Last spring there was discussion here and here on Phi Beta Cons about Tom Klingenstein’s golf game with the president of Bowdoin College and the latter’s politically correct but inaccurate account of their golf-course conversation during a subsequent convocation address at the school. Tom discussed all that in a wonderful essay and made some broader points about lessons to be learned from that experience — and, indeed, from the Bowdoin curriculum.
PBC readers will be interested to learn that, since then, Tom has agreed to fund an National Association of Scholars study “examining the curriculum, student activities, and campus values of Bowdoin College as a case study to learn what a contemporary liberal arts college education consists of.” And K. C. Johnson today writes, “The project’s announcement prompted me to take a look at Bowdoin’s history department,” and he does so here.