The end of liberal education — Part One, the Vassar experience

[Valin]

Power Line:

Paul Mirengoff

4/12/13

 

Have left-liberals killed liberal education? I’ve come to think so, and recent developments at Vassar and Bowdoin help confirm my fear.

 

The indispensable Stanley Kurtz is on top of both stories. At Vassar, the subject of this post, he reports on attempts to block a speech by Alex Epstein, a proponent and defender of America’s conventional energy industries. Epstein was invited to speak by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA).

 

The presentation of Epstein’s point of view was particularly important at Vassar. For, as Kurtz demonstrates, the college has attempted, in the context of an aggressive fossil-fuel divestment campaign, to brainwash its students on issues of climate change, energy, and the environment. As one student told Kurtz, “I don’t feel that [conservative students at Vassar] are able to freely express their views at all.”

 

The reaction to Epstein’s appearance is consistent with that impression. Posters advertizing his lecture were promptly covered or ripped down.....(Snip)

 

[Valin]

The end of liberal education — Part Two, the Bowdoin experience

Paul Mirengoff

4/13/13

 

Scott has done an outstanding job of covering the story arising from the NAS report by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano on Bowdoin College called What Does Bowdoin Teach? In his most recent post, for example, Scott provides valuable links and commentary.

 

I agree with Stanley Kurtz that there is nothing quite like What Does Bowdoin Teach? Why? Because, as Kurtz says, (1) no one until now has exposed the politicization of higher education in this kind of breadth and depth — by examining how it plays out at a single college and (2) no one has thought to to mine a college’s own archives to substantiate charges of bias. (Actually, I once did some mining of Dartmouth’s archives on a very small scale, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post.

 

Kurtz is right in insisting there’s no substitute for simply diving into What Does Bowdoin Teach?. For those who won’t, however, I offer a slightly condensed version of William Bennett’s excellent Foreword:

 

(Snip)