Douglas Ambrose and economics professor James Bradfield for an entire center that would offer extracurricular programs on the history and meaning of freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Menges pledged to back it with $3.6 million and to help raise additional funds. “I’m confident that we could have brought in millions from other alumni,” says Paquette.

A high-profile effort to promote the study of America’s first treasury secretary and his legacy seemed to be just what Hamilton College needed: Over the last several years, the school has suffered bouts of bad publicity. In 2002, it outraged many alumni when its “Womyn’s Center” sponsored an appearance by Annie Sprinkle, a professional provocateur who describes herself as a “prostitute/porn star turned Ph.D. sexologist.” (Her Ph.D. is from San Francisco’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.) According to an account in The New Criterion, she instructed her audience in the proper use of sex toys.

That same year, Joan Stewart’s predecessor as president, Eugene M. Tobin, resigned after he was exposed as a serial plagiarist. The board of trustees aggravated the matter by appearing not to care: It let Tobin stay in his post for an entire school year, gave him a severance package worth $827,000 (according to the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y.), and established a chair called the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professorship.

A pair of ideological scandals came next. In 2004, Hamilton College hired Susan Rosenberg, onetime member of the Weather Underground, to teach a writing course called “Resistance Memoirs.” She was available because President Clinton, during his final minutes in office, had granted her clemency: Rosenberg had been serving a 58-year sentence for weapons possession and conspiracy. She was also the getaway driver in a 1981 armored-car robbery that left a security guard and two police officers dead. Eventually she pulled out of her Hamilton appointment, blaming “organized right-wing intimidation,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her most vocal critic probably was Paquette, who would eventually pay a price for speaking his mind.

Rosenberg’s patron had been the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture — basically a slush fund for campus radicalism. When Rosenberg withdrew, Kirkland’s director, Nancy Rabinowitz, offered a speaking invitation to University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. Churchill is the man who became notorious for penning an essay in which he described the victims of the World Trade Center bombing as “little Eichmanns.”

This sparked a full-on alumni revolt. Several formed the Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform, launched a website, and ran petition candidates in special elections for the board of trustees (unsuccessfully, though they will try again this spring). Moreover, a wider world that had given scarcely a thought to Hamilton College came to see it as a hotbed of ideological lunacy. Even New York governor George Pataki chimed in, blasting the school for embracing “a bigoted terrorist-supporter.” There was all the usual muttering about “academic freedom,” but in the end Stewart canceled the Churchill event, citing security concerns.

Because of these shenanigans, the cofounders of the Alexander Hamilton Center quite sensibly wanted to protect their enterprise from the faculty’s mischief-makers. “We have a problem with mediocrity on campus,” says Menges. “So we put together a charter that would protect the center from a liberal clique that might seek to divert it from its mission.”

Hamilton at Hamilton College

This is becoming standard practice among philanthropists who want to support higher education but don’t want their donations abused by professors and administrators more interested in Annie Sprinkle than scholarship. Rather than writing blank checks for unrestricted purposes, these donors earmark their gifts for special programs that are havens of traditional academics. Princeton is home to the James Madison Program, led by Robert P. George. At Brown, John Tomasi coordinates the Political Theory Project. Colorado, Emory, and Texas are also experimenting in this area. Many development offices encourage the growth of these programs because they provide right-leaning alumni with agreeable ways to give money to their old schools.

The Hamilton Center’s agenda was relatively modest because it wouldn’t have offered classes. Instead, it planned an extracurricular menu of lectures and conferences on annual themes; the first year’s topic was to have been slavery and the abolitionist Gerrit Smith (a Hamilton grad, class of 1818). Above all, the center wanted to become a hub of intellectual activity — its board of advisers included the likes of Princeton’s George, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, and NR’s Richard Brookhiser, who has written a biography of Alexander Hamilton.

Yet even this was unacceptable. On October 10, Hamilton’s professors passed a resolution opposing the center by a vote of 77 to 17. One of the ringleaders was Rabinowitz. “There was an element of payback in that vote,” says Paquette. “They were mad at me for criticizing Rosenberg and Churchill.”

The center’s faculty enemies tried to disguise their ideological objections as matters of high principle, claiming that the center had too much autonomy from the college. This is becoming a common theme: At Southern Methodist University, which is the frontrunner to host the George W. Bush Presidential Library, many professors have couched their objections in the language of institutional governance when in reality they simply don’t like President Bush.

SMU probably will get its Bush library, but Hamilton College almost certainly won’t have a Hamilton Center. After the faculty vote, which was technically non-binding, the college’s board of trustees got into the act. At a meeting on October 14, several of them raised concerns about the center’s charter. One was Kevin Kennedy, a major donor to the school. Another, according to internal documents obtained by NR, was Drew Days, who was solicitor general in the Clinton administration.

Paquette and his allies were happy to compromise. “We made more than a dozen changes to the charter,” he says. “Yet we had to insist on a certain amount of autonomy because the faculty would have wasted no time in turning the Alexander Hamilton Center into the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Postmodern Sexuality.”

This was the beginning of the end. There were more meetings, including a November 6 conference call with board members. One of them, chairman Stuart L. Scott, attacked Paquette for having had the audacity to criticize Hamilton College for the Rosenberg and Churchill invitations. Apparently academic freedom has its limits. On December 1, Stewart told the board what everybody already knew: The Hamilton Center was kaput. Paquette and his partners, she claimed, had “envisaged a center that would be at Hamilton but not of Hamilton.”

Stewart’s semantic hairsplitting was blind to the big picture. “Our goal was to create an enduring institution that would put Hamilton College on the map scholastically,” says Paquette. “We gave them the golden goose on a silver platter and they dropped it.” In the student newspaper, junior Benjamin Noble offered a similar interpretation: “Many professors, because of their ideological biases, personal vendettas and politics, have deprived students of this great intellectual opportunity.”

That’s no surprise: On campus, denying intellectual opportunity has become a way of life.

Reproduced here with the permission of the author.