So skewed to the left are campuses that some traditionalist faculty members have created centers designed to put forth alternative points of view – a mere trickle of intellectual diversity in a sea of bias. Evidently even such modest inroads are, in Roger Kimball’s words, “too much for some of the tenured radicals who preside over most colleges and universities today…, [and] faculties and administrators are closing ranks to enforce ideological conformity on campus.” They “have wised up to the fact that if they are to maintain their ideological stranglehold over the curriculum, they need to control not just a vast majority of the programs but virtually all of them.” In addition to similar developments elsewhere, there is the case of Hamilton College, a liberal arts college in Clinton, New York, where Robert Paquette’s attempt to found the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization with a substantial gift was recently thwarted – via a long and torturous process. Powerful radical faculty at Hamilton just couldn’t stomach the prospect of an entity on campus dedicated to promoting “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.” And a pusillanimous and unprincipled board and president – to their great shame – withdrew their support for this superb project. The crushing of the Hamilton Center is no mere local brouhaha. As Kimball concludes:

What gives it a broader significance is the likelihood that faculties elsewhere will resort to similar tactics to enforce their ideological monopoly on campus. Faculties are everywhere jealous of their autonomy to teach and preach what they like–unless, it seems, some of their number presume to break ranks and offer students a genuine alternative to the “transgressive,” anti-Western canon that has become the new orthodoxy on campus. What happened at Hamilton is likely to set a precedent, and become a model, for faculties bent on stifling intellectual freedom.

This is something for donors and others intent on creating centers for the study of Western culture and ideals to ponder. The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, for instance, recently launched the “Veritas Fund for Higher Education” whose purpose is to support campus entities devoted to the serious study of free institutions. James Piereson, who is leading the effort, remarked, “We want to work with faculty and administrators to restore [such study], to the ultimate benefit of students.”

But will the tenured radicals allow such cooperation and restoration? Their obliteration of the Hamilton Center suggests they will go to any lengths to build a firewall against intellectual diversity. Those of us dedicated to intellectual freedom and pluralism will persevere. We will strategize anew and, in the end, prevail.