Scott Johnson at Power Line writes about the devastating report on Bowdoin College and the college President’s smug response to a professor who wrote to the President about the issues.Here’s the letter the professor published in the Bowdoin student newspaper:
To the Editor,I write to tell you about my communication with President Mills regarding the NAS study.I sent the following letter to President Mills the morning after Monday’s faculty meeting. He was kind enough to call me upon receiving it. During our phone conversation I voiced my agreement with parts of the piecemeal reports that the NAS has already released; with the gist of Thomas Klingenstein’s arguments in his Claremont Review of Books essay and in the Bowdoin Orient; and with Mills’s own argument, in his September 2010 convocation address, which I excerpted in the letter.I asked President Mills to look to the final NAS report when it is released and point out in public those parts that echo what he said in his convocation address. I hoped that his doing so would cause people who would otherwise dismiss the central message of his address—which I understand to be more concordant with the thrust of the NAS than he does—to take it seriously. He said that I should rather “have the guts to stand up and say it.” Herewith.Sincerely, Assistant Professor of Economics Stephen Meardon
Monday April 1, 2013Dear President Mills, I was sorry to hear my colleagues chuckle at the mere mention of the NAS study at today’s faculty meeting. I am sorrier to say that, to my ear, you encouraged them.I was present at your convocation address in September 2010 and admired your aim. “We must guard against political correctness and a culture where everyone…is supposed to feel ‘comfortable’,” you said, and rightly.The chuckles were the sound of people resting comfortably with the conviction that the ideas in the study, probably a good deal different from those that dominate around here, need not be seriously entertained. It’s a different sound entirely from your admirable convocation address.With highest regard, Steve Meardon
I don’t know Professor Meardon’s politics. But it took guts to question — even privately and professionally — the skewed intellectual composition of the campus. It took even more guts to respond to the President’s taunt by going public.
See my prior post, “Coming Out As A Conservative On Campus”.
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