Foolishness

In October, fearlessly throwing down the gauntlet to fortune, I passed on some snippets of good news. Among which, there was this: Hamilton College, long a flourishing centre of the Higher Cant, was to house something that sounded suspiciously like education - the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization, which would seek “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture.”

Well, that was then; this is now. The faculty would have none of it and demanded "that the center be subject to faculty oversight" - in other words, that it propogate the same PC buffoonery that the faculty do. Faculty oversight and excellence in scholarship being mutually exclusive, the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be.

To add derision to defeat, Dinocrat pointed me towards this credo by a certain Shelby Grantham, who teaches Writing at Dartmouth.

I teach writing. It's the second-best way I know to figure things out--such as what to do about racism, how to make non-violence a national priority, why so few students think they can make a difference, what poetry is good for, when and how to resist injustice, ways to share the planet with other species, and what gender has to do with anything. Seeking words to make such questions ring and their answers sing is what my English 5 sections [the required first-year writing course] are about.

I bow my head and crawl back into the closet.