Monday, April 29, 2013
The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World - WSJ.com
I say that because it's my opinion that our educational institutions have become too partisan on social issues, somewhat anti-American, and impose their agendas to our impressionable youth, rather than teach to learn facts and form their own opinions based on facts...
In a Wall Street Journal column, David Feith tells us all about the "golf shot" and what has happened since:
"A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin's commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn't pretty. Funded by Mr. Klingenstein, researchers from the National Association of Scholars studied speeches by Bowdoin presidents and deans, formal statements of the college's principles, official faculty reports and notes of faculty meetings, academic course lists and syllabi, books and articles by professors, the archive of the Bowdoin Orient newspaper and more. They analyzed the school's history back to its founding in 1794, focusing on the past 45 years—during which, they argue, Bowdoin's character changed dramatically for the worse. Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics. The school's ideological pillars would likely be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American higher education lately. There's the obsession with race, class, gender and sexuality as the essential forces of history and markers of political identity. There's the dedication to 'sustainability,' or saving the planet from its imminent destruction by the forces of capitalism. And there are the paeans to 'global citizenship,' or loving all countries except one's own."
